New JNU VC criticised as provocative tweets emerge

Around midday on Monday, Professor Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit was the talk of the town as she became the first woman to be vice chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University.

No sooner was she appointed as JNU VC, tweets from a handle with the name Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit and purportedly belonging to her went viral. The handle, which joined Twitter in December 2014, saw a massive jump in followers since Pandit was named JNU VC. The number of followers more than doubled after the news of her appointment, crossing 4,200 by 3.30pm. Author Makarand Paranjape, who has also been a JNU professor, and Prafulla Ketkar, the editor of the RSS-run magazine Organiser, are among the 485 followers of the handle.

But like all things on social media, controversies also spring up fast.

Along with the rise in followers, the handle also led to criticism of Pandit, given its controversial views on a number of topics such as jihad and religious conversion. Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of the fact-checking website Alt News, collated a collection of screenshots of tweets from the handle. This included a tweet from December 2015, which stated “Sunni Islam is radical thanks to Wahabi influence. It has problem with modernity, secularism and living peacefully with non-Muslims.”

Zubair also shared a tweet from the handle from May 2019 that appeared to justify Nathuram Godse, the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi.

Another tweet shared by Zubair was from May 2021 that appeared to be calling for India to adopt the same method China used with “mentally ill Jihadists”. One more tweet from May 2021 appeared to be calling Tamil actor Kamal Haasan “anti-Hindu” and “rice bag (derogatory term associated with Christian converts)”.

THE WEEK was able to verify the existence of the two tweets from May last year.

Yogendra Yadav, leader of the Swaraj India party, shared on Twitter some other tweets from the handle about the farmers protests and wrote, “Introducing the new VC of JNU--clearly a role model of scholarship for its students and faculty”.