Those who have returned their Sahitya Akademi awards to protest the supposed rise in intolerance in the country were strangely quiet during repeated instances of communal violence under past regimes
Till a Sahitya Akademi award-winner connected with the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty which ruled India for nearly six decades, returned her award, most people did not know that such an award existed. The award offers a measly one lakh rupees in cash (which is far less than the royalty this author gets from the 35 books that he has written) and some trinkets. The return of this award was to protest against the supposed rise of intolerance in India, especially against the minorities.
Yet, none of these worthies protested against the inability of the Government to prevent terror attacks in Mumbai, Delhi and other places in India, where hundreds were killed and thousands injured. Obviously such people have their agenda.
Coming back to the Sahitya Akademi, the promotion of art and culture has a lot of plus points. The Akademi’s award surely means a lot for the winner, who also gets his winning book printed at the cost of the Sahitya Akademi. However, with due apologies to some of the award winners, their work is often dull, boring and monotonous.
A friend once remarked that all such awards are based on recommendations, connections and one’s lobbying skills. The Sahitya Akademi is under the Union Government’s Ministry of Culture but works as an autonomous institution. To be eligible for the Akademi’s award, a book must be an “outstanding contribution to the language and literature to which it belongs”. It may be “a creative or a critical work”, but must not be a translation, an anthology, an abridgement, compilation or annotation, or university research paper.
So, what does it mean to return the award and what exactly are the awardees returningIJ Some have surrendered the award amount along with a formal letter to the Akademi. A few others have sent letters of protest but not enclosed cheques. Some have just announced their decision to return the award but are yet to formally inform the Akademi. No one has returned the award citation or the trophy so far.
The Akademi is run on taxpayers’ money and every year it spends crores of rupees publishing the works of supposedly distinguished authors. This seems like a waste of resource. If a writer is good at his work and deserves recognition at the national level, publishers will make a beeline for him. The fact of the matter here is that the Akademi’s so-called recognition is partisan and a result of successful lobbying.
How it is that the so-called eminent writers had not said a word when 3.70 lakh Hindus and Sikhs were driven out of Kashmir valley and made refugees in their own countryIJ How is that these writers did not protest when tents put up for pilgrims visiting the Amarnath shrine was referred to as the “colonisation of Kashmir”IJ
Also, it is important to ask that, if the Government is doing a good job of promoting quality literature, then why is it that most Government publications, including those written by its award-winning writers, lie in corners of Government outlets with hardly any takerIJ A number of state-run agencies are doing the same kind of pointless work. Only a few of their publications make money through sales. The rest are considered to be propaganda. Their only purpose is to show how the Government of the day is doing a great job.
Commenting on the hypocrisy of many of the writers returning their awards, Union Minister for Finance Arun Jaitley rightly noted that only “one of the protesting writers in 2015, while returning her Padma Shri, has cited the Sikh killings of 1984 as one of her reasons. It took 31 years for this writer’s conscience to be aroused by the genocide of 1984.” He also added that “there is no atmosphere of intolerance in the country. The manufactured revolt is a case of an ideological intolerance towards the BJP”.
Notably, we have few writers today who can be considered to be all-time greats, in the league of William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, John Keats or William Wordsworth on the one hand or Rabindranath Tagore, Kalidas and even RK Narayan on the other.
The Akademi awardees should know that there are other serious problems of corruption, poor governance, terrorism, a negative bureaucracy which are equally, if not more, important than the one issue that they are agitating about. This is not to say that maintaining communal harmony isn’t important or that religious intolerance is acceptable. But these are issues that the Government alone cannot resolve. The people’s attention should be drawn to these cases, and their cooperation solicited in bringing about change.
In fact, social intolerance is a problem that is creeping in all over the world. For example, in the US, Sikhs have often been mistaken for Arab Muslims and made the target of racial hatred. Closer home, in Pakistan, minority Shia and Ahmediyya Muslims have been targeted while in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, radical Muslim jihadis have unleashed a reign of terror.
Notably, a US Congress report, that was released on October 22, said that Pakistan is now the worst country in terms of religious freedom. The Washington, DC-based US Commission for International Religious Freedom has asked the Obama Administration to designate Pakistan as a “country of particular concern” citing “egregious” violations”.
This CPC designation is given to those countries that “engage in or tolerate” systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom. The USCIRF derives its mandate from the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, which requires the US Government to annually to designate as “countries of particular concern” or CPCs, and to take action to encourage improvements in each CPC country.