As many as 304 people related to the world of education, including two Nobel winning American economists, have written to President Draupadi Murmu, criticising Visva-Bharati Vice-Chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty for targeting Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, who has a house near the university in Santiniketan.
The house, Pratichi, is built over 1.38 acres and last April, the university claimed that 13 decimals (0.13 acre) of the land belonged to it and that the economist was occupying it illegally. The Nobel laureate went to the Calcutta High Court, and the matter remains in court.
“Prof. Chakrabarty has been responsible for various atrocities. He was responsible for the unlawful suspension of students and teachers, illegal termination of the employment of faculty members, officers, and other staff, denying them of their freedom of speech, and suppressing dissent in any form, by indiscriminately issuing show-cause notices, charge-sheets, and illegal orders of suspension and termination,” the group, including Nobel laureates George A. Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz, wrote to the President of India.
“The latest target of his draconian rule is Prof. Sen, an alumnus of Visva-Bharati. [The university], of late, issued a series of letters, using indecent language, to Prof. Amartya Sen imposing the allegation that he illegally grabbed the land of Visva-Bharati, which they cannot substantiate,” the letter said.
“In the letters issued by the Visva-Bharati administration, it has been claimed that the concerned lease deed was executed for 1.25 acres of land, but that Mr. Sen possesses 1.38 acres of land… Ironically, a document attached with one of the letters issued to him by the Visva-Bharati administration exhibits that 1.38 acres of land have been legally recorded in the name of Ashutosh Sen, the father of Mr. Sen,” it said.
“Recently the same land has been mutated in the name of Amartya Sen by the Government of West Bengal. According to Prof. Sen, his father bought some land from the market in addition to the leased land. As matter of fact, in an RTI reply to Mr. Nilkantha Mandal dated 17.02.2023, Visva-Bharati did not provide the authenticated copy of the lease deed on the ground of “third party” information,” the letter further said, adding, “It is indeed indicative that the university administration did not take any action for the alleged illegal occupation of land during the last 80 years and that it is making it an issue at a point in time when Prof. Chakrabarty is under the scanner for his abysmal failure to run Visva-Bharati.”
Criticising the university for serving eviction notice on the Nobel laureate, the letter accused the V-C of “trying to capitalise on the ideological differences that Mr. Sen has with the NDA government” and urged Ms. Murmu to take “appropriate action against Mr. Chakrabarty immediately”.
