The students of Jadavpur University on Wednesday threatened to undertake a hunger strike from tomorrow to force Vice-Chancellor Abhijit Chakrabarty to resign, deepening the crisis which began after the VC called in the police to break up a gherao on September 17.
Nearly 700 students today threatened to sit on a hunger strike from 6 PM on Thursday to mark the completion of one month of the police crackdown on students who had gheraoed the VC seeking a fresh probe into the sexual harassment of a girl. Many students have already vowed not to attend classes till the VC resigns while others said they will attend lectures in view of their impending exams, but will not mark their attendance in official records.
Most of the classrooms were either empty or with a handful of students. Some teachers also took classes in the open outside the classrooms. The VC has stayed away from the campus which re-opened after the Durga Puja vacation and efforts to reach him failed as his phone remained switched off. On Tuesday he had told PTI that normalcy would soon return to the campus and had even issued an appeal to the students to attend classes.
Teachers, on the other hand, said they would bring out a rally on Thursday in the campus. Nandini Mukherjee, joint secretary of the Jadavpur University Teachers' Association (JUTA), told PTI that the management had blamed teachers for the problem and to protest against that they would take out arally. "They are threatening us and maligning us. We will protest against that," she said. State education minister Partha Chatterjee said the government would not ask the VC to resign. "There is no question of us seeking his resignation. He was appointed by the Chancellor. If he resigns on his own it is his personal matter, but we will not ask him to resign," he said.
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