Trinamool starts agitation outside VBU at Santiniketan

Kolkata: Following instructions of Trinamool Congress chairperson Mamata Banerjee, her party members began an agitation outside the Visva Bharati University (VBU) campus protesting against the university authority’s move to exclude Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore from the plaques installed to notify the UNESCO World Heritage Site status granted to Santiniketan.

Mamata, on Thursday, set a deadline of Friday morning for the VBU authorities asking them to remove the installed plaques bearing the name of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Chancellor of the university, and Bidyut Chakraborty, Vice-Chancellor, to notify the UNESCO’s recognition of Santiniketan as a ‘World Heritage Site’. She demanded that a plaque dedicated to Tagore be instead installed there.

Following her directions, TMC members on Friday installed a makeshift arrangement near the VBU campus and began a sit-in demonstration. They demand that the university authorities take immediate measures to reverse their move and do the needful to pay respect to the bard whose immense contribution has led to Santiniketan winning the UNESCO World Heritage Site status. They demanded that a plaque be installed dedicated to Tagore and the existing ones be removed.

According to the UNESCO website, “Santiniketan is an embodiment of Rabindranath Tagore’s vision and philosophy of where ‘the world would

form a single nest’ using a combination of education, appreciation of nature, music and

the arts.”

The VBU authorities are learnt to have said that these plaques will be replaced by the ones that will be provided by the Archaeological Survey of India.