[The
hypocrisy of the ‘intellectuals' who’ve relinquished Government awards and
positions to oppose the current administration notwithstanding, their outcry is,
in fact, the dying gasp of an India that we hope to leave behind.]
By Kanchan Gupta
In
a country where outrage is manufactured — with the help of a media perpetually
un-satiated in its hunger for ratings and eyeballs — at a speed much higher
than at which people can rage, it is only natural that individuals seeking
their proverbial 15 minutes of fame should do something sufficiently dramatic
to capture the attention of the chattering classes, even if fleetingly. And so
it is that a group of novelists, poets, writers, ‘intellectuals’ as they would
like to be known and worshipped by the neo-literate classes and illiterate
masses, has returned awards given by, or resigned from, the Sahitya Akademi, a
tax-funded relic from the era when umbrellas would be taken out in Delhi every
time it rained in Moscow.
Novelist
Nayantara Sahgal, daughter of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, niece of Jawaharlal Nehru,
wasn’t the first to turn in her award; credit for that should go to Uday
Prakash. But a Hindi writer does not quite the cut makes and the Commentariat
did not go into a tizzy. That happened only after Nayantara Sahgal declared she
was (as opposed to she too was) returning her reward, timing the announcement
in a manner it would make it to prime time news bulletins.
Soon
after, poet Ashok Vajpeyi said he too was returning his reward. Since then
others have followed suit. Novelist Shashi Deshpande and poet Satchidanandan
have resigned from Sahitya Akademi; novelist Sarah Joseph has returned her
award. We can be sure the list of the righteous will grow longer in the coming
days. We can also be sure of a flood of commentary and interviews on how the
morally courageous have taken a stand and drawn the line between that which is
acceptable and what is not.
These
intellectuals are ostensibly angered by the ‘shrinking space for dissent’ and
the ‘attacks on cultural diversity’, the ‘increasing intolerance towards
freedom of expression’ and the ‘rise of fascism’ with the ‘advent of aHindutva
Government’ headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They are aghast that
rationalists like Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare have been killed in
cold blood in Maharashtra , as has writer MM Kalburgi in Karnataka. Nothing
that was considered sacred in the past, they argue, is sacred today.
That’s
balderdash, or, to borrow an expression from a crude, uncouth critic of
Narendra Modi on whom space has been lavished by a pink paper, it’s dog shit. The
reasons are as bogus as the feigned anger, the marzipan opprobrium they have
sough to heap on Narendra Modi, the Government he heads, the BJP, and, of
course, the RSS. Names have not been taken. That would be beneath contempt for
these intellectuals. It’s through elaborate allusion that they have let it be
known that freedom, liberty and plurality are at a discount today as never
before.
Their
decision, which increasingly appears to be a well-coordinated move, follows the
grisly lynching of a Muslim man by a Hindu mob at Dadri in western Uttar
Pradesh, a back-of-beyond place of which nobody, more so the intellectuals, knew
anything till a tragedy was blown out of proportion. Which begets the question:
If one death can upset them, if the murder of two rationalists and a writer can
wound their conscience, if stray comments by loudmouths who don saffron or have
found a place in Team Modi for inexplicable reasons, can make them feel it’s
Kristallnacht in India, where was their conscience, their spirit, their ethics
all these years and decades?
Nayantara
Sahgal had no compunction about accepting the Sahitya Akademi award two years
after the grisly and gruesome anti-Sikh pogrom on her nephew’s watch. Rajiv
Gandhi’s deplorable ‘when a big tree falls the earth is bound to shake’
justification of the slaughter of 3,500 Sikhs by Congress goons did not upset
her. The Meerut Bhagalpur
We
could go on and on. We could pitilessly expose Ashok Vajpeyi as a crawling
courtier who did Indira Gandhi’s bidding as a civil servant and a palace bard. We
could talk of all the stuff that is said about K Satchidanandan. We could point
out Sarah Joseph’s anarchist politics and warped ideology. We could mock at the
whole lot for being what they are (or were till recently): Establishment
apologists, the favoured few, the exalted minority who soared much higher than
merit would have allowed them.
Truth
be told this is the last, dying gasp of an India that we would leave behind if
Narendra Modi stays the course and steers this nation to his stated twin goals
of development and growth, a country that is not captive to the diktats of a
few or in thraldom to a Dynasty, a people who are at ease with progress and
modernity without shedding their identity. There is a lot to be criticised. And
there is a lot to be praised. Unfortunately, for some, it’s darkness at noon just as India
(The
writer is a current affairs analyst based in NCR )
