Nothing Wrong in Naming Kerala Campus After RSS Leader: Union Min
Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has urged the Central government to reconsider its decision.
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Amid the controversy over naming the new campus of Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology (RGCB) in Kerala after Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, a RSS idealogue, Union Minister V Muraleedharan supported the Centre’s decision and said that there is nothing wrong in naming the institute after a “patriot.”
On Sunday, 6 December, when reporters asked him about the decision, he said, "What is wrong in naming an institute after a patriot?,” PTI reported.
Elaborating on his statement, he said that Golwalkar was a zoology professor in Banaras University and “asked how the famous Nehru trophy boat race was named after former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.”
"Has Nehru ever participated in any sports activity?" he further asked.
Muraleedharan said that he didn’t understand the reason behind RSS idealogue’s name being unacceptable. “The RGCB governing council took this decision and no one else has a role in it," he said, PTI reported.
BACKGROUND
On Friday, Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan said that the second campus of RGCB in Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram will be named 'Shri Guruji Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar National Centre for Complex Disease in Cancer and Viral Infection'.
Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has urged the Central government to reconsider its decision. He wrote a letter to the union health minister and said that the research institution “has been above political divides,” The News Minute reported.
As the decision kicked off a controversy, Communist Party of India (CPI) leader Mullakkara Retnakaran urged that the campus should be named after Dr Padmanabhan Palpu, who was a bacteriologist from Kerala and was known for his service during the plague as many as 120 years ago.
(With inputs from PTI, The News Minute)
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