KOLKATA: Taking the Centre head-on once again, the West Bengal government has directed all the universities and colleges under its jurisdiction to ignore the directive of the University Grants Commission (UGC) to arrange for the live telecast of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech on September 11 on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of Swami Vivekananda’s address to the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago.
Speaking at a press conference here Friday, West Bengal education minister Partha Chatterjee hit out at the Centre for attempts to ‘saffronise’ the education system. “The Centre cannot do it without informing or without taking the concurrence of the state government concerned. It is not acceptable to us, since we feel that this is a clear attempt of saffronisation of education. The colleges and universities in the state got puzzled by the UGC circular and they approached us regarding it. I clearly tolf them that there is no necessity to adhere to the UGC directive,” he said.
The Centre had sent notices to more than 40,000 colleges and universities asking them to live telecast the speech of the Prime Minister. The West Bengal government’s defiant response is in line with its earlier call to ignore the Centre’s directive to all schools in the country to build ‘patriotic fervour’ before the Independence Day.
The Centre had asked the schools to administer the ‘Sankalp ke Siddhi’ pledge to students in order to make them aware of the ‘New India Mission’ of the Prime Minister and celebrate patriotism with events organised between August 9 and 30 in the respective schools. The West Bengal government had then rejected the central government’s directive stating that it does not need ‘lessons on patriotism’ from the BJP.
The Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress government has resisted multiple central government directives that it said were ‘bulldozed upon the states’ by ignoring the federal structure of the country, which the Trinamool Congress alleged the BJP government at the Centre was trying to decimate.