[The revolt now presents Mr.
Modi with a critical test of his vaunted ability to shape the public narrative
of his administration. Perhaps more than any crisis he has faced since becoming
prime minister 17 months ago, this one is offering a kind of X-ray of Mr.
Modi’s carefully cultivated persona both here and abroad.]
 |
Sudheendra Kulkarni, a former senior
Indian official, left, said that far-right Hindu nationalists
smeared
black paint on his face to protest an event in Mumbai featuring Khurshid
Mahmud
Kasuri, right, a former Pakistani foreign minister.
Credit Agence
France-Presse — Getty Images
|
The novelist Nayantara Sahgal
said she was returning India’s
highest literary honor to express sympathy for “all dissenters who now live in
fear and uncertainty.” G. S. Bhullar, a short-story author, said he was giving
back the same award to protest the “violent retrogressive forces dictating
terms in the field of literature and culture.” Mandakranta Sen, a Bengali poet,
said she was sending her award back to protest “attacks on rationalists.”
In
the last month, 35 leading Indian authors and poets have returned coveted awards from the
National Academy of Letters in a collective revolt against what Salman Rushdie
this week called the “thuggish violence” creeping into Indian life under the
Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra
Modi.
The
writers’ revolt, which began in September after a 76-year-old critic of Hindu
idolatry was gunned down in his home, rapidly gained strength this month when
Mr. Modi failed to promptly condemn the killing of a Muslim man, Mohammed Ikhlaq,
by a Hindu mob because they suspected he had killed a cow and eaten its meat.
The revolt now presents Mr.
Modi with a critical test of his vaunted ability to shape the public narrative
of his administration. Perhaps more than any crisis he has faced since becoming
prime minister 17 months ago, this one is offering a kind of X-ray of Mr.
Modi’s carefully cultivated persona both here and abroad.
Just last month, during a visit to the United States, Mr. Modi
was warmly embraced by Mark
Zuckerberg and other
Silicon Valley titans, who praised him as the modernizing, progressive,
open-minded leader of the world’s largest democracy. But the backlash from some
of India
Is he a Twitter-savvy technocrat obsessed with boosting
development for all India
“Mr. Modi talks all these tall words abroad, on foreign soil,”
said Mangalesh Dabral, a poet who is returning his award from 2000. “All the sermonizing,
this talk of the great digital India
One of Mr. Modi’s favorite modes of communicating is Twitter,
where he has 15 million followers and more than 9,500 posts. On Twitter, Mr.
Modi presents himself as cheerleader in chief for all things India Delhi
With each passing day of silence from Mr. Modi, more writers
stepped forward to say they, too, were returning their awards from the academy,
also known as Sahitya Akademi. At least a dozen more writers have joined since
Monday, when right-wing Hindu
activists in Mumbai smeared black paint on the face of Sudheendra
Kulkarni, a think tank leader, for agreeing to host an event for a book for a
former Pakistani foreign minister.
“There are attacks on ordinary liberties, the ordinary right to
assembly, the ordinary right to organize an event in which people can talk
about books and ideas freely and without hostility,” Mr. Rushdie told India’s NDTV
network on Tuesday. As
if to prove his point, Mr. Rushdie described what happened when he posted on Twitter in support of Ms. Sahgal and the
writers’ revolt, warning that these are “alarming times for free expression in India
Uday Prakash, a renowned Hindi writer, was the first author to
renounce his award from the academy, in September. “I have never seen such
hostility before,” he said.
In interviews this week, the
writers returned to the same refrain: That Mr. Modi’s failure to confront
intolerance by fellow Hindu nationalists is giving tacit permission for more
intolerance. “The tide of violence against freedom of speech is rising every
day,” Ms. Sahgal said.
On Tuesday, Mr. Modi for the first time directly addressed the
Sept. 28attack that left Mr. Ikhlaq dead. During an interview with the Bengali
language newspaper Anandabazar Patrika, Mr. Modi called Mr. Ikhlaq’s death
“really sad,” and emphasized that his Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., “never
supports such incidents.”
But he also accused political opponents of trying to exploit Mr.
Ikhlaq’s death. “The B.J.P. has always opposed pseudosecularism,” he said.
