There is an eviction war going on in today's India. The bulldozer, the most proud symbol of the BJP's Yogi model of governance (and justice, in the vocabulary of Bhakts) has become ubiquitous. The poor living in slums and unauthorised colonies in cities and on undocumented homestead land in villages and Muslims across India are of course the most common targets of this eviction war.
Ideological dissenters and political opponents too find themselves at the receiving end. Rahul Gandhi just handed over the keys of his MP accommodation following his vendetta-driven disqualification from the Lok Sabha. The list also includes one of India's tallest living scholars, the 90-year-old economist and philosopher Amartya Sen.
After he got the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998, the Vajpayee government honoured him with India's highest civilian award Bharat Ratna. But Professor Sen has now received an eviction notice, with the threat of using force as needed, from the Visva Bharati University. The institution set up with great love and hope by India's first Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore is today being systematically ruined, like many other institutions of excellence, by the ruling Sangh-BJP establishment.
The VBU claims that Professor Sen is illegally occupying 13 decimal land over and above the 1.25 acres leased out to his father Ashutosh Sen in 1943, a claim Professor Sen has refuted with documentary evidence. The latest eviction order asks the professor to vacate the plot by 6 May. There is clearly no level too low for the power-drunk vendetta-driven hate-filled regime to stoop to.
This harassment is the price The Argumentative Indian is having to pay for his staunch defence of secularism and composite culture and a social and political order that values the rights of citizens to liberty and welfare.
We hang our heads in shame Professor Sen and stand in full solidarity with you against this reign of persecution.
