In his interview Amartya Sen betrays his inability to tolerate any political ideology which differs from his. It is ironic then that he criticises the idea of Solitarism, which believes that human beings have one principal identity. For Sen and many left leaning Indian academics abroad it is difficult to accept that a right wing Modi government has brought huge benefits to all Indian’s irrespective of caste or creed. For decades the Socialist Congress party brought little benefits to the minorities and manipulated them to get their votes. Sen says that the present president and prime minister are all Hindu as if it was a crime. But he is economic with the truth. The president is a Dalit the group Sen says is suppressed. What the Modi government is saying is that the vast majority of the country which is Hindu have certain cultural values and ethos that have to be accepted and acknowledged by all Indian’s. The Hindu majority has faced reverse discrimination from the left leaning secular Congress party and intellectuals like Sen for decades. It is almost as if being a majority community you are automatically guilty of everything. The Modi government is correcting this situation. The United States is a majority Christian country and some of its national festivals and governmental proceedings have a distinct Christian flavour and that is how it should be. Sen as an American should be critical of that but of-course he will not. It is much easier to target India because Sen knows that he can go back to India as a celebrity, be interviewed by the media and criticise the Modi government without any fear as India is a free country even though he paints it like it is a wicked dictatorship. Sen goes on to make a strange comparison with Bangladesh. He has an amnesia of how Bangladesh was born and the many near civil wars it has suffered. On the other hand India is one of the world’s largest economies, it has harnessed its vast population to build a diverse nation which should be a role model to the rest of the world. Unfortunately people like Sen left India without taking part in any nation building and yet they continue to snap at what is Hindu conspiracy everywhere. Hinduism and by extension Hindus are born secular in the sense that the idea of many paths to God is ingrained in their psyche. It is due to this reason that Zoroastrian’s, Baha’is , Tibetan Buddhists and persecuted Jewish people have found a safe home in India.
PS Amartya Sen has now got another comrade Abhijit Banerjee, new recipient of Nobel Prize. He did not waste time in criticising BJP. Living in the US he dare not say that it is in trillions dollars of debt.
Nitin Mehta
Recent Comments