The institute reportedly accused the scholar of inviting ‘controversial speakers’ to deliver the annual Bhagat Singh Memorial Lecture on campus.
By Scroll Staff
The Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai has suspended Dalit student and PhD scholar Ramadas Prini Sivanadan for two years for participating in protests against the Bharatiya Janata Party government, the Progressive Students’ Forum alleged in a statement on Friday.
Ramadas, who is also a student leader, had received a show cause notice from the institution’s registrar on March 7 objecting to his activism, specifically his participation in the Parliament March in Delhi in January and his post on social media encouraging students to watch the documentary Ram Ke Naam as an “‘anti-national’ act”, the forum claimed in a statement.
Ram Ke Naam is a National Film Award-winning 1992 documentary by filmmaker Anand Patwardhan about the campaign by Hindutva groups to build a Ram temple at the site of the erstwhile Babri mosque in Ayodhya.
The students’ association said that the documentary has been officially screened at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in the past, that it is publicly available for viewing and has also been screened by state broadcaster Doordarshan. “The current TISS administration, however, wants to censure voices even in the online space in what students want to share and talk about,” the forum alleged.
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