By Express News Service
NEW DELHI: The iconic Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi got a new vice-chancellor in Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit on Monday with controversy following soon after. She is 59 and the first woman to hold the post at JNU, but what caught the eye was an unverified Twitter handle, @SantishreeD, which had sharp tweets condoning Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, criticising BJP’s opponents, minorities and farm union leaders.
The Twitter handle was later deleted but screen shots of the toxic tweets were widely shared. In one tweet, Congress president Sonia Gandhi was termed an “Italian remote control”. Another tweet read, “Non-Muslims wake up to Love Jihad which is terror by other means”. Some tweets were targeted at JNU, Jamia and St Stephen’s college, calling for a ban on funding to these institutions.
Criticising the appointment, TMC spokesperson Saket Gokhale tweeted, “The new Vice-Chancellor of JNU refers to Christians as ‘rice bag converts’. She will now head one of India’s elite liberal arts universities. Education Min @dpradhanbjp should clarify if that’s how Christian students at JNU are going to be treated & if this is Indian govt policy”.
Pandit, a political science professor at Savitribai Phule Pune University, is an alumna of JNU where she pursued her MPhil and PhD in International Relations. The appointment is for five years. She succeeded M Jagadesh Kumar, whose term at JNU was mired in controversies.
Born in Russia, Pandit did her schooling in Chennai. She did her BA in history and social psychology in 1983 from Chennai’s Presidency College, bagging the first rank and winning gold medal. She also did her MA from the same college and was ranked second. A polyglot, she speaks six languages including Telugu, Tamil and Sanskrit.
Soon after her appointment at JNU, she said her focus would be providing a gender-sensitive environment for academic excellence and implementation of the National Education Policy.