“Opposition regularly alleges B.J.P. of igniting communal flare. But isn’t the
opposition doing polarization now?”
While Mr. Modi did not address the writers’ revolt, his allies
have been merciless. Rakesh Sinha, an unofficial spokesman for the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of the B.J.P., said the writers were
“frustrated communist cadres” who had long opposed the “cultural nationalism”
embraced by Mr. Modi’s supporters.
He noted that at least two of the writers who returned awards
signed an open letter warning that Mr. Modi’s election as prime minister in
2014 would give rise to bigotry and violence. “They are not in a position to
accept someone like Mr. Modi,” he said in an interview.
In a lengthy post on Facebook, Mr. Modi’s finance minister, Arun
Jaitley, ridiculed the protests as political sour grapes by leftist writers
still reeling from “the shrinking fortunes” of their traditional government
patrons, the Indian National Congress and the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
“With the Congress showing
no signs of revival and an insignificant Left lacking legislative relevance,
the recipients of past patronage are now resorting to ‘politics by other
means,’ ” Mr. Jaitley added. “The manufactured protest of the writers is one such
case.”
Several writers scoffed at the idea that the protests have a
hidden political motive. Some pointed out that several Indian writers were
jailed during the state of emergency declared by Mrs. Gandhi in 1975. Mr.
Rushdie, a British citizen who was born in India
And yet G.N. Devy, a writer
from Mr. Modi’s home state, Gujarat , said a government official recently visited and politely
quizzed him for an hour about his decision to return his award. He said the
official asked about the political aims and organization of the writers’
protest. He said he told the official that there was no organization.
“My protest is not against any government, but to make the point
that the Constitution of this country needs to be fully protected,” he said in
an interview.
It is the kind of encounter
that has become more common under Mr. Modi, in part because his ascendancy to
prime minister has been accompanied by growing activism from conservative Hindu
nationalists who seek to suppress forms of expression they view as offensive to
their religion. They have pressured publishers to withdraw books, pushed
universities to remove texts from syllabuses and filed criminal complaints
against those they deem to have insulted Hinduism.
Few writers have drawn more criticism than M.M. Kalburgi, a
noted rationalist scholar who enraged far-right Hindu nationalists through his
criticism of idol worship and superstition. Mr. Kalburgi said he received
multiple death threats, and on Aug. 30 was shot dead at point-blank range in
his home in Karnataka, a state in southern India
Mr. Kalburgi’s death created a fierce debate among members of
the National Academy of Letters. Mr. Kalburgi had been a member of the
academy’s general council, and he received an award from the academy in 2006
for a collection of his academic research. Yet the academy issued no formal
statements condemning Mr. Kalburgi’s murder.
Some members wondered whether the academy was keeping quiet
because it gets government funding. Ms. Sahgal, for one,
criticized the academy for acting as if it was “wise to be silent when writers
are being killed.”
That silence is what led Uday Prakash to be the first to return
his award. “Writers are a family, but they don’t seem to care,” he explained.
In addition to the 35 writers giving back their awards, at least
five others have announced their resignations from the academy. But not all
academy members support the protests.
“For so many years, you take advantage of the prestige of the
academy and now you want to return the award?” said one member, Govind Mishra.
“There is no sense to this. There are so many other pressing issues. Farmers
are killing themselves. Nobody thought of giving their awards back for them.”
Vishwanath Prasad Tiwari, the academy’s president, said in an
interview that the protesting writers had been misled into believing that the
academy had been silent in the face of intolerance and violence.
He pointed out that the vice president of the academy presided
over a tribute for Mr. Kalburgi last month. The tribute celebrated Mr.
Kalburgi’s contributions as a writer and scholar, but also included forceful
condemnations of his murder. “How can anyone say the academy did not react?”
Mr. Tiwari asked. “The vice president himself is Kalburgi’s friend. Have they
ever demanded like this for any other writer?”
Mr. Tiwari said he is convening an emergency meeting this month
to discuss the protests and what can be done to stop writers from returning
their awards. “The storm that has been set in motion by this protest needs to
be dealt with,” he said.
In the meantime, the academy
has issued a statement condemning all attacks on writers.
