'Put Up New Plaque With Tagore's Name By Tomorrow Or...': Mamata's Ultimatum To Centre Amid Visva-Bharati Row

She said her party workers would begin an agitation if the plaques were not changed by Friday.

New Delhi: Amid row over missing Rabindranath Tagore's name from Unesco plaques, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday slammed the authorities for not inscribing the name of Tagore on plaques commemorating the award of ‘World Heritage Site’ by UNESCO at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan. 

She said her party workers would begin an agitation if the plaques were not changed by Friday, reported news agency PTI.

"It is only for Tagore that Santiniketan got the UNESCO tag and you have removed his name from the plaques. We were silent because of the Durga Puja celebrations. If you do not remove the plaques and put-up new ones with the Nobel Laureate's name by 10am tomorrow, our people will launch a demonstration holding Kobiguru's photos to their chests," Banerjee told reporters at a press conference here.

The controversy erupted after the plaques bore the names of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is also the chancellor of the varsity, and Vice-Chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty, but did not have any mention of Tagore who set up the varsity.

Earlier on Wednesday, the university had said the plaque was just a temporary structure to demarcate the heritage site.

“It was a purely temporary structure raised to demarcate the heritage site. The ISI and UNESCO will provide some text that will be erected once they are received,” Visva Bharati spokesperson Mahua Bandyopadhyay had told PTI.

After the plaques came up on the campus, the Visva Bharati University Faculty Association (VBUFA), a teaching staff organisation of VBU sent emails to the Prime Minister and Chancellor Narendra Modi, President Droupadi Murmu, who is the Visitor, and West Bengal Governor C V Ananda Bose, terming it as an insult to Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, by not mentioning him, and instead mentioning other names on the plaques. 

The email also demanded the resignation of the university VC.

UNESCO gave credit to "renowned poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore" for setting up of Santiniketan which is uniquely different from the "prevailing British colonial architectural orientations of the early 20th century and of European modernism".