New Delhi: Often at the centre of controversies, West Bengal’s Visva-Bharati university has once again made headlines – this time for disallowing a lecture on Nobel laureate Amartya Sen from being held in its library auditorium.

The lecture was organised by a Bengali little Magazine, Anustup, and was scheduled to take place on August 14. The lecture was to be delivered by renowned economist Jean Dreze, the Hindu reported.

The magazine had recently published a special issue on Sen in collaboration with the university’s Department of Economics and Politics and the A.K. Dasgupta Centre for Planning and Development.

After the university’s refusal, the lecture was held on the scheduled date in a private auditorium, the report said.

 “Amartya Sen is a child of the Santiniketan library and of India’s most illustrious scholars. It i​s startling that an event celebrating his work had to be shifted from the library to a local hall in Bolpur. So much for the freedom of expression,” Dreze told The Hindu.

While Visva-Bharati PRO Atig Ghosh said that the lecture was cancelled as it overlapped with another heritage event being held at the university, Visva-Bharati professors said that there was no such overlap.

“Nobody is given permission to hold an event in the university exactly at the same time as a heritage event is taking place in the university. In this case, the Rabindra Saptaha lecture was scheduled to take place at Lipika Auditorium from 7 p.m. and no other overlapping programme could be permitted,” Ghosh said.

However, the Rabindra Saptaha (or Tagore Week) had begun on August 8 after inauguration by  Union Minister of State for Education Sukanta Majumdar, Viswa-Bharati professors told the paper.

“The real reason for the refusal to grant the auditorium is that both Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze are regarded as eyesores by the BJP-led government at the Centre,” a professor, who did not want to be named, told the Hindu.

It must be noted that right after Dreze’s lecture, the university issued a notification removing the chairperson of the A.K. Dasgupta Centre, professor Apurba Kumar Chattopadhyay, who was among the organisers of the lecture.

In 2023, the university had sent multiple notices to Sen, asking him to return a portion of land that the university claimed was illegally occupied by him. The university had also named him in a 2020 list of illegal plot holders within its premises. 

Sen had denied any wrong-doing and clarified that the land was leased out to his family for 100 years in the 1940s and some of it was also bought by his father from the market following all rules and regulations.

“I could not see any subtlety in their [university authorities’] thinking. I also do not understand the politics behind this attitude of Visva-Bharati University. This is my residence which was built on leased land from Visva-Bharati in the 1940s," Sen had said.

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