The \u201cJai Shree Ram\u201d chant is not part of the traditional Bengali culture and is a \u201crecent import\u201d which is being used to \u201cbeat up people\u201d and to \u201cwage a war\u201d, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen said in Kolkata on Friday.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cKolkata after Independence: a personal memoir\u201d.<\/p>\n
During the session, in response to a question, Sen said that \u201cto my knowledge \u2018Jai Shree Ram\u2019 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\u201d. He said that this chant has no connection with Bengali civilisation.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cThese are recent imports to wage a war,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In recent times, a few incidents have been reported from different parts of West Bengal where Muslims were asked to chant \u201cJai Shree Ram\u201d and beaten up.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cJai Shree Ram\u201d. She came out of the car and the people chanting the slogan fled, and her words \u2013 unclear from the video \u2013 was used by the BJP to say that she had said \u201cJai Shree Ram\u201d 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 \u201cJai Hind\u201d and \u201cJai Bangla\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Incidents of beating up Muslims who were asked to chant “Jai Shree Ram” have been reported.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":279,"featured_media":5899,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,9],"tags":[],"tmauthors":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5898","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editors-choice","8":"category-nation"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/279"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5898\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5898"},{"taxonomy":"tmauthors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebengalstory.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tmauthors?post=5898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}