Kolkata: Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of RSS , is now trying to make a foray into Presidency University, the campus where Syama Prasad Mookerjee (to whom RSS traces its ideological lineage) and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (its nationalistic Vande Mataram poet) spent their college days.
Luminaries like Bankim Chandra, Swami Vivekananda (who studied here as well) and Syama Prasad have largely been shunned by left-wing student organisations, who rarely host events celebrating them but focus on foreign figures like Lenin, Marx and Che Guevara,” ABVP Presidency unit president Mridul Banik said. ABVP’s attempt at breaking into Presidency, the country’s oldest higher education institution, follows similar efforts at Jadavpur University, where RSS — for the first time — opened a shakha after BJP’s assembly poll win in Bengal. “Presidency is a crucible of nationalism. It is the alma mater of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, who wrote our National Song, and Syama Prasad Mookerjee, who founded the Jana Sangh, to which we trace our lineage. So we chose this campus to honour Indian stalwarts and highlight the role of ‘Vande Mataram’ in the freedom struggle.
The university’s ABVP unit has organised a seminar on Thursday at the campus’s A K Basak Auditorium to commemorate the sesquicentenary of India’s National Song, ‘Vande Mataram’, where RSS eastern India prachar pramukh Jisnu Basu — also a scientist at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics — is one of the invitees.
Presidency College (now a university) has been a cradle of dissent, from anti-colonial nationalism to the Naxal movement, since the nineteenth century. The institution nurtured revolutionary fervour, most famously exemplified in the Netaji-Oaten confrontation (that led to Subhas Chandra Bose’s expulsion for confronting Professor Oaten) before becoming the epicentre of the Naxal movement in the 1960s (spearheaded by firebrand student leaders like Ashim Chatterjee alias Kaka and Gautam Chattopadhyay, founder of Moheener Ghoraguli, often described as the first Bengali rock band).