West Bengal minister Shashi Panja on Tuesday hit out at Union Home Minister Amit Shah for eviction notice to Nobel laureate Amartya Sen by Visva Bharati.
According to the report in NDTV, Panja said: "Amit Shah comes to pay tribute to Rabindranath but a Nobel laureate, who was named Amartya by Rabindranath Tagore is being served an eviction notice by Visva Bharati”.
The eviction notice to Sen from centrally-run Visva Bharati comes at a time when Shah had arrived in West Bengal on Rabindranath Tagore’s birth anniversary.
“Sen shares a special link with Tagore, as does the University. While Visva Bharati grew from a little school Tagore established in Shantineketan, the poet had also bestowed the name ‘Amartya’ to the grandson of a close friend,” it mentioned.
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TMC supremo and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee also threw her weight in.
"Some people think Shantiniketan is Tagore's birthplace. Some people's rallies end up destroying a statue of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar," she said, in a jibe directed at BJP chief JP Nadda and Amit Shah, the report said.
Shah is currently on a visit to Bengal and the first item on his itinerary today was a visit to Tagore's ancestral house in Kolkata's Jorasanko, where he paid floral tributes to the poet, said the report.
"Earlier they were confused between the janmabhoomi (birthplace) and karmabhoomi (place of work) of Tagore. At least now they know he was born at Jorasanko," Panja was quoted as having said.
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The report mentioned few years ago, BJP chief JP Nadda had mistakenly mentioned Santineketan -- where the Visva Bharati University stands today—as the poet's birthplace.
It said CM Banerjee on Tuesday hinted that the BJP leaders should know about the state instead of reading out misinformation "from a cheat sheet, or a teleprompter".
“Over the last week, the intelligentsia of the state, as well as the ruling Trinamool Congress, have vocally backed the Amartya Sen, who has been embroiled in a battle with the university over several months,” it said.
“The university claims the land attached to Amartya Sen's ancestral property, Pratichi in Shantineketan, is ‘illegally occupied’. The University has said it would evict the economist if he failed to vacate it within the deadline,” it added.
Last week, the Calcutta High Court put a freeze against a move by Visva Bharati to take away part of the property.
