School of scandal

Updated on: Monday, November 02, 2009

Santiniketan: It was supposed to be a place of unfettered learning — a school without boundaries, where the best traditions of the ancient Gurukul system would be brought alive. The Visva-Bharati of Tagore’s dreams was a place where, to borrow the poet’s own words, the world would converge in its quest of erudition. Today, the university is one of the most controversy-riddled campuses in the country — rife with allegations of corruption and mismanagement. So, what went wrong?

According to ashramites who had seen the poet in his heydays, Tagore perhaps foresaw exactly this. In his last days, he is believed to have expressed a lot of anxiety about the fact that Visva-Bharati was growing at a fast pace and, in time, might grow to be a “university”. He feared that Visva-Bharati would lose its character and ideals and merely become an institute of higher education, just like any other university.

While he was alive, Tagore guarded his greatest gift to the world against such a metamorphosis. He had the power to steer Visva-Bharati towards the ideal that was unattainable — perhaps even incomprehensible — for the people to whom he bequeathed it.

After Tagore’s death in 1941, none less than Mahatma Gandhi took over the reins of the institution, albeit for a brief while. Soon, Jawaharlal Nehru became involved in the state of affairs of Gurudev’s Santiniketan. Money was scarce and many insiders thought that the time was ripe for Visva-Bharati to grow into a university under the aegis of the central government. In 1951, Visva-Bharati became a central university by an act of Parliament.

“That was the watershed,” says 92-year-old painter Dinakar Kowshik, perhaps the seniormost resident of Santiniketan. “You can trace all problems to that one root. Visva-Bharati was never meant to be a university. Its culture —its very logic — defies the university system. The moment they tried to measure Visva-Bharati on the same scale as other universities, they dealt a death blow.” Kowshik had joined the university as a student of renowned artists Ramkinkar Baij and Nandalal Bose in 1940 — a time when Tagore was still alive and his personality loomed large.

Everything changed soon after this. “With Tagore gone and the Centre having become the new guardian of the institution, there was a paradigm shift,” said Supriya Tagore, a direct descendent of Rabindranath, who retired as the Patha Bhavana principal after a stint of more than four decades. “While, on the one hand, funds started flowing in steadily, putting an end to the cash crunch that had always been a problem for Rabindranath, grades, divisions and new employment rules were imposed on Visva-Bharati, which were completely against its inherent nature. The maladjustment started just then.”

Once it became a university, Visva-Bharati — which had its own vision for recruiting teachers and staff, deciding on their pay, framing syllabi, creating new centres of excellence — became answerable to the University Grants Commission. Suddenly, the ashram became a place for career advancement, where objectives like promotions and increments became primary for teachers and administrative staff, just as degree-earning, rather than learning and assimilation of ideas, became for students.

Ashram veterans feel that if Visva-Bharati were given a separate status by the Centre, instead of equating it with other universities, if a completely different set of rules, suited to its novel character governed it, such problems would not have occurred.

“Do you have another university that starts with kindergarten and ends with research and beyond? Do you have another university, whose physical territory is not clearly demarcated and where the official territory is punctuated not only with personal property but also with tribal villages?” asked Amitrasudan Bhattacharya, who had served Visva-Bharati for 41 years and has headed both its Bengali department and Vidya Bhavana (school of humanities). “Such a system, naturally, needs to be handled differently. It needs a vice-chancellor who understands Tagore’s philosophy. The Centre has always tried to bring in the best scholars as vice-chancellors, but no one has tried to find out if that person is versed in the ideology behind this great institution or even if that scholar is a good administrator,” he added.

Veterans rue the fact that good administrators have always eluded Visva-Bharati. At the time when Nehru had appointed the great scientist Satyendranath Bose as the vicechancellor, the campus was rife with a clash between Ramkinkar Baij and a senior English teacher. This soon grew out of hand and the campus was divided into camps, with Bose unwittingly having become a part of the controversy.

Renowned agriculturist and scholar Leonard Elmhirst, at Nehru’s insistence, started an inquiry. The report said that though Bose was a renowned scientist, he was not a good administrator.

Things got immeasurably worse in 2004, when the world woke up to news that the then vice-chancellor, Dilip Sinha, had appointed a professor of mathematics on the basis of forged marksheets. Sinha was summarily arrested, along with the lady teacher in question. A central inquiry committee found that Sinha had illegally extended affiliation to colleges across the country.

Even before one got time to forget this and accept the new vice-chancellor, Sujit Basu, there was a new low in Visva-Bharati history: Tagore’s Nobel Prize was stolen. Till date, the CBI has not been able to pinpoint charges, though it reportedly suspects an inside job.

And now, there are charges of illegal appointments by the present vice-chancellor, Rajat Kanta Ray, who is also accused of claiming false medical and travel bills. The Karmi Sabha, the workers’ union, has directly accused Ray of claiming at least Rs 10 lakh in false medical bills. “This is not all. He has also wrongfully appointed his own relatives in prime positions in the university, though there have been better qualified candidates for this,” said Karmi Sabha leader Debabrata Sarkar.

Despite petty interests often holding the campus to ransom, unlike most universities of the country, party politics had not entered the premises for a long time. The two vicechancellors till the late Sixties, Kalidas Bhattacharya and Pratul Gupta, had ensured that the campus remained free of political colour.

However, internal political formations soon happened. During Tagore’s time, all workers, both teaching and nonteaching staff, had a union called Karmi Mandali. In the Seventies, the teachers felt that they needed a separate union, and the Adhyapak Sabha was formed. Soon, the non-teaching staff followed suit, and the Karmi Sabha happened. Party politics entered the campus through these and though for a brief while, the Adhyapak Sabha was governed by Leftwing parties, it waned soon. Since then, both unions as well as the students’ one have been Congress-influenced.

“But they get typically embroiled in petty personal issues like promotions and appointments, which get blown out of proportion,” said Bhattacharya. “All V-B needs is a strong and honest administrator as vice-chancellor. But every time, we are presented with a V-C who becomes part of the controversy,” he summed up.

School of scandal

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