Social activist Aruna Roy delivered the concluding talk for this year’s edition of the Hyderabad Literary Festival on understanding of social and political issues among youth in the country here on Sunday.
Ms. Roy, who was one of the founders of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan and one of the biggest proponents of Right to Information Act, opined that there was growing intolerance against free speech in the country. She said that opposition to a popular idea could not be freely aired.
“I am worried about the narratives that are going around. I am worried that one day, they will take away our rights and the Constitution will be changed. This panic has set into many in northern India,” she said.
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“There are many distorted narratives that tell that the Constitution should be changed or amended. I hear a narrative that Gandhi was the traitor and Godse was the hero,” she added.
Ms. Roy wondered how many youngsters understood the real narratives of developments in India. “Many of us in universities cannot go to colleges to talk. We have to do it outside the gates,” she said. On the third and concluding day of the festival, discussions on slain journalist Gauri Lankesh, on translation into languages and sessions on theatre were featured. Workshops on story writing and citizen journalism were also part of sessions at the festival. At the three-day festival, discussions about Kannada literature, which was the Indian language in focus, also took place. Writers from Spain participated at the festival, as the European nation was the foreign country in focus.