People wait at a centre during hearings under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls, in Nadia, West Bengal(L), File photo of Amartya Sen in Birbhum
Credit: PTI Photos
Kolkata: The Bharatiya Janata Party has questioned why Amartya Sen, who lives in the United States, should continue to be a voter in West Bengal, even as the Election Commission sent two officials to the eminent economist’s residence at Shantiniketan in the state’s Birbhum district on Wednesday to serve a notice to him.
“As far as I know, Amartya Sen is a citizen of the US. His name should have been struck off the electoral rolls,” Sukanta Majumdar, a minister of state in the central government, said when journalists asked him about the notice sent to the 92-year-old economist, who had been awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998. “I don’t know why his name has not been deleted from the electoral rolls of West Bengal yet.”
Majumdar, the former president of the BJP’s unit in West Bengal, made the comment a day after Abhishek Banerjee, the general secretary of the ruling Trinamool Congress, alleged on Tuesday that the Election Commission, which was conducting the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls in the state, had even served a notice to the economist for a hearing.
Sen, who was born in Shantiniketan in 1933, has been a voter in the Bolpur assembly constituency of West Bengal.
He was awarded the Bharat Ratna – the highest civilian award of the nation – in 1999 when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was at the helm of a BJP-led government in the Centre.
After Sen, currently the Thomas W Lamont University Professor at Harvard University in the United States, started criticising the policies of the BJP and its government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, some leaders of the saffron party demanded that he be stripped of the Bharat Ratna.
The EC’s notice to Sen has given the Trinamool Congress a new weapon to criticise the poll panel over the SIR of the electoral rolls – a process, which, according to the party supremo and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, has been marred by “serious irregularities, procedural violations, and administrative lapses” in West Bengal.
An Electoral Registration Officer and a Booth Level Officer, engaged by the EC, went to ‘Pratichi’ – the residence of Sen in Shantiniketan – and handed over the notice, issued to the economist, to one of his relatives.
The enumeration form distributed by the EC for the SIR of the electoral rolls had been duly filled up for the economist and submitted to the concerned BLO. The commission, however, sent him a notice pointing out that the age gap between him and his father or mother mentioned in the enumeration had been less than 15 years, which could not be generally expected. He was asked to clarify the issue with adequate documents during a hearing with the officials, who would again go to his residence on January 16.
“A Nobel laureate should be above any suspicion, right? But what if he's a Bengali? Then he'll be slapped with hearing notices as if he were some common criminal,” the ruling TMC continued to criticise the EC for serving the notice to the economist. “Amartya Sen, whose groundbreaking works form the bedrock of modern economics, who has brought unparalleled glory to Bengal and the entire nation, and whose ideas are studied in universities across the world, has been issued a SIR hearing notice,” the TMC posted on X on Wednesday. “This is the cynical, shameful farce of @BJP4India and @ECISVEEP’s SIR process. They will drag our icons through the mud, tarnish our pride, and stoop to any low if it serves their Bangla-Birodhi agenda of division and degradation.”