In the Rabindranath Tagore-founded Visva-Bharati, protests overshadowed celebrations on the poet’s birth anniversary as a large group of people continued their sit-in against the university’s move to take away a piece of land from the Santiniketan house of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen.
The university had initially planned a number of events for the poet’s birthday — this year it fell on May 9, as per the Bengali calendar — but closer to date it not only pruned the number of events but also announced the closure of Rabindra Bhavana for the day “due to unavoidable circumstances.”
Visva-Bharati is the only Central university in Bengal and the only institution whose Chancellor is the Prime Minister of India, and ever since Prof. Bidyut Chakrabarty took charge as the Vice-Chancellor in late 2018, the university has witnessed conflicts over political ideology, with detractors accusing the Vice-Chancellor of favouring the right wing.
