Writers’ warning call to Modi

S Nihal Singh

THE Hindi writer Udai Prakash was the first to return his Sahitya Akademi award on September 4 to protest against the murder of VM Kalburgi, one of four rationalist thinkers and writers killed over a period for their views. But it was the writer and Jawaharlal Nehru’s niece Nayantara Sahgal returning her Akademi award, quickly followed by Hindi poet Ashok Vajpeyi, that set off an avalanche of protest. About 25 writers in English and India languages have returned their awards.

Sahgal’s point of protest is simple. India’s culture of diversity and the right to dissent was under “vicious assault”, she said. And other writers who followed in her path by returning their Sahitya or Padma awards agreed with her that freedom of expression was being constricted with the coming to power of the Modi-led government.

Two distinguished men of letters who did not return their awards, historian Ramchandra Guha and writer Amitav Ghosh, said they did not wish to show disrespect to their peers who had chosen them. But they fully supported their fellow writers’ protest to pinpoint the growing culture of intolerance. The acclaimed writer Salman Rushdie whose Satanic Verses was banned by a Congress government jumped in to lend his support to the protesting writers, inviting expected abuse from the Sangh Parivar.

So, where do we draw the line? Let us get the facts right. The autonomy of institutions funded or sponsored by the government is a myth in India. What kept them alive, if not kicking, was that they were for the most part led by men and women of distinction in their respective fields in an environment encouraged by what can be best described as Nehruvian liberalism. They had the guts to disagree with the government’s views on occasion and often prevailed.

What has changed is that under the Modi dispensation, premier institutions of historical research and learning have been staffed with obscure people whose only merit seems to be their loyalty to the ideology of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Sangh Parivar. Imagine, there was not a squeak of protest from the head of Sahitya Akademi, the primary national institution of letters, to the murders of rationalists, done to death for their agnostic thinking. Piquantly, BJP leader LK Advani added his voice of protest after the blackening of the face of Sudheendra Kulkarni by Shiv Sena workers for organising the launch of former Pakistan foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri’s book in Mumbai. He said it showed “a growing intolerance towards views that are different from our own”.   

The Modi government is creating a climate of fear in which opportunists and Parivar ideologues revel and those who want to get ahead look over their shoulders before expressing a viewpoint. The root cause of the problem is that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not fully realised that he is more than the leader of the BJP. He is the conscience keeper of the nation. Thus if the Dadri tragedy happens, instead of initial silence and belated expression of generalities and later passing on the responsibility to the state government, the nation expects him to provide the balm to alleviate the shock waves that spread around the country  by the horror of a Muslim lynched to death on suspicion of consuming or storing beef. His Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has done nothing to elucidate the party’s position by his long Facebook justification.

There can be two reasons for Mr Modi’s attitude: his upbringing in the Sangh Parivar and an under-estimation of such horrors as Dadri. His cause is not helped by his Culture Minister, Mr Mahesh Sharma, who described Dadri as “an accident” and asked writers who returned their awards to stop writing. Indeed, he has proved to be a national joke, almost on a par with a school leaver placed in charge of India’s highest institutions of learning. And we all know the consequences of appointing a television actor, whose main merit seems to be his proximity to the BJP, to head the prestigious film institute in Pune.

The crisis of confidence highlighted by the writers’ protest would serve a bigger purpose if it helped the government and the RSS to sit back and take stock of their policies. The omens are not promising, given the level of invective unleashed by the Sangh Parivar on those who support the writers’ cause and feel that the atmosphere of tolerance that largely prevailed under Congress rule and even under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee coalition regime, despite glaring aberrations, was largely benign. In the Parivar’s view, there is only one path to truth and it is the one espoused by it.

The direction the collective view of the Parivar is taking is unmistakable.  It is expressed in the words of wisdom we receive each day from the new czars of culture and political correctness. And there is constant bashing of the so-called western tilt in the Indian system of education. Nativist beliefs are supreme. What the West does, except in technology, is taboo. After all, ancient India knew it all before the rest of the world found out through imitation and trial and error.

The writers’ revolt is significant for many reasons. It is an early warning sign, thanks to their greater sensitivity to the atmosphere around them, of a widespread feeling in the country of an Emergency-like moulding of minds and history. Mercifully, the Emergency was of limited duration, but the new edifice the Sangh Parivar is building is open-ended because in essence it represents Indian truth which, in the Parivar’s view, is universal truth.

There is still time for the Modi government to alter the direction it is taking. To carry out the Parivar’s agenda to its logical conclusion would be destructive of the nation state. The question therefore boils down to Mr Modi’s ability and willingness to refrain from taking the country down the garden path. There lies the Prime Minister’s challenge and opportunity.