Responding to the controversy over media reports that Visva-Bharati University has named him among those “occupying additional illegal plot”, Nobel laureate and economist Amartya Sen said that the land is registered in records and is on a long-term lease.
Referring to reports that Visva-Bharati University Vice-chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty was arranging the eviction of unauthorised occupation of leased land on the campus and that he has also been named in the list of occupants, Sen said that the central university has never complained about any irregularity of landholding either to him or his family.
The Nobel laureate asserted that the Visva-Bharati land on which his house is situated is entirely on a long-term lease, which is nowhere near its expiry. “Additional land was bought by my father as freehold and registered in land records under mouja Surul,” he said
“I could comment on the big gap between Santiniketan culture and that of the V.C., empowered as he is by the Central government in Delhi with its growing control over Bengal,” Sen added.
Referring to recent reports on the V-C’s claim to the faculty that Sen had called him up against eviction of hawkers before his Pratichi residence, Sen said, “He would be spared the necessity of inventing completely imagined conversations with me, beginning impossibly with me introducing myself as Bharat Ratna something that no one has ever heard me do”.
Meanwhile, the BJP on Saturday hit out at the Nobel laureate, saying that he “should not work on the advice of a failed chief minister”.
A day after Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee wrote to Sen and slammed the BJP for “baseless allegations” against him, state BJP chief Dilip Ghosh said: “We respect him (Sen). But he should not be seen as the spokesperson of a group. If he works on the advice of a failed chief minister, people will think otherwise.”
2020-12-26 13:54:00