St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai has cancelled its annual Stan Swamy Memorial Lecture, scheduled for Saturday, following protests by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
The decision came after the ABVP’s Mumbai unit stated on Tuesday that a group of its members had met with the college principal and submitted a letter demanding the “immediate cancellation” of the memorial lecture.
“ABVP firmly believes that organising a lecture in memory of a person accused in the Elgar Parishad–Bhima Koregaon case, facing UAPA charges for links with banned Maoist groups, is an attempt to glorify urban Naxalism on campus,” said the Hindu right-wing student organisation.
The group also called on the Maharashtra authorities to take “strict action” against such events, which it alleged were being conducted under the “guise of academic freedom.”
The lecture, organised by the college’s Department of Inter-Religious Studies, was to have been delivered virtually by Father Prem Xalxo on the theme “Migration for Livelihood: Hope amidst Miseries.”
Father Stan Swamy, an 84-year-old human rights activist and Jesuit priest, was jailed for nine months without trial under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) before his death in a Mumbai hospital in 2021, ahead of a bail hearing.
A long-time advocate for marginalised tribal communities, Swamy was arrested in 2020 on allegations of having ties to a banned radical left-wing organisation that police claimed instigated violence in Maharashtra in 2018.
Despite suffering from Parkinson’s disease and other serious health issues, Swamy was repeatedly denied bail. In May 2021, he was admitted to hospital after contracting COVID-19 and suffered a cardiac arrest over the weekend, leading to his death.
He was the oldest among a dozen individuals — most of them academics and human rights defenders — accused in the 2018 Elgar Parishad–Bhima Koregaon case and imprisoned under the draconian UAPA.
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