New JNU VC denies having Twitter account amid row over tweets

New Delhi: Amid facing heat over old tweets from an unverified handle in her name, the newly-appointed vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit claimed on Tuesday that she never had a Twitter account, NDTV reported.

"I don't have a Twitter handle," she told NDTV, adding that "non-sense is being spread" and denied any knowledge about the nature of tweets.

The Twitter account was deactivated yesterday after users dug out controversial tweets that ranged from calling protesting farmers "parasites" and "dalals (agents)", Jamia Millia Islamia and St Stephen's College as "communal campuses" and sharing posts by right-wing trolls to target journalists and politicians.

Calling herself a "thorough academic", she called the Twitter controversy a "planned narrative" and asked if this was the way to welcome a woman.

The handle, which had tweets calling Jamia Millia Islamia and St Stephen's College "communal campuses", used slurs for Indian Christians and described civil rights activists as "mentally-ill jihadists", was deleted following the uproar on Monday.

Pandit on Tuesday distanced herself from the controversial Twitter account.

"It has been found out that it has been hacked and somebody internally from JNU has done this," she told The Indian Express. "The point is, many people are unhappy that I am the first woman V-C."

The vice chancellor claimed that she only got to know about the account when photos of the tweets were shared and that no one had told her about the account earlier. "In this world, everybody is a conspirator," she remarked.

Pandit said that she was being treated badly by the media just because Prime Minister Narendra Modi "beat the Left in breaking a glass ceiling", referring to her being appointed as the first woman vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University.

"I'm a woman from the marginalised section and the southern state of Tamil Nadu," she said, according to The Indian Express. "Why did the Left not do it all these years? Seventy years they were in power. They couldn't get to JNU? It is their adda [hub]."

She alleged that she was being attacked as she focussed on the "Indian perspective".

On the criticism from BJP MP Varun Gandhi over grammatical errors in her press release, Pandit said: "I dictated… the lady from the previous V-C took it in shorthand and the PRO said she will correct it and put it up. How much can you monitor? I still don't have a team. Today I told the office staff that if you don't know English, you should have told me you don't know English. But nobody says they don't know. I sat, retyped and rewrote it myself today and uploaded it on the university website."