Ratan Tata at IIT Madras on Friday. (PTI)

Chennai, July 28: Enakshi Bhattacharya had not come prepared to protest, she didn’t even have a placard ready. But she was angry.

“I was so annoyed when I read in the newspapers here this morning that Narendra Modi is coming to Chennai,” the professor in the electrical engineering department of IIT Madras said over phone.

She had walked to the dais with a colleague in the campus auditorium where Modi had been invited to speak and held up a handwritten poster pinned to her bag that said: “Mr Modi, we disapprove.”

“This is nothing to do with the IIT. Many of us after the Gujarat riots were agitated. As an academic, I thought I should protest,” said Bhattacharya, who wrote out the poster after entering the auditorium.

“It was not even planned. I just walked away from my department (to the venue) and Dr Nandita Dasgupta, who sits right across me, said she would come along.” She wanted to convey to Modi that “he cannot get away with anything”.

“I had my education all over the place. My father was in the defence ministry,” said the professor who graduated from IIT Bombay and then did her research at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

Bhattacharya, whose mother hails from Nabadwip in Bengal’s Nadia district, said she and some friends had raised funds for the Gujarat riot victims in 2002. Some people in IIM (Ahmedabad) were directly reaching assistance to the victims and “we joined in that effort” under the Movement for People’s Unity, formed in Chennai then, she said.

Dasgupta, who also teaches in the same department and grew up in Calcutta and studied at Jadavpur University, did not want to comment.

The protest came hours before the annual convocation in the evening, which Ratan Tata has been invited to address.

Tata himself had been at the receiving end of a noisy protest a couple of months ago when some people, who looked like students, raised slogans against him at a gathering where he was to receive Maharashtra’s civilian award.

Nor was he the only industrialist to face one. Rahul Bajaj was also heckled by a pro-quota group when he went to receive an award in Mumbai.

But the protest that came closest to today’s was the one Manmohan Singh faced at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in May when a volunteer stood silently in the auditorium, where the Prime Minister was speaking, holding up a banner saying “Development or Destruction”.

“This is a democracy and a protest is permissible under the law,” said an IIT professor who asked not to be named. He said he was in Gujarat when Modi became the chief minister and that no one could wish away the fact that “some terribly evil things happened there”.

Modi has signed an MoU with Neyveli Lignite Corporation for a lignite-based power plant in south Gujarat.