Professor Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit from Savitribai Phule Pune University was appointed as the first woman vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) on Monday. 

The news of her appointment sparked a Twitter outrage from Opposition leaders and journalists for Pandit’s controversial remarks and tweets from the past. 

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Saket Gokhale, National Spokesperson-All India Trinamool Congress, reshared a tweet by the vice-chancellor from last year, in which she had referred to Indian Christians as ‘rice bag converts’. “The new Vice-Chancellor of JNU refers to Christians as ‘rice bag converts’.

She will now head one of India’s elite liberal arts universities

Education Min should clarify if that’s how Christian students at JNU are going to be treated & if this is Indian govt policy,” Gokhale wrote on Twitter. 

Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) leader Kavita Krishnan also reshared tweets in which Pandit had called student bodies ‘extremist Naxal groups’ and ‘losers from JNU’. “The Modi regime’s new JNU VC has a twitter feed full of unhinged Hindu-supremacist bile against educational institutions founded by Muslims or Christians, & against India’s farmers, plus it’s full of #Covidconspiracy theories. She actively hates JNU,” Krishnan tweeted.

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In yet another tweet, Pandit had advocated for the persecution of civil rights activists, whom she referred to as ‘mentally-ill jihadists’ in ‘Chinese’ style.

Mohammed Zubair, journalist and fact-checker, posted screenshots of multiple tweets made by Pandit in the past. In May last year, for instance, she had indirectly called farmer leaders Yogendra Yadav and Rakesh Tikait ‘parasitic middlemen’ and ‘liars and losers’. In another tweet, she even claimed that Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, had reason to kill the father of the nation, “I would believe both Gandhi and Godse, both read Gita and believed and took opposite lessons. Godse thought-action was important and identified the solution for a united India.”

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Pandit, who will hold the position for five years, had also remarked in the past that Muslims belonging to the Sunni sect of Islam were radical, and were ‘mentally ill jihadists’.

She has now deleted her Twitter account.