Image credit : Illustrative Image

With the Bharathiar University gearing up for its 34th convocation on Tuesday, an outfit called Youth for Social Justice has threatened to wave black flags at Vice-Chancellor A Ganapathy if he participated in the ceremony.

The forum staged a protest on Monday, demanding to arrest the V-C, who has been booked under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act for allegedly preventing a Dalit scholar from doing her post-doctoral research in the university.

The police, on a direction from the National Commission for Scheduled Castes (NCSC), registered a case against the V-C last week. The Commission had issued an order following a complaint by Sri Lakshmi Prabha that the university had refused to hand over all her certificates, thus preventing her from pursuing post-doctoral research.

She claimed that her name figured in the UGC’s shortlisted candidates but she was not able to proceed further due to the documents purposely withheld by the university during the verification process.

Lakshmi also alleged that she was denied the job of an assistant professor in the university’s Department of Biotechnology after she finished her Ph.D despite being eligible under the priority criteria and blamed it on favouritism. She has challenged it in the court and the case is pending.

The university, however, has denied all her charges. Under these circumstances, posters have sprung up condemning the case “foisted” on the V-C. The poster, which says it is from the people affected by the misuse of SC/ST Act, calls for repealing of the Act by the central government.

Irked by these posters, the Youth for Social Justice president N Paneer Selvam has written to the NCSC seeking action against the V-C, Registrar and the Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the university for allegedly creating communal disharmony among the students.

The PRO, on instructions from the V-C and Registrar, has been sending messages through the social media amounting to creating communal disharmony, which can even end up in law and order issue, Paneer Selvam alleged.

In the protest held before South Tahsildar’s office, the members said they would show black flags to the V-C and called upon the Governor-Chancellor, who is taking part in the convocation, to take action against him and annul appointments made by him.