Visva-Bharati shifts venue of Tagore death anniversary event from Bangladesh Bhawan
The steps have been taken in view of the public rage against Sheikh Hasina, who resigned as Bangladesh prime minister and fled to India on July 4.
The annual event held to mark Rabindranath Tagore’s death anniversary at Bangladesh Bhawan in Visva-Bharati, West Bengal’s only Central university, was on Wednesday shifted to an old playground on the campus in view of the ongoing turmoil in the neighbouring country, varsity officials said.
After Bangladesh was liberated in 1971, ‘Amar Sonar Bangla’, a song Tagore had composed in 1905, became the country’s national anthem.
Though he was born in Kolkata in 1861 and died in the city on August 7, 1941, the Nobel laureate composed many of his famous poems and songs in those parts of undivided Bengal which became East Pakistan in 1947 and subsequently Bangladesh after the Liberation War.
“Although no untoward incident has happened on the campus ever since the unrest started across the border, security has been tightened here as a precautionary measure,” a university official said on condition of anonymity.
“The proposed screening of a biopic of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the first president of Bangladesh, has also been postponed in view of the attacks on his statues in Dhaka and other places. Made by Shyam Benegal, the biopic ‘Mujib, The Making of a Nation’ was supposed to have been screened at Bangladesh Bhawan this month,” the official added.
The steps have been taken in view of the public rage against Sheikh Hasina, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s daughter and head of the Awami League, who resigned as prime minister and fled to India on July 4.
The Bangladesh Bhawan was planned and funded by Hasina. She and Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated it in 2018 in the presence of West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee.
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated in Dhaka on August 15, 1975.