IANS
ALIGARH, MARCH 3
AMU Vice Chancellor Zameer Uddin Shah said on Thursday that he will meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi to clarify issues related to the controversial off-campus AMU centres.
Shah, a retired Lt. General, also denied that he was insulted by Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Smriti Irani when he went to her house in New Delhi for a meeting on January 8.
“It would take a lot to humiliate a veteran of the Longewala Battle of 1971 who spent the better part of his 40 years in the Army fighting insurgencies in Punjab and North-East and dousing communal passions in various riots,” he said in a statement.
Shah maintained that Irani had refused to fund the AMU centres in Malapuram in Kerala, Kishanganj in Bihar and Murshidabad in West Bengal.
He said the Aligarh Muslim University Act of 1920 allowed the University to have these centres, including the one in Malappuram, and two more in Bhopal and Pune.
“However, it is apparent that a certain AMU alumnus has wrongly informed the Minister that the centres have been established illegally,” he said.
The Vice Chancellor said he would meet Modi soon “to resolve the problems”.
Irani insists that the AMU off-campus centres have been established illegally and that her Ministry won’t fund them.
At the January 8 meeting, she even told Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy to take back the land allotted to the AMU centre.
Shah said media reports over the issue were aimed at tarnishing the AMU’s image.
“I will reserve further comments on this,” said the Vice Chancellor, on his failure to hold discussions with the HRD Minister on January 8 in the presence of the Kerala Chief Minister.
“The Chief Minister informed me that the HRD Minister was adamant that the AMU centres were illegally established and would not be funded by her Ministry despite being told that they had been approved by the AMU Executive Council and the President of India,” he said.
The five off-campus centres were supposed to be fully functional by 2020. Only those in Kerala, West Bengal and Bihar are partially working but without any schools.
The centres had got the approval of the country’s President, who is the AMU’s Visitor, in 2010.
Interference in universities ‘unwarranted’
NEW DELHI: Renowned academicians on Thursday slammed the central government for what they called its unwarranted interference in central universities and autonomous educational institutes.
“Universities are places for dialogue where people from different ideologies are free to express their opinion based on ideologies they concur to. In any case, depleting education system over the year has turned most of the state universities to cheerleaders of the respective governments,” Satish Deshpande of the Delhi School of Economics said at a seminar here.
“Central universities were still managing to hold their position but the series of recent events have shaken their autonomy to a huge extent.”
“The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh map of India begins from Afghanistan and goes up to Myanmar across Pakistan and Bangladesh. Is it not distortion of the geography, as the actual Indian map is a lot different,” said Burra Srinivas of the South Asian University.
“There has been a complete distortion of Indian history under the present regime. Recently, the Sanskrit department of our university organised a seminar on the Indian history. When I asked them about the historians and evidence provided by the Archaeological Survey of India on the topic they were discussing, they told us that western powers have wrecked our history. We will re-establish it through our Sanskrit scholars,” University Grants Commission fellow Vikram Soni said.
Concurring with his views, Sunil Kumar of Delhi University asserted that “certain forces wish to saffronise the entire history, demolishing its factual perspective completely”.
“Ambedkar fought for the existence of the Dalits in higher education. Today, there is a class which is challenging this very existence. Anyone dissenting with their view is labeled with a range of adjectives,” Rukmini Sen of the Ambedkar University said. More than a dozen intellectuals and academicians participated in the seminar.
