Jai Shree Ram is not part of traditional Bengali culture, being used to beat up people: Amartya Sen

The “Jai Shree Ram” chant is not part of the traditional Bengali culture and is a “recent import” which is being used to “beat up people” and to “wage a war”, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen said in Kolkata on Friday.

At the Gandhi Bhavan auditorium of Jadavpur University, hundreds of students, teachers and other enthusiastic people went to hear Sen speak at the public lecture on “Kolkata after Independence: a personal memoir”.

During the session, in response to a question, Sen said that “to my knowledge ‘Jai Shree Ram’ is not a traditional Bengali chant. It is a recent import. People are being asked to chant it as a ploy to beat them up”. He said that this chant has no connection with Bengali civilisation.

Sen added that he had come to know that Ram Navami is celebrated a lot in Bengal these days, but that never happened in the past. He said he had asked his granddaughter which of the gods and goddesses she liked most, and her reply had been Goddess Durga. Sen explained that the way Durga Puja was celebrated in the state could not be compared with Ram Navami. “These are recent imports to wage a war,” he said.

In recent times, a few incidents have been reported from different parts of West Bengal where Muslims were asked to chant “Jai Shree Ram” and beaten up.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been consistently using the phrase in the state to wage a political war against Trinamool Congress and its chief Mamata Banerjee. Prior to the elections, Banerjee stopped her car in Midnapore during an election campaign where people stood along the road chanting “Jai Shree Ram”. She came out of the car and the people chanting the slogan fled, and her words – unclear from the video – was used by the BJP to say that she had said “Jai Shree Ram” was an abuse. Since then, there have been several occasions when Mamata Banerjee and her party members have encountered the slogan during their visits to different places in the state. Banerjee has planned to counter the slogan with “Jai Hind” and “Jai Bangla”.

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