Amartya Sen urges Bengal people to reject communalism

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has said that political parties might have reasons to pursue individual goals, but rejection of communalism ought to be a shared value without which 'we shall not be worthy heirs of Tagore and Netaji'.

He said the Left and other secular parties in West Bengal have no less commitment than the ruling TMC to ensure communalism does not rear its ugly head in the state.

“Rabindranath Tagore, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Swami Vivekananda, all wanted and argued for a united Bengali culture, and there is no room in their social objective for trying to excite one community against another. Kazi Nazrul Islam is as big a Bengali leader as the others. Bengal has greatly suffered from communalism in the past and has learned to reject it firmly,” the Nobel winner, a known critic of the BJP, further said.