The VC’s car too bore the brunt of the agitation. Picture by Bibhash Lodh

Students following their teachers in the path they were shown was amply demonstrated when they held the vice-chancellor, teachers and other officials of Jadavpur University (JU) hostage for 22 hours from Thursday to Friday to protest a government advisory putting off student union polls.

The students assembled at exactly the same place — Aurobindo Bhawan, the main administrative building at JU — where the teachers congregated on January 30 to press for their own demands on implementation of promotion schemes. The teachers’ sit-in enforced a near-shutdown on the campus. All classes in the engineering, science and arts departments were suspended.

The students picked up the baton as they chose Aurobindo Bhawan to raise high-pitch slogans from 4.30pm on Thursday to 2.30pm the following day against the government stay on campus elections until the Lyngdoh committee recommendations were followed. Of course, the students’ demonstration was livelier as they belted out popular songs to keep everybody engaged and entertained.

The teachers, locked up inside the campus, were not allowed to take classes on Friday.

The agitation was the fallout of the higher education department’s decision on February 18 to suspend student union elections for preventing any untoward incident over the conduct of polls. The stay was enforced after the unrest at Harimohan Ghose College in Garden Reach on February 12.

“What happened over the past 22 hours was sheer campus unrest. The way students kept vice-chancellor Souvik Bhattacharya and other senior officials confined over demands for an election, it is clear that the department had done the right thing by scrapping elections for the next six months,” a senior university official said.

Education minister Bratya Basu was livid. “It can be well understood from what happened at JU, the only university out of the 16 to have witnessed a gherao, whose political interests were being served. We are against this culture of gherao.”

The minister blamed the university for the chaos, saying: “We have to think about the university administration. Someone who can’t explain the meaning of a government advisory to chhoto chhoto chhelemeye (kids), I wonder how he is going to run the administration.”

Governor M.K. Narayanan, who is the chancellor, criticised the gherao on the sidelines of a programme. “I am opposed to gheraos. Whatever happened at Jadavpur is anarchy,” he said.

At JU, the authorities convened a meeting with the student union election advisory committee on Thursday to discuss its stand on the recent advisories from the education department.

After the advisory on February 18, a government note stated last Friday that “in case the terms of the student union have expired or are near expiry, the university and college authorities may take recourse to the provisions of the existing statutes, rules and regulations relating to the conduct of election to the student union and adopt appropriate arrangements”.

This created an impression that the government had lifted the ban.

“Following the two conflicting advisories, we met to decide our stand and resolved that the executive council, the university’s highest decision-making body, will be asked to write to the government to clear the air. But the students started a gherao, stoking campus unrest and giving the department an excuse to justify the stay,” a university official said.

By Friday afternoon, the education department issued a third advisory. “To remove any scope for doubt, it is again advised that all processes related to the conduct of elections to the student unions in universities and colleges in the state may continue to be in abeyance until a fresh advisory from the state government is issued.”

The department was in no mood to bow before pressure, but it admitted the mistakes in the previous advisories and made its current position clear: “This supersedes the clarification dated 1/3/2013 (last Friday) issued by this department addressed to the vice-chancellors.”

A university official said the latest advisory virtually killed any room for negotiation with the government over conducting campus election. “The department would always cite what had happened on the campus today to quash our demands for holding election,” he said.

Amid all this, the students lifted their gherao after some university teachers and registrar Pradip Ghose assured them to discuss the committee’s recommendations at the next executive council meeting on Tuesday.