TWriters as a community are not intimidated easily. They have the courage of their convictions and the determination to fight tooth and nail while defending their right of expression guaranteed as a fundamental right under the Indian Constitution. Some of them go the extra mile and take on the establishment and also wage a relentless crusade against superstitions and religious practices, which they deem are outmoded and irrelevant in the present day. Those with rationalist leanings often write against idol worship and in the process offend the sentiments of the believers who take instant umbrage and demonstrate against what they consider blasphemous writing.
Earlier, these protests used to fizzle out soon and the writers would resume their work. But the situation is totally different today and rationalists and writers who step out of line and maintain a virulent anti-religious stance in their writings find themselves vulnerable to attacks on life and limb from fringe elements and hired assassins. Three brutal slayings – that of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar in Kolhapur, Communist leader Govind Pansare in Pune and educationist and eminent Kannada litterateur M. M. Kalburgi in Dharwad and the death threats held out to several other writers have put it beyond the shadow of doubt that fascist forces are at work, and that these attacks are only likely to spread.
The cold blooded murder of 77-year-old Kalburgi, a prolific writer and educationist who had served as the Vice Chancellor of Hampi University in Karnataka and whose body of work included tomes that attacked superstition and idol worship, has however set off a chain reaction and writers and authors all over the country have come out strongly against the violence being unleashed on writers. Kalburgi was a Sahitya Academy winning author and had also served on the Board of the Karnataka Sahitya Academy and writers protesting against the long drawn silence of the Academy in condemning the murder have begun to return their Sahitya Academy Awards.
In the year 1984, the late journalist and author Khushwant Singh had returned his Padma Bhushan award protesting the government’s operation codenamed Operation Bluestar launched to flush out militants who had holed up in the Golden Temple in Amritsar. But the present protest where nearly 40 writers have returned their awards is a new phenomenon that has no precedent in independent India. It has to be appreciated that these protesting authors are not returning awards given to them by sundry clubs or associations. The Kendriya Sahitya Academy Award is akin to the ‘Golden Grail’ for writers and is given only to the most meritorious and deserving, whose oeuvre can be classified as the best in creative writing.
The Sahitya Academy, the sleeping giant, finally woke up and passed a resolution condemning the murder of Kalburgi and the others, but it remains helpless in the matter of ensuring safety for writers who continue to be under grave threat from forces who appear to have a set agenda. The attitude of the powers that be towards the writers who have returned their awards continues to be cynical, at times downright offensive and clearly lacking any kind of empathy. While the Union Finance and Information and Broadcasting Minister Arun Jaitley has described them as orchestrators of a manufactured rebellion and as rabid anti-BJP elements, RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) spokesman Rakesh Sinha has dismissed them as frustrated communist writers. The Honourable Minister of State for Culture, Government of India, Mahesh Sharma too has come out with a suggestion that if the writers find the climate hostile they could stop writing. Far from assuaging their feelings and doing whatever is possible to safeguard them from attacks from those opposed to their line of thinking, the Government in its attempt to play down the situation is only ending up making matters worse and is only further hurting the feelings of creative minds whose contributions to enriching the world of Indian literature is immense.
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C. V. Aravind
C. V. Aravind is a Bangalore-based freelance journalist.[/column]