A lecture by former finance minister P Chidambaram scheduled to be held on August 24 at IIT Delhi has been cancelled by one of the two organisers, leaving the other fuming and questioning the reasons cited. Intimating the cancellation, IIT Delhi’s Entrepreneurship Development Cell (EDC) claimed Chidambaram had an “urgent meeting” and had to go out of town. However, the Centre for Civil Society (CCS), whose board member Praveen Chakravarty was to moderate the event, dismissed this as “blatant lies”. When contacted, Chidambaram too rejected the EDC claim. He told The Indian Express Saturday he would be “very much in Delhi” on August 24 and did not have any urgent meeting planned for that day. “This lecture was arranged by a common friend. Date, time and subject were finalised. Today I got a message from him that the lecture was cancelled. That’s all that I know,” he said in a text message. His lecture had been titled — ‘The pathbreaking economic reforms of 1991: Why is it a big deal?’ According to CCS, their associate director Samta Arora was in touch with a student representative of the EDC since August 7 to organise the lecture. They were even informed on August 14 that there was an overwhelming response to the event. However, on August 16 the representative informed Arora the event stood cancelled. Screenshots of WhatsApp and text messages of the reported conversation between the two show the timeline of events. “Mam there has been some issue sorry but we cannot do the event and no one in IIT Delhi will be able to do it for reasons you can understand (sic).” read an SMS to Arora on August 16 around 8 pm. However, on August 15, Arora had got an image on WhatsApp from the same representative showing IIT Delhi Director V Ramgopal Rao reportedly ‘liking’ and ‘sharing’ a post about the event uploaded by the EDC IIT Delhi Facebook page. The message stated, “Mam ab to IIT ke director ne bhi post share kar di hai.” On August 16, the EDC wrote on its Facebook page: “EDC IIT Delhi regrets to inform you that the orientation session with Mr P Chidambaram has been cancelled. Mr Chidambaram has an urgent meeting that he cannot get out of and the same was communicated to us.” The post was deleted after The Indian Express contacted EDC representatives. Asked why the event was cancelled, EDC vice-president Abhijeet Malhotra said it happened because Chidambaram was busy and had to go out of town. When questioned how the CCS, which was coordinating with Chidambaram, did not know about this, he cut the call. On being called again, Malhotra said, “The event has been cancelled because August 25 was going to be a holiday and we did not have many students who had registered for the lecture. Most of those who did were from outside IIT, and we did not want the lecture to take place with a thin crowd.” Chakravarty rejected these claims, saying, “. It is strange that an event which was publicised by the director himself was cancelled suddenly. There seems to be something more than what meets the eye.” Rao denied sharing a poster of the event from his Facebook page and said he was not even aware of the programme. “I was not aware of this, and I’ve not shared any poster about it. Maybe the event was cancelled because he (Chidambaram) was busy elsewhere, but I’ll have to find out. There’s definitely no political reason behind the cancellation,” said the IIT Delhi Director.
