Left student protestors not interested in proper discussion with minister, had other agenda: WBCUPA

KOLKATA: Trinamool Congress-leaning West Bengal College and University Professors Association (WBCUPA) on Monday claimed that left and ultra-left student outfits of Jadavpur University, who heckled education minister Bratya Basu after the association's meet on the campus on March 1, had the intention "to hit the minister physically."

Around 40-50 protesting students gatecrashed into the open-air theatre where around 3,000 WBCUPA members from colleges and universities from all over the state were attending the meeting and went on a vandalisation spree at the venue on Saturday. But none of the participants including Basu, who is also the WBCUPA president, retaliated or responded as they requested the students to wait for some more time to let the AGM be completed and enable the minister to meet the students and discuss their demands.

Senior WBCUPA functionary Arnab Saha told a press meet that "notwithstanding the minister assuring the students that he will meet their representatives after the AGM and having accepted their memorandum during the lunch break, they went on creating disturbances and heaped abuses at the teachers including women."

"The education minister was restrained despite provocations by the SFI and other ultra-left protestors throughout and asked everyone to keep quiet. He accepted the memorandum from some of the SFI representatives who were allowed to enter the venue of the AGM.

After the programme was over, he waited for their representatives to discuss their demand for holding the students union polls on time in a proper manner. But around 40-50 wanted to speak to Basu at one time, gathered near his car, and amid the jostling he almost tripped," Saha said.

"Protestors' intention was to hit education minister, says WBCUPA"

He claimed "apparently the protestors, under instruction from some quarters, had some other agenda. They were not interested in holding discussions with Basu but were driven by the intention to hit him physically. Otherwise, why should the windscreen of his car be smashed, the looking glass splintered into pieces, and the tyre of his vehicle deflated?

Why some of the protestors climbed on the bonnet of his car and flaunted shoes?" Trashing the claims by SFI that Basu had brought hundreds of outsiders belonging to TMC to JU campus, Saha said "this is a blatant lie as the participants, numbering 3,600, are all respected teachers in their colleges-universities, and the narratives woven by SFI were unfair to the teaching community."

He said around 10 WBCUPA members, including senior faculty members Omprakash Mishra and Manojit Mondal, were assaulted by the leftist student protestors and abused without any provocation. Another WBCUPA functionary, Suman Mukhopadhyay, said, "We did not go to JU to occupy the university.

We have every democratic right to hold our programme on the campus as an organisation and we took prior permission from the university authorities in this regard. It seems there was a blueprint to disrupt the democratic functioning of WBCUPA."