Mumbai, K.P. Rajan: Apropos your cover story (The Howl Anthology, Oct 26), the list of authors and poets relinquishing Akademi awards has grown long enough for the government to start taking note. When eminent constitutional expert Fali S. Nariman feels agitated about the plague of intolerance in the country, can finance minister Arun Jaitley simply dismiss the phenomenon as the work of agitators indulging in politics by other means? If the government does nothing to assuage the feelings of the intelligentsia, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s image abroad is bound to suffer badly.
Pune, Keshav Sathaye: The protest by some 42 writers who have returned their awards, allegedly against rising intolerance, seems to me to be illogical. For a long time, India has seen troubles of the samee ilk—attacks, provocation and so on. But these authors did not return their awards then. Their returning the awards now shows that they are like-minded: that is, they are leftists who have cleverly dec- ided to make a political statement. In that sense, it is a manufactured revolt.
On E-mail, S.M. Shervani: The genie of intolerance is out of the bottle and it’s creating havoc. All the years of propaganda that Muslims are the enemy and Hindus need to assert themselves are taking their toll. The big genie has transformed into many smaller genies, each wreaking havoc where it can. The challenge for the master is to get all of them back into the bottle right now.
Vasco, Hetal Kenaudekar: By not condemning the callous comments of his ministers and party members over the Dadri lynching, Modi has created doubts in the minds of the people. Silence certainly amounts to complicity.
Sydney, Sushant Kumar: With so many awards being returned, the government could sell these “pre-owned” awards and recover some money. Really.
Noida, Manish Garg: I’d like to analyse the pangs of conscience felt by eminent authors who have returned their awards. Nayantara Sahgal accepted her award two years after the massacre of Sikhs in 1984. None of these authors thought of returning awards after the anti-Sikh riots, or after Taslima Nasreen was hounded, or after Salman Rushdie’s book was banned. Selective amnesia at work?
On E-mail, Pradeep Mathur: We need to focus on individual liberty, be it of thought, speech or action. All forms of violence, religious or caste-based, are on the rise. The political hypocrisy is apparent: everyone makes the right noises about freedom and tolerance, but keeps quiet when it comes to reining in the fringe elements who violate the rule of law.
On E-mail, Mahesh Kapasi: It is unfortunate: the writers who have returned their awards are right when they say intolerance has grown in our country. People are within their rights to object to anything, of course, but they shouldn’t infringe upon the rights of others in doing so. It’s up to the government to enforce the law and ensure that those who break the law are given exemplary punishment.
Bangalore, Venkat D.: Not a squeak from our intellectuals when army jawan Vedmitra Chaudhary was lynched in Hardevnagar, near Meerut, for saving a girl from molesters. Nor in March, when a Hindu man was abducted and murdered in Bihar for marrying a Muslim girl. Hope those who returned awards have also gone and returned the cash that came with it.
Perth, Sanjiv Gupta: Why return awards now, when religious intolerance, communal riots and casteist violence have plagued India all through history? All they have done is insulted a prestigious award.
Lucknow, M.C. Joshi: It’s clear our writers have been in the race to return awards after Nayantara Sahgal—she of the Nehru-Gandhi family—said she was returning her award because intolerance had grown in “the past 15 months”, clearly directed against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. How come she didn’t refuse to take the award in 1986, in protest against the anti-Sikh riots of 1984?
Cherthala, M.K. Somanatha Panicker: Perhaps the writers who have returned their awards have let their fecund imagination work to predict a bleak future for the Indian democracy.
Chennai, Kangayam R. Narasimhan: How come our writers did not return their awards when U.R. Ananthamurthy openly said that he’d piss on a Hindu idol to test if it had powers? If a similar blasphemy had been committed against the gods of any other religion, I’m sure they’d have howled in protest.
Dehradun, Rakesh Agrawal: There must be something really grave about writers returning their awards, for a lot of hard work goes into any act of creativity, especially the kind that wins awards and universal acclaim.
Adipur, Mohan: Ganesh Devy returns his Sahitya Akademi award, but keeps his Linguapax prize, which is awarded by Spain, a country that saw 142 hate crimes in 2015, 57 of them against Muslims.
Visakhapatnam, D.L. Narayan: The Sahitya Akademi is an independent, apolitical body, which was set up to promote literature in Indian languages. Are Satchidanandan and others suggesting that the Akademi be politicised? The job of upholding the Constitution is that of the Supreme Court. I wonder why the intellectuals don’t move the SC.
