A prominent teacher’s union at Visva-Bharati has written to the President of India, bringing to his notice a video in which Vice Chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty can be seen praising China and criticising his own institution in the presence of the Chinese ambassador.
Mr. Chakrabarty has often been accused, particularly by the Visva-Bharati University Faculty Association or VBUFA, of being partial towards right-wing ideologues while inviting speakers to the university; and now with the anti-China mood prevailing in the country, the VBUFA has seized a January 13 video to show how the VC himself sang praises of China while being publicly critical of Visva-Bharati.
According to VBUFA, the VC, with his remarks, had not only surpassed his administrative jurisdiction but also shown disrespect to the Visva- Bharati community and to all the stakeholders, “ranging from the Chancellor, Hon’ble Prime Minister, the Visitor Hon’ble President of India, the Rector Hon’ble Governor of West Bengal.”
On January 13 this year, Chinese Ambassador to India Sun Weidong delivered a lecture at Visva-Bharati, and during the Q&A session that followed, Mr. Chakrabarty remarked how the Chinese had a sense of ownership of their country and were hard-working — two qualities that, according to him, were missing in the Rabindranath Tagore-founded institution.
“After my visit to China … I found out the secret of Chinese development which we lack miserably. ‘We’ means I am not talking about the country as a whole, I am talking about my family Visva-Bharati. The first thing which is very striking… is the idea of ownership. I didn’t find any of the Chinese people in China who do not consider his or her country as his or her own… And second…the idea of hard-working. There is no substitute for hard-working. And unfortunately in Visva-Bharati, please forgive me for letting cat out of the bag, we are not hard-working at all. So I think if we want to learn the technique of Chinese politics which leads to develop, I to have to remind these two notions the idea of ownership and the idea of hard-working. Only then we can be a good brother of China,” Mr. Chakrabarty can be heard saying in the video.
Pointing out that the VC “miserably suffers from any sense of English grammar”, the VBUFA letter to the President said, “He made all these complaints without any evidence or justification. If this is not a glaring instance of brazen disrespect and humiliation to his own people, then what is? Is Visva Bharati safe in the hands of such a person who either has lost his sense of proportion or is perpetually in the habit of exercising his words and acts without considering their tenability — legal, administrative or otherwise?”
