Much sound and fury, but signifying what? Some accomplished writers have returned the national awards given by the Sahitya Akademi. Some others have quit their posts in Sahitya Akademi. The latter is basically a personal decision, and one cannot critique it: if you are part of a body that you feel (rightly or wrongly) is not doing its job, then the only honourable option is to resign from that body. The returning of awards, on the other hand, is a purely symbolic, and hence, public gesture. It can be critiqued.
But the tenor of the critique has to be serious: the dismissal of the authors as writers, and that too by people incapable of reading or writing anything other than a cheque, is contemptible. All the protesting authors are accomplished writers, and at least a few of them are among India’s leading writers. Moreover, their protest is motivated by a genuine concern for India.
Having conceded that, one can still question their gesture of returning the national awards. The reasons they give are broadly of two sorts, with some overlap. Many of them have returned their awards as a protest against the Sahitya Akademi, which, they feel, has not spoken up against the on-going intimidation of intellectuals and writers and, in particular, the murder of Professor M.M. Kalburgi, a Sahitya Akademi awardee.
Their protest is legitimate, but I would add that the Sahitya Akademi has always, to some degree, failed in its job of supporting writers. I, like many other writers, have evidenced no ‘support’ from the Akademi. Neither am I alone in suspecting that this august body was (and is) riddled with cliques. One can correctly argue that the current issues, involving intimidation and murder, allude to a higher realm of ‘support’, but one will also have to take into account that India has consistently ranked rather high in this field. We have reliable data for at least a subset of writers, as the Committee to Protect Journalists maintains records of journalists killed worldwide from 1992 onwards. India has managed to make it into the list of 10 to 20 disparate nations where journalists were murdered almost every year in the period, and in 2007, we even took the gold with the grand annual tally of seven. The Sahitya Akademi is undoubtedly an august and necessary institution, but like another necessary institution — democracy — its promise far exceeds its performance.
Such contextualisation does not excuse what Vikram Seth has termed the ‘mealy mouthedness’ of the Akademi, but it does make one understand the fury of BJP supporters. What the writers consider human rights issues, BJP supporters see as a political shift. Sadly, the protesting writers might have played into the hands of BJP ideologues, who have, on the basis of winning 31 per cent of the votes cast in the last general elections, gone about claiming that two-thirds of India supports the Modi government. This slippage from gaining a two-third majority in the lower house of the Parliament (a quirk of the electoral system, which makes redundant the majority of Indian votes cast for other parties) to claiming a two-third support in India is not accidental. It is part of a gambit by the BJP to equate party with government and government with nation. By returning their national awards, the authors have fallen into this trap: national awards cannot be equated with governments, let alone a particular party in power, in a democracy. It is an error to ‘return’ any national award in any working democracy.
Yes, true, the protest may focus global attention on worrying trends in India. But Modi’s mentors are consummate politicians, who devised a standard procedure to tackle such protests as far back as the Gujarat riots: (1) ignore the protest for a long period, (2) during which your stand-up artistes (like the current Culture Minister) make statements that entertain the Stormtroopers, and (3) finally issue a politically correct statement for the record. This procedure works because Modi’s mentors are more savvy than the writers. They know that despite an article or two in TheGuardian etc., the ‘world’ will continue to hug them luridly as long as trade deals keep flowing.
But that is one reason why Modi should pay attention to this protest — because, finally, the success of these deals depends on the prosperity of 1.2 billion bipeds in India, some of whom voted BJP, and not on gimmicks like the fetishisation of a usually neglected quadruped, whose quixotic defence makes bad sense economically and environmentally, and signifies a narrow interpretation of Hinduism.
I assume that Modi and the BJP want to create a hegemonic national consensus, something that only exists in successful First World countries, arising from the modern ‘European’ discovery that personal freedom is (paradoxically) the only way to create public unity. This is something the so-called Islamic states have not realised. Unfortunately, the issues that the Hindutva units are currently choosing in order to cultivate this national consensus will not work in a diverse country like India. They need to find less divisive and more enabling issues — or soon they might have to choose between the future of their own ideology and the future of India.
