Lock up all student union rooms till elections conducted, Calcutta HC directs all Bengal colleges and universities

Kolkata, July 3 (IANS) The Calcutta High Court on Thursday directed the West Bengal Higher Education Department to ensure that the union rooms, also often referred to as common rooms, in all colleges and universities in the state remain locked till the time the students’ union elections in those institutes were conducted and the results declared.

A division bench of Justice Soumen Sen and Justice Smita Das gave this order on a petition seeking to draw the attention of the court that unofficial student unions allegedly run by close associates of the ruling Trinamool Congress were operating several colleges and universities in the state, where students’ union elections had been pending for years.

In the petition, the petitioner, advocate Sayan Banerjee, also alleged that the operators of these unofficial unions were operating from the union rooms, thus making these rooms hubs of antisocial activities.

After a detailed hearing on the matter on Thursday, the division bench ordered that the union rooms in all colleges and universities would remain locked till the time the students’ union elections in those institutes were conducted and the results were declared.

It also directed the state government to clarify its stand on the pending students’ union elections by filing an affidavit in the matter in the next two weeks. The next hearing on the matter will be on July 17.

The direction from the Calcutta High Court in the matter is quite significant considering that the union room or common room at South Calcutta Law College (New Campus) at Kasba in South Kolkata became significant in the case of the rape of a student of that college within the college campus last week.

The investigation has revealed that the victim was called by the three accused - Monojit Mishra, Jaib Ahmed, and Pramit Mukhopadhyay - to the common room within the campus. After some initial conversations within the common room, the victim was dragged from there to the adjacent guard room also within the campus by the three accused and she was raped there.

The same division bench of Justice Sen and Justice Das on Thursday itself directed Kolkata Police to submit the progress report on the investigation and the case diary in the matter of the law college student gang-rape to the court within the next seven days.

--IANS

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