As Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) receives Santishree Dhulipadi Pandit, a professor of politics at Savitribai Phule Pune University since 1992, as its first woman Vice-Chancellor, after acting JNU V-C M Jagadesh Kumar was made chairperson of the University Grants Commission (UGC) last week, it is with trepidation that students anticipate her tenure.
With Pandit at the helm, students are not too eager to welcome JNU’s multilingual alumna.
“We were informed that a woman V-C was going to replace Kumar from ABVP sources two weeks ago. It was apparent from then how the tenure will turn out to be. ABVP has been rising to power since the BJP government came into power in 2014, with the tenure change we think it will help them make use of institutional resources and support unabashedly, now more than ever,” student of MA History at JNU told Maktoob.
What is purportedly the Twitter handle of Pandit (now deactivated) is contentious, to say the least.
From condoning Gandhi’s assassination by Godse, calling farmers parasitic and Indian Christians “rice bag converts”, students from JNU as “losers in extremist Naxal groups” to spewing Islamophobic comments branding institutional incarceration and torture of Uyghur Muslims in China as a model worth emulation, Pandit has on several instances shown her ideological moorings, proudly owning up her pro-BJP stance, claiming and vowing in her tweets to have voted Modi into power and how she would vote for Amit Shah and Yogi Adityanath in years to come.
“Things haven’t been going very well here. Now, its too dangerous. Really, I feel scared after seeing her tweets,” a Muslim student from JNU’s School of Social Science told Maktoob.
“She called for the ethnic cleansing of my community. How will I study there? How will I stay inside the campus where a woman who hates us is in power?” she asks.
Pandit’s controversial rendezvous with Islamophobia does not end with this. She has tweeted that jailed research scholar and Muslim activist Sharjeel Imam is a “real jihadi produced by IIT-B and JNU.”
Unearthing her contentious tweets, Alt News founder Mohammad Zubair has tweeted that the newly appointed JNU V-C was a “Godse Bhakt.”
Through Twitter, she urged people to vote for the BJP while slamming the “Italian-origin” Sonia Gandhi.
Posting a screenshot of Pandit’s tweet that read, “stop funding communal campuses” like Jamia and St.Stephen’s, CPIML leader Kavita Krishnan said that “The Modi regime’s new JNU V-C has a Twitter feed full of unhinged Hindu-supremacist bile against educational institutions founded by Muslims or Christians… she actively hates JNU.”
Pandit has several awards to her name, Veer Savarkar Award in 2010 in Pune among them.
The award is named after the RSS ideologue who had believed in a Hindu Rashtra annihilating anyone who is not a Hindu.
According to Savarkar, people whose religion originated from the Indian subcontinent are Hindus. Similar is the view shared by Pandit as seen from one of the tweets on her now-deactivated Twitter handle. Quote tweeting a post that quotes Karim Uddin Barbhuiya, a member of Assam Legislative Assembly, “I am an Indian by choice and #Sanskrit is the mother of all Indian languages,” Pandit writes, “This is being a Hindu civilizationally, whatever be your religion.”
In one instance, Pandit has also urged “non-Muslims” to wake up to prevent “Love Jihad.”
After many including journalists and rights activists started sharing her tweets following her appointment, Pandit has now deleted her Twitter account.
In a message to students and faculty, new VC Pandit said she would strive to implement NEP 2020, describing it “the vision of our honourable Prime Minister.”
Meanwhile, students of JNU say that the appointment of former V-C as the UGC chairman has only shown how he has pandered to the regime, as reflected through the granting of higher offices.
Speaking to Maktoob, Anand Yesodharan, a PG graduate of the university said Kumar’s tenure has marred JNU since 2016, the year he was sworn into the office. These include various events such as the forced disappearance of Najeeb, a sedition case against JNU student leaders soon after he took charge in 2016, hostel fee hike issue in 2019, culminating in months-long protests.
“Kumar’s appointment as the UGC chairman does not come as a surprise as we have witnessed how the students came to be viewed as anti-national and his role at perpetuating the agenda. It did not stop with us getting labelled,” Yesodharan recalls.
He said to Maktoob that towards the end of his tenure, JNU was redundant with infrastructural lapses, burdening many PhD scholars with a lack of a proper library for research purposes.
Stating that the security on the campus had also taken a blow after the newly-appointed UGC chairman became the V-C, Yesodharan said that cyclops, the private agency which is responsible for security at JNU, was Kumar’s method for bolstering safety on campus, but in vain.
“The attack on campus by ABVP goons in 2020 is a testimonial to how substandard the security service is despite being heavily funded.” This is reiterated by the allegations levelled by a female student who in 2020 had claimed that they had an encounter with a drunk guard and had “never felt this insecure on campus.”
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