Nationalism Row: Rival ABVP, SFI Marches Held Around Jadavpur University

Kolkata: Jadavpur University campus witnessed rival mobilisations by the ABVP and SFI on Thursday, with the RSS-affiliated student outfit taking out a Vande Mataram march inside the varsity and the Left student organisation organising a counter-procession outside, intensifying an ongoing ideological battle over nationalism and campus politics.

The ABVP march, held with the national flag and slogans of "Vande Mataram" and "Bharat Mata Ki Jai", was organised ahead of a nationalist conference at the Triguna Sen Auditorium inside the premises, while SFI activists marched along Raja Subodh Mullick Road outside.

The police had put up barricades outside the campus to stop the SFI from marching ahead to avoid any face-off with the ABVP.

Students, teachers and non-teaching employees participated in the two programmes, turning the university and its surroundings into competing stages for rival political narratives.

The ABVP said the march was meant to assert that there was no place on the campus for what it described as "anti-national" slogans or activities.

Its workers also put up portraits of eminent personalities, including Rabindranath Tagore, at the university gate and displayed Nandalal Bose's illustrations that form part of India's Constitution on campus walls.

The visual messaging was presented as a counter to controversial graffiti that have become a major point of contention at the varsity in recent days.

The SFI, meanwhile, took its protest to the road outside the university, opposing what it sees as an attempt to impose a particular political and nationalist narrative on the campus. Its counter-march added a distinctly Left response to the ABVP's mobilisation, with the two sides effectively staking out competing political spaces around the university.

The face-off comes against the backdrop of clashes between ABVP and Left student groups at Jadavpur University over the past two weeks, which have drawn the varsity into a wider political confrontation in West Bengal.

The latest round of mobilisation follows a large Vande Mataram programme at Jadavpur University last week, in which thousands participated. The event had already turned the national song into a fresh political flashpoint at a university historically associated with strong Left student activism.

The ABVP's Thursday programme preceded a "Nationalist Conference" organised by a committee named after Haripada Bharati, a professor and founding president of the BJP's West Bengal unit in 1980.

With rival groups now taking their contest from campus walls to marches and counter-marches, Jadavpur University has once again become a prominent arena for West Bengal's broader ideological contest.