Guwahati: The authorities of IIT Guwahati have been accused of citing a fake tweet in court documents against a former professor of the premier higher education institute, Alt News reported.
According to the report, IIT Guwahati’s Board of Governors (BoG) minutes report cited a tweet in the name of Dr Brijesh Kumar Rai, a former professor of the institute, which he has never made.
On January 1, 2020, Dr Brijesh Kumar Rai, then Assistant Professor of IIT Guwahati, was given Compulsory Retirement for alleged misconduct.
On January 2, 2020, he was given the notice to vacate the quarters of the institute.
Dr Rai had been working in the Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering at IIT Guwahati since 2011.
He has filed four PILs and more than 450 RTI applications, alleging corruption at IIT Guwahati before his compulsory retirement.
A screenshot of an alleged tweet by Dr Rai was attached to a document of the 106th Board of Governors (BOG) meeting held on April 22, 2021.
It is available on the website of IIT Guwahati. According to the screenshot on page number 96 of this 125-page document, Dr Rai tagged several accounts including the Ministry of Education, and the Prime Minister’s Office, and called for a protest against the forced expulsion of students, the news website reported.
In this purported tweet, he also talked about mobilizing shop owners across faculty gates. It also says that the demonstration will be against the BJP, PM Modi, Himanta Biswa Sharma, and IIT Guwahati and it will be led by Vikrant and Himanchal.
Vikrant Singh and Himanchal Singh are students of IIT Guwahati. They went on a hunger strike from January 4 to 7, 2020, in protest against the compulsory retirement of Dr Rai.
According to reports, in March 2021, Vikrant was suspended by IIT Guwahati authorities for the 2021-22 academic sessions.
While Vikrant was subsequently terminated from the institute, Himanchal was made to sign a six-point undertaking by IIT Guwahati to continue his research.
The undertaking states that he will not participate in any future protest or agitation.
In October 2021, IIT Guwahati filed a criminal defamation case against Dr Rai before the Kamrup Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM)’s court (case no 79/2021).
The IIT Guwahati in the complaint alleged that “with the intention of making the most out of his disinformation campaign the accused Dr Rai published a tweet on his social media account with the purpose of organising a rally on March 11, 2021”.
The complaint further mentioned that Dr Rai in his tweet revealed that he along with his associates intended to protest against public figures belonging to a particular political party on the campus of IIT Guwahati.
The said tweet was made by the accused person from his Twitter handle @brijeshrai on March 11, 2021, it alleges.
In the document, a copy of the screenshot purportedly taken from his social media account is attached and marked as Annexure-B. When we matched the Board of Governors (BOG) minutes report and the tweet in Annexure-B, we found that both the screenshots are the same, said the Alt News report.
(This story was originally published by Alt News)