Campus Gauntlets

A black-and-white photo of a young man sitting at a desk, holding a pen as though he is about to write something, has gone viral across Calcutta’s college campuses, and even street corners and book shops. This photo of Sudipta Gupta, a member of the Students Federation of India who died in April this year in police custody after being arrested along with fellow students while protesting the West Bengal government’s decision to withhold college elections, has become a symbol of political violence in educational institutions in the two-year reign of the Mamata Banerjee government. The lady had famously said, two years ago, after some student clashes that “colleges are for studying, not fighting.”

Unfortunately, the new regime has reported incident after incident of political clashes, some of them resulting in death. In February this year an on-duty police officer was shot dead, allegedly by Trinamool goons, while trying to contain clashes that broke out between Left and TMC student groups. What has earned the TMC government flak is the response of the chief minister to these incidents, in which she has been acc­used of taking a lenient stance towards perpetrators if they happened to be supporters of her ruling party. She had called Sudipta’s death a “petty matter”, for instance. And the main accused in the killing of the cop, Mohammed Iqbal, a TMC strongman, had only been arrested after a media campaign.

Other shocking incidents include the attack on students of Presidency University and the ransacking of its premises, allegedly by TMC activists. TMC, and its student wing, too have been at the receiving end of student violence. The chief minister and finance minister Amit Mitra were  roughed up in Delhi, allegedly by SFI students, after her comments on Sudipta’s death. The cycle of violence thus continues in Bengal campuses without any apparent end in sight. And Sudipta  will never put that pen he so promisingly holds in his hand in that poster to paper.