It is significant that while we still grapple with divides in our society, at a time when an insidious government is ripping apart its secular and democratic fabric, the Nobel Prize for Economics should go to a man who believes in an equitable, ‘inclusive’ economic order and in a culture that is richly syncretic.

While Amartya Sen has been recognised for his scholarship on the tenuous connection between political rights and economic needs, the broad sweep of his human concerns rises above the babble of parochial cacophony and political jingoism, to include staunch opposition to communalism and nuclear armament. Even as the government tries to appropriate the icon, its political mentors only see dark conspiracies in the ideas of the Nobel laureate.