Historian Ramachandra Guha declines to teach at Ahmedabad University after ABVP calls him 'anti-national'

Author and historian Ramachandra Guha will not join Ahmedabad University (AU) in Gujarat due to unforeseen circumstances, which he said, are out of his control in a tweet on Thursday.

On October 16, the AU had announced that Ramachandra Guha will be appointed as the Shrenik Lalbhai Chair Professor of Humanities and the director of the Gandhi Winter School at the School of Arts and Sciences.

Guha had tweeted, “Due to circumstances beyond my control, I shall not be joining Ahmedabad University. I wish AU well; it has fine faculty and an outstanding Vice Chancellor. And may the spirit of Gandhi one day come alive once more in his native Gujarat.”

Thereafter, on October 19^th, the Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad had registered their protests against the new appointment by the university and had allegedly said that Guha is ‘anti-national’.

Pravin Desai, ABVP’s Secretary in Ahmedabad told The Indian Express that, “We made a representation before AU Registrar B M Shah. We said that we want intellectuals in our educational institutes and not anti-nationals, who can also be termed as ‘urban Naxals’. We had quoted anti-national content from his (Guha’s) books to the Registrar. We told him, the person you are calling is a ‘Communist’. If he is invited to Gujarat, there would be a JNU-kind anti-national sentiment.”

The memorandum which was submitted to the Vice-Chancellor has demanded the cancellation of the decision in which Guha was being appointed as the chair professor of the university.

It states that, “His such writings have encouraged divisive tendencies, alienation in the name of independence of the individual, freeing terrorists in the name of independence of the individual, and separating Jammu and Kashmir from the Indian union, in well known universities like Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Central University, Hyderabad.”

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