Left-backed JUTA oppose ‘boycott call’ of students to remove pro-Trinamul teachers
Telegraph | 7 March 2025
The Left-backed Jadavpur University Teachers Association (JUTA) has opposed a call by a section of students to “boycott” pro-Trinamul teachers.
The Left and ultra-Left students decided to boycott classes of Om Prakash Mishra and Manojit Mandal, two prominent pro-Trinamul figures on a campus where, for many years, only brands of Red have been acceptable.
Slogans reading “Boycott OPM” (Om Prakash Mishra) and “Boycott MM” (Manojit Mandal) have been painted all over. Mishra teaches international relations and Mandal teaches English.
Mishra, a former head of the department, has written to JU interim vice-chancellor Bhaskar Gupta, appealing that he be provided security to come to the campus and hold classes.
On the doors of the office of the head of the English department, a scribbling says: “Shame MM, no cooperation until our demands are met....”
Mandal headed the department until last week.
Rajyeswar Sinha, assistant general secretary of JUTA, said: “We don’t support the call to boycott teachers who belong to a different political ideology. Teachers must be allowed to conduct classes, irrespective of their political beliefs. If students have specific complaints against a teacher, they should lodge complaints before the university authorities or police.”
“Ostracising a teacher by painting the walls of the department giving a call to boycott cannot be supported. Such selectivity in approach must be resisted.”
Sinha, a professor in the Bengali department, said they passed on this message during a rally organised by their association to condemn the alleged attack on students during education minister Bratya Basu’s visit to the campus on March 1.
Some of the teachers who spoke off the record said many in their ranks were waking up to the dangerous ramifications of trying to retain JU as their preserve and demanding the resumption of democratic processes simultaneously.
JU teachers, often accused of remote-controlling student movements, seem to have broken ranks with the younger lot on the issue.
A former vice-chancellor of JU said it was “a paradigm shift in stance” to “not disallow any other ideology” on the campus. The practice was not to give any space to any opposing ideology, he said.
“Instead of defeating the contrary opinion by engaging in debates, the usual practice has been to get coercive with the ones representing the other political belief.
“The same mindset prompted the Left and ultra-Left students to heckle Babul Supriyo in 2019, then Union minister of state, after he came to the campus to attend an event of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the RSS. The same bent of mind is responsible for the disruption during Bratya Basu’s meeting on the campus and the subsequent boycott call,” said the VC.
It is in this context that the JUTA move to oppose the boycott stands out. “Perhaps they are realising that such muscle-flexing could trigger a backlash on campuses where Left supporters are in the minority,” said another former vice-chancellor.
Pabitra Sarkar, a former vice-chancellor of Rabindra Bharati University who taught at Jadavpur University, told Metro: “The teachers should be allowed to hold their classes, irrespective of their political identity. I endorse the stand of the teachers’ association.”
A JU official said Mishra got into an argument with students when the education minister was barricaded on March 1.
Mandal was seen urging students not to disrupt the programme where the education minister was invited as president of a pro-Trinamool teachers’ association.
“I am glad that the JUTA has made the statement. This seems to be a welcome change,” Mishra said on Thursday.
“It’s good to know.... I will hold classes once the students agree to attend my classes,” said Mandal.
JUTA on Thursday urged first-year engineering students who are not writing their first-semester examinations as a mark of protest to write the exams.
Ujan Bhuiya, a JU student who identifies herself as a “cadre of the Revolutionary Students Front (RSF)”, a frontal organisation of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), said they think the boycott must go on.
“We have given the call not because they belong to different ideologies. We are boycotting because they enabled the assault on the students on a day education minister came to the campus… We will not allow such enablers to hold classes,” Bhuiya told Metro.