Chief minister Mamata Banerjee tore into the saffron camp over Visva-Bharati’s treatment of Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen over 13 decimals of land from his ancestral home — Pratichi — in Santiniketan, asserting that the matter was being criticised globally and was a shame for Bengal.
Mamata was speaking in the House on Monday during the discussion on governor C.V. Ananda Bose’s February 8 address in the Assembly, when she broached the treatment being meted out to the Bharat Ratna by the current dispensation — Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the chancellor of the varsity — under vice-chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty.
“The whole world is criticising you (the saffron regime)…. You do not even spare (Ishwarchandra) Vidyasagar, you do not even spare a man like Amartya Sen. Have you no shame?” asked Mamata. Her Vidyasagar reference was to the May 2019 incident of people allegedly from an Amit Shah road show in Calcutta barging into a college and vandalising a bust of the 19th-century social reformer.
The incident came to be viewed as a key inflection point in the general elections, as the BJP — which won 18 of the 33 seats in Bengal till then — lost all nine in the final phase that followed.
“You accuse a man like him (Sen) of encroaching on land? Had he asked us for some land, we would have laid it before his feet as tribute,” she added. “Thankfully, Rabindranath Tagore is no longer alive, or else they would have maligned him too.”
By bringing up Vidyasagar and Tagore in the same breath, Mamata virtually put the 89-year-old economist in the pantheon of Bengal icons that the saffron ecosystem is repeatedly accused of finding unpalatable on account of their inclusive, humanist philosophies.
Mamata’s remarks came two days after Sen in a statement on Saturday questioned the real purpose of Visva-Bharati’s proposal to measure the land. The same day Sen’s lawyer also sent a letter to the joint registrar of the estate office of Visva-Bharati, asking him to apologise on various platforms, including the media, for “baseless” attacks on Sen.
Visva-Bharati had sent him its third letter last week, asking him to suggest a suitable date and time for a joint survey of the land of Pratichi.
Some state officials said the proposal to measure the land of Pratichi was irrelevant when the chief minister handed over land documents to Sen that showed him as the rightful lessee of the entire 1.38 acres recorded in the name of his father Ashutosh Sen as a long-term lessee.
“We conducted an investigation and handed him all the evidence. Every figure he cited was absolutely okay. I gave him the land department papers, because I considered it a shame of Bengal that a Nobel laureate is being dishonoured this way,” said Mamata.
She criticised the handling of Tagore’s Visva-Bharati and Santiniketan by the current dispensation at the central varsity.
“Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, what have they done there? Ashramiks and students come to me and weep,” said Mamata, who met some Visva-Bharati students and a teacher on January 31.
Sources said the students had told Mamata how Visva-Bharati was rampantly suspending students, terminating teachers and taking punitive action against its employees, especially those protesting against the VC.
In four years of Chakrabarty at the helm, 22 teachers were suspended, while punitive actions have been taken against at least a dozen students.
“Students suspended, years of classes ruined, they have not been able to study… and they have been misled by the CPM,” Mamata added. “Trying to be leaders, trying to get politics in, getting teachers fired, ruining the future of students. Jogai-Madhai-Godai: the CPM, the Congress, and the BJP. We never did such things.”
