A campus discoloured: On the saffronisation of National Institute of Technology, Calicut
A S Jayanth | 8 February 2024 | The Hindu
An uneasy calm prevails at the National Institute of Technology, Calicut, (NIT-C), on the morning of February 5. Yellow college buses and a few private vehicles enter the campus at Chathamangalam, around 20 km from Kozhikode city in Kerala, as classes resume after a three-day gap. Students with backpacks slung over their shoulders are walking in. To the left of the main gate are two police barricades, a reminder of the storm of students’ protests that rocked the campus four days ago, leading to the three-day closure from February 2.
The protests had erupted as a response to the suspension of Vysakh Premkumar, a final-year-student of Electronics and Communication Engineering. The sequence of events that led to the students’ unrest and what followed have raised concerns about the institute administration’s alleged bias and the attempts to create a discord between students and among faculty members in one of the premier institutes of higher education in the country…