On Friday, the Chief Minister of West Bengal Mamata Banerjee wrote a letter to Amartya Sen In honor of Visva-Bharati University (VBU), a central university, it named him on its campus squatters list.
In expressing solidarity with him, Banerjee highlighted Sen’s deep ancestral roots with Santiniketan (a Bolpur neighborhood in the Birbhum district where Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore had established Visva-Bharati in 1921) and said that some “nouveau invaders” in VBU are raising questions about their family. properties.
How did the controversy start?
During a meeting with faculty members on December 9, VBU Vice Chancellor Bidyut Chakraborty stated that Amartya Sen had identified himself as “Bharat Ratna Amartya Sen” and requested that the street vendors from his home not be evicted as his daughter, who visits Santiniketan frequently, would do. be bothered. The vice chancellor further stated that Professor Sen suggested giving space to the street vendors within his property on the Visva-Bharati University campus, where the Nobel laureate hung up the phone.
The president of the Visva-Bharati University Professors Association (VBUFA), Sudipta Bhattacharyya, who was present during the virtual meeting, wrote an email to Sen to find out if what the VC said was true.
In response to the email, Sen denied making any phone calls to the vice chancellor. Professor Sen wrote: “I am very surprised to hear what the Vice Chancellor of Visva-Bharati has apparently stated at an online teacher meeting. I don’t think I had that conversation with him. I should also mention that I have never referred to myself as ‘Bharat Ratna’. Nor do I think I could have referred to my daughter buying vegetables from street vendors and that that is a reason to keep street vendors calm. I don’t know where my daughters buy vegetables! However, that would not be a reason to raise the question of how street vendors should be treated. Finally, there are no street vendors outside my house in Santiniketan ”.
The Indian Express had reported the news.
Professor Sen further said in his email: “I believe, however, that Visva-Bharati often interferes too much with the normal life of ordinary people, of which the placing of walls to interfere with the paths and steps of the people are a good example. I remember once writing about it some years ago in a newspaper. I also remember my mother, who of course lived in our house (Pratichi), she tried to help the eviction street vendors, not outside our house (since there are no street vendors there), but near Pearson Palli. All this, of course, has nothing to do with the absurd claim that the vice chancellor has supposedly made.
Amartya Sen’s bond with Santiniketan
Rabindranath Tagore had invited Kshitimohan Sen, the maternal grandfather of the renowned economist and Sanskrit scholar, to Santiniketan in 1908 and had played a key role in the construction of the Visva-Bharati together with Tagore. Visva-Bharati was established in 1921.
It is well known that Sen, born in 1933, was named Amartya by Tagore. On campus, various parcels were given to many eminent people in a 99-year lease from the time of Tagore. Sen grew up in Pratichi, the house built by his father in Santiniketan, and visits it frequently. In May 1951, Visva Bharati was declared a central university and institution of national importance by an act of Parliament.
The consequences of the controversy
VBU issued a demonstration cause notice to the president of its teachers’ association, Sudipta Bhattacharyya, for allegedly violating the varsity code of conduct when communicating with the media with internal correspondence. The university authorities, through the notice issued on December 19, accused Bhattacharyya of interacting with the media (about Vice Chancellor Bidyut Chakraborty of VBU criticizing Amartya Sen on December 9) without the approval of the university authorities.
On Thursday, VBU authorities wrote to the West Bengal government alleging that dozens of its parcels had been incorrectly registered and that the list of unauthorized occupants includes the eminent economist Amartya Sen.
According to the Visva-Bharati property office, he had recently prepared a squatter list that includes Sen’s name as his home, Pratichi, which occupies around 138 decimal places, while the original lease was granted at 125 decimal places. .
The university claimed that Sen has reportedly occupied 13 decimal places of land, in addition to the 125 decimal places of legally rented land that the university gave to his father.
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On Friday, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee wrote a letter to Sen to express her solidarity with him and told him that she would always be by his side as his sister. Banerjee also claimed that such accusations were being made against him because he “does not lean towards the ideology of the BJP.”
Sen, a Nobel laureate and Harvard University Thomas W. Lamont University professor, has been a vocal critic of some of the policies of the BJP-led NDA government at the Center.
Addressing Sen as “Amartya gives respected”, Banerjee wrote in the letter: “We are all aware of his family’s deep and organic ties to Santiniketan. His maternal grandfather, the revered scholar Kshitimohan Sen, was one of the first leading settlers in Santiniketan, while his father Ashutosh Sen, a prominent educator and public administrator, had his famous Pratichi house built in Santiniketan some eight decades ago. His has been a family woven into the culture and fabric of Santiniketan, in an inalienable way ”.
Answer from Amartya Sen
Speaking to an English-language newspaper (The Telegraph), Sen has said that there is a large gap between the Santiniketan culture and that of the VBU rector.
“Being born and raised in Santiniketan, I could comment on the great gap between the Santiniketan culture and that of the CV, empowered as it is by the central government of Delhi, with its increasing control over Bengal. I would rather use Indian laws as they exist, ”said Sen.
The Nobel laureate further said: “Visva-Bharati University tells us that its rector Bidyut Chakrabarty is busy organizing the ‘eviction for unauthorized occupation’ of the leased land on campus and that I have also been included in the ‘list of the occupants’, even though Visva-Bharati has never complained about any irregularity in land tenure ”.
“The Visva-Bharati land that our house is on is fully under long-term lease, which is nowhere near its expiration date. My father bought some additional land as free property and registered it in the land registers with mouja Surul. “
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