Sixty-seven eminent personalities and academics from across various universities and institutions in the country and outside have issued a statement declaring solidarity with writer and academic Kancha Ilaiah against whom a case was filed by the Saroornagar police station, allegedly for hurting religious sentiments.
Intimidation of Prof. Ilaiah should be seen as part of the ongoing process of criminalisation of dissent and suppression of freedom of expression, the statement said, and noted that the law is repeatedly being turned into a surrogate for Hindutva politics.
‘Shocking’
“It is shocking that the Telangana government too has fallen prey to the majoritarian ambience and that its state’s institutions are backing Hindutva violence,” the statement said, after recalling the line of events that have unfolded post his comments at the CITU meeting at Vijayawada.
It may be recalled that Prof. Ilaiah was visited by a group from a Brahmin-based organisation, after a newspaper reported that he called Brahmins “lazy” and “gluttons” at a meeting, which he vehemently denied. Instead, he claimed that he was talking only about Brahmins as a community keeping away from production-related work for centuries.
Later, however, he allegedly began to receive threats from the community.
A case has recently been filed against him after the Ranga Reddy district court issued directions for the same.
Commending Prof. Ilaiah’s scholarship as visible through his “iconoclastic” works, which radically denounced the caste system in India, the statement called it “deeply disturbing” that a scholar of international repute who has inspired scholars and activists to look at one’s own history critically, and who relentlessly challenged dominant orthodoxies in the academia, is being targeted by state agencies “acting in tandem with Hindutva organisations”.
“The politics of Hindutva, while hurting every living being’s dignity and sentiments, continuously claims to be the perpetual and universal victim. Dalits today cannot speak of the indignities and oppression they have suffered at the hands of Hindus — even that has become a matter of ‘hurt sentiments’ of dominant groups and castes,” it read.
The scholars have demanded that the intimidation be stopped and the police cases against Prof. Ilaiah be immediately withdrawn.
Signatories to the statement included noted Leftist historians Tanika Sarkar and Sumit Sarkar, and economists Prabhat Patnaik, Utsa Patnaik, and C.P.Chandrasekhar, Sociologist Satish Deshpande, writer and academic from Johannesberg Dilip Menon, feminist scholar and historian Uma Chakravarti, subaltern theorist Partha Chatterjee, and many others.
