Santiniketan: Replace plaques with Rabindranath Tagore’s name by Friday, says Mamata Banerjee

Kolkata, October 26

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday came down heavily on the authorities for not inscribing the name of Rabindranath Tagore on plaques commemorating the award of ‘World Heritage Site’ by UNESCO at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan and warned of widespread demonstrations.

She said her party workers would begin an agitation if the plaques were not changed by Friday.

“It is only for Tagore that Santiniketan got the UNESCO tag and you have removed his name from the plaques. We were silent because of the Durga Puja celebrations. If you do not remove the plaques and put-up new ones with the Nobel Laureate’s name by 10 am tomorrow, our people will launch a demonstration holding Kobiguru’s photos to their chests,” Banerjee told reporters at a press conference here.

A huge controversy was triggered after the university authorities put up marble plaques bearing the names of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is also the chancellor of the varsity, and vice-chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty, but did not have any mention of Tagore.

On Wednesday, the university had said the plaque was just a temporary structure to demarcate the heritage site.

Visva Bharati spokesperson Mahua Bandyopadhyay had told PTI, “It was a purely temporary structure raised to demarcate the heritage site…”

A senior university teacher said three such plaques had come up within the premises of the central higher educational institution after UNESCO’s World Heritage site honour to Santiniketan on September 17.

UNESCO gave credit to “renowned poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore” for setting up of Santiniketan which is uniquely different from the “prevailing British colonial architectural orientations of the early 20th century and of European modernism”.