St. Xavier’s College Mumbai drops Stan Swamy lecture after ABVP opposition
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Mumbai: St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai has called off its annual Stan Swamy Memorial Lecture, scheduled for Saturday, following protests by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
The ABVP’s Mumbai unit said its members had met the college principal on Tuesday and submitted a letter demanding the “immediate cancellation” of the event. The group argued that holding a lecture in memory of a person accused in the Elgar Parishad–Bhima Koregaon case and charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) for alleged links with banned Maoist groups amounted to “glorifying urban Naxalism on campus.”
The organization also urged the Maharashtra authorities to take “strict action” against such events, which it alleged were being held under the “guise of academic freedom.”
The lecture, organized by the college’s Department of Inter-Religious Studies, was to be delivered virtually by Father Prem Xalxo on the theme “Migration for Livelihood: Hope amidst Miseries.”
Father Stan Swamy, an 84-year-old Jesuit priest and human rights activist, was arrested in 2020 on charges of having ties to a banned radical left-wing group that police claimed instigated the 2018 violence in Maharashtra. A long-time advocate for marginalized tribal communities, Swamy spent nine months in jail without trial under the UAPA before his death in a Mumbai hospital in July 2021, ahead of a bail hearing.
Despite suffering from Parkinson’s disease and other serious ailments, he was repeatedly denied bail. In May 2021, he was admitted to hospital after contracting COVID-19 and suffered a cardiac arrest before succumbing. He was the oldest among a dozen academics and human rights defenders charged in the Elgar Parishad–Bhima Koregaon case.
