Calcutta University will confer West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee with a honorary D.Litt (doctor of letters). This is for the first time that the university is granting its prestigious D.Litt to a serving chief minister of West Bengal.
Earlier, two former chief ministers of the state had received honorary doctorate from the varsity, but not when they were in office. They were Bidhan Chandra Roy and Jyoti Basu.
While Roy received the doctorate in 1944 as doctor of science, Basu received it in 2007 as doctor of law. While Roy was a renowned doctor who was educated in Royal College in London, Basu had studied law in England.
Banerjee is being granted the doctorate in the filed of literature, the same doctorate that Rabindranath Tagore received shortly after he won the Nobel Prize in 1913. Tagore had then said, “This D. Litt is much more important to me than the Nobel Prize.”
The doctorate came decades after the chief minister was embroiled in a controversy after she claimed that she had received a doctorate from an American university which never existed. She was the butt of many jokes in the 1980s and 90s, especially during elections over the same.
The officials of Calcutta University refused to say on what grounds the chief minister was eligible for the honour.
“She would be given for art, culture and social service,” said vice chancellor of the varsity Sonali Banerjee.
The university had always maintained strict yardsticks to confer this prestigious doctorate.
Besides Tagore, eminent figures like Jagadish Bose and C.V. Raman had received the doctorate before Independence. The senate never considered names like Subhash Chandra Bose, Jawharlal Nehru and even Mahatma Gandhi. However, people like Syama Prasad Mukherjee and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan made it to list not because of their political affiliation, but their academic excellence.
Recipients of the doctorate after the Independence include Satyajit Ray and Amartya Sen.
Former president Pranab Mukherjee was awarded the doctorate after he was elected president, making it the first time a serving president being accorded the award.
