Political violence in Bengal is dreadful: Amartya Sen

KOLKATA - Nobel laureate and eminent economist Amartya Sen Monday termed as “dreadful” the growing incidents of political violence across West Bengal and said there was needed to find out why it has become so dominant.

“Its a question of analysing why violence has become so dominating. What is the nature of the politics that has led to this? It is indeed an important problem and deserves to be treated seriously. We have to analyse the various causes that have led to the dominance of violence and what we can do to change that, Sen told reporters on the sidelines of a seminar here.

Violence is bad because it is a dreadful thing. It causes agony, loss of life, loss of sense of peace and on top of that, it affects economic growth.

Since the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, West Bengal is witnessing escalating political violence and over a few hundred people have became victims of it.

Sen was here to address an international Tagore conference - A different Universalism: The Global Vision of Rabindranath Tagore and his Contemporaries - organised by the Netaji Research Bureau and the Kolkata Museum of Modern Arts here.

He also dubbed as “bad” the violence between the students unions in educational institutions.

Asked for his suggestion to stop the violence, Sen said: I have just come from abroad and it is not easy to straightaway get into an analysis.

Campus violence is horrible and unwanted. If you ask, everybody will say the same. But we have to find out how to stop this kind of violence, he added.

One person was killed and 10 others were injured Thursday in two separate incidents of violence following clashes between student unions of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) and the Trinamool Congress.