Cracking the whip on those who scuttled a recent meeting of the Kerala University Senate, Governor Arif Mohammed Khan on Saturday withdrew 15 of his 17 nominees from the governing body.
The extraordinary move comes a few days after the majority of the Senate members, including the 15 nominees, abstained from the meeting called to propose a member on the search-cum-selection committee for the next Vice Chancellor.
The sudden development is bound to exacerbate his stand-off with the Left Democratic Front (LDF) government that had recommended the nomination of those who have now been removed.
Two of those who have been withdrawn – G. Muralidharan Pillai and B. Balachandran – have also lost their membership in the Syndicate by way of the decision. Those who ceased to be Senate members for having “failed to discharge their duties and responsibilities” also include four department heads viz. Institute of Management in Kerala head K.S. Chandrasekhar and the head of the departments of Music, Sanskrit and Philosophy K. Bindu, C.A. Shaila, and Binu G. Bheemnath respectively.
The others are R.S. Suresh Babu, T.S. Yamuna Devi, G.K. Harikumar, V. Ajayakumar, Shaik P. Harriz, Joy Sukumaran, G. Patmakumar, N.P. Chandrasekharan, and P. Asokan.
Vinodkumar T.G. Nair and A.M. Unnikrishnan are the nominees of the Chancellor who will continue to be members of the Senate. The duo had turned up for the meeting of October 11 that had been called off in the absence of the minimum quorum of 21 members.
Only 13 members, including Vice Chancellor V.P. Mahadevan Pillai, attended the meeting. The Senate currently has 91 members, most of whom stayed away despite being present on the campus following a political decision taken prior to the meeting.
The marching orders came even as the government and the university conveyed their willingness to convene another Senate meeting on November 4 to discuss the Chancellor’s directive to nominate a member on the selection committee.
