Kolkata: Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of RSS, is now trying to make a foray into Presidency University, the campus where Syama Prasad Mookerjee (to whom RSS traces its ideological lineage) and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (its nationalistic Vande Mataram poet) spent their college days.The university’s ABVP unit has organised a seminar on Thursday at the campus’s A K Basak Auditorium to commemorate the sesquicentenary of India’s National Song, ‘Vande Mataram’, where RSS eastern India prachar pramukh Jisnu Basu — also a scientist at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics — is one of the invitees.ABVP’s attempt at breaking into Presidency, the country’s oldest higher education institution, follows similar efforts at Jadavpur University, where RSS — for the first time — opened a shakha after BJP’s assembly poll win in Bengal.“Presidency is a crucible of nationalism. It is the alma mater of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, who wrote our National Song, and Syama Prasad Mookerjee, who founded the Jana Sangh, to which we trace our lineage. So we chose this campus to honour Indian stalwarts and highlight the role of ‘Vande Mataram’ in the freedom struggle. Luminaries like Bankim Chandra, Swami Vivekananda (who studied here as well) and Syama Prasad have largely been shunned by left-wing student organisations, who rarely host events celebrating them but focus on foreign figures like Lenin, Marx and Che Guevara,” ABVP Presidency unit president Mridul Banik said.This is the outfit’s first “official” programme at Presidency after it was formed just before Durga Puja. “We are trying to reclaim the campus that played such a major role in Indian nationalism,” Banik said.Presidency College (now a university) has been a cradle of dissent, from anti-colonial nationalism to the Naxal movement, since the nineteenth century. The institution nurtured revolutionary fervour, most famously exemplified in the Netaji-Oaten confrontation (that led to Subhas Chandra Bose’s expulsion for confronting Professor Oaten) before becoming the epicentre of the Naxal movement in the 1960s (spearheaded by firebrand student leaders like Ashim Chatterjee alias Kaka and Gautam Chattopadhyay, founder of Moheener Ghoraguli, often described as the first Bengali rock band).ABVP unit members feel this later anti-establishment “narrative” has overshadowed the earlier one, leading to an “oversimplistic depiction” of the campus. “Presidency is the place of Jagadish Chandra Bose, Satyen Bose and Meghnad Saha. It is the campus of physicist Bikas Sinha. Presidency played a pioneering role in the country’s freedom struggle. Netaji had to leave Presidency because of this,” Basu said on Wednesday, adding that it pained him to see “some people politicising Vande Mataram”. His first visit to the campus was when Sinha sent for him regarding the physics lab’s modernisation, Basu recalled.The campus’s entrenched students’ groups had layered responses to ABVP’s first Presidency event. AISA unit president Anwesha Thander said everyone was welcome to visit the campus. “But we will not allow any attempt to inject divisive politics. Presidency’s legacy is one of free thought, scientific temper and progressive values and we will firmly resist anything that opposes this heritage,” she added.SFI unit secretary Ushashree Mitra said she and some of her friends would attend the seminar. “But we will protest if there is an effort to spread false narratives or divisive messages,” she said while promising to “engage in debate or dialogue” if there was an opportunity.RSF unit convener Antik Sankar Majumdar accused ABVP of exploiting the lack of unity and mobilisation among left-wing students’ organisations while expressing angst at the permission given to ABVP when “we have seen campuses being vandalised by right-wing supporters”.AIDSO unit secretary Debanjan Das felt there was an urgent need to “re-evaluate ourselves and reach out to students proactively with our ideology” if ABVP could organise such events at Presidency.
