On Saturday night, IIT Kharagpur director V.K. Tewari made a Facebook post on the upcoming convocation on February 23: “The Prime Minister will also inaugurate (virtually) Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, IIT Kharagpur.”
Fourteen years ago, on May 17, 2007, while laying the foundation stone for the project, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the then President, had said: “I am very happy that this multi-speciality research centre is named after the great personality of India, Dr B.C. Roy, who was a freedom fighter and a professional doctor.”
Between the foundation stone-laying and the inauguration, the name of the institute has undergone a metamorphosis that reflects the change the country, too, has undergone.
Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee — founder of the Jana Sangh, the precursor to the BJP — appears to have elbowed out Dr B.C. Roy, the maker of modern Bengal.
This newspaper sent text messages to the director asking whether Prime Minister Modi would be inaugurating the same facility that was initially named after B.C. Roy, but there was no response till 10pm. Repeated calls to the mobile number of the director went unanswered.
Registrar Tamal Nath said he had no information whether the facility renamed after Mookerjee would be inaugurated by the Prime Minister.
Sources said the hospital for which Kalam had laid the foundation stone and the one proposed to be opened on February 23 were the same. The super-speciality hospital at Balarampur outside the campus is part of the IIT’s plans to start its own medical college and has come up on an 18-acre plot belonging to the institute.
The sources said the decision to rename the hospital after Mookerjee, who was not a medical doctor, was taken last December at a meeting of all the heads of departments at IIT Kharagpur and teachers.
But the first known official word on the subject came only on Saturday night when Tewari, the IIT director, uploaded the Facebook post.
The post made no mention of either the original name of the project or what President Kalam had said then.
According to the government’s website on the former President, Kalam had gone on to say in his address on May 17, 2007, at Kharagpur: “He (B.C. Roy) has done so much to the country in medical and political system. Dr B.C. Roy believed that Swaraj would remain a dream unless the people were healthy and strong in mind and body. He made contributions to the organisation of medical education, established hospitals, medical college, and centre for training women in nursing and social work. I am sure this name will be ringing in the minds of all the students and faculty members and the tradition of service set by Dr. B.C. Roy will be followed.”
Campus sources said that B.C. Roy’s name had been proposed by Ajay Kumar Roy, then head of the school of medical science and research, IIT Kharagpur. He had sent the name to the IIT’s board of governors and the board had approved the name.
“It was named after B.C. Roy because of his contributions to the field of medical science,” an official said.
A teacher said that many in the faculty had been stunned by the renaming but could not speak out as the authorities had issued a gag order in June barring teachers from “making adverse criticism of any current policy and action of the institute” in public.
“We are so terrified that we don’t oppose any policy in private, either. When the director said the Prime Minister himself would be inaugurating the facility, we realised that there was no point protesting,” said a teacher who did not want to be named.
Sabyasachi Sengupta, a former professor of electrical engineering at IIT Kharagpur, said: “It will be quite a spectacle at IIT Kharagpur that the small hospital on the campus will continue to be known as BC Roy Technology Hospital and the super-speciality one would be renamed after someone who has nothing to do with medicine.”
The IIT now provides indoor and outdoor medical facilities for common ailments at the BC Roy Technology Hospital, located in the heart of the campus.
An official said the director did not want both facilities to be named after B.C. Roy, so the super-speciality hospital had been renamed after Mookerjee.
Last year, Prime Minister Modi had renamed Kolkata Port Trust after Syama Prasad Mookerjee.
