The Hindu Business Line : Ignoble act

THERE can be no two views on the enormity of the recent theft of Tagore's Noble Prize medallion, among other things, from the museum at Santiniketan, an act committed while the sleepy town was indoors watching the cricket one-dayer at Lahore.

The act can only be described as being one of public desecration on the ground that the world utters the name of India and Rabindranath Tagore in one and the same breath, and that, by this yardstick alone, an assault on Tagore of this sort is also an assault on the image of the country. Clearly, those involved in the theft did their homework meticulously, timing it to the day when they knew that even the best of security arrangements in Santiniketan would have taken the day off.

The theft is certainly a cataclysmic event as far as Tagoreana is concerned, not to speak of the strong impact it has had on the national psyche as reflected by, among other things, the interest shown by such personages as the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister in what the West Bengal authorities are doing by way of taking steps to apprehend the culprits and get the artefacts back. Even the Nobel Foundation in Sweden has been taken by surprise in that this theft (as reports say) is perhaps the first of its kind as far as Nobel medallions go. But perhaps the most important thing that is probably being lost sight of is the deplorable state of security at the Tagore museum at Santiniketan.

This correspondent had occasion to visit the museum a year back and two things struck him. The first was of course the immense value of the artefacts on display, not merely from the point of view of Tagoreana but also from that of the Bengal Renaissance.

The second was the abject state of security at the museum, an inexcusable lapse given the value of its contents. That this observation at the time was not a figment of the imagination has been brought out now in the many comments that are being made on the laxity of the museum authorities — that is, the Visva-Bharati University — in protecting the priceless treasures from thieves and vandals.

In defence, it will be argued that there were in place rudimentary security measures such as alarm bells, etc., but the fact remains that the system (if one was in place, that is) did not work effectively when the theft was being committed.

This is the area where the entire thrust of official ire (as far the West Bengal Government is concerned) should lie. It is just possible (at least one fervently hopes so) that the artefacts — at least some of them — will be recovered in the wake of the strenuous police efforts that are being made in that direction.

But the fact is that everyone would have been spared this period of shock and suspense had the Visva-Bharati authorities done their job vis-à-vis security in the first place.

The least the Government can do is to institute a high-power inquiry into the security arrangements at the museum at the time of the break-in and, more important, pull up those who are found to have done a bad job of it. That action should be taken by the Chancellor of the university, who is no less than the Prime Minister himself.

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