Indian Express, 20 December 2010
Tanvir A Siddiqui
Allowing an anti-Narendra Modi remark to appear in an opinion piece carried in his poetry collection two years ago has brought the ire of higher-ups in Gujarat Urdu Sahitya Academy on Aqaal Shatir, a poet here. He has been asked to return the financial assistance that the Academy provided him for publishing the anthology.
The Academy had provided Rs 10,000 to bring out his Urdu poetry book Abhi Zinda Hoon Main (I’m Still Alive). The Academy took exception to one sentence in the opinion piece written by Bhiwandi-based Raunaq Afroz and slapped a notice on Shatir asking to explain why he should not be asked to return the financial assistance, for “violating rules of acceptance”.
This was the sentence that rubbed the Academy mandarins the wrong way: “Ho Narendra Modi ka ke iqtedar men aate hi us ne is riyasat se Urdu ka safaya hi kar diya, Modi ne sirf itne par he iktefa nahin kiya, balke 2002 men ek soche-samjhe mansoobe ke tehat poore Gujarat men firqawaranh fasadat aur haiveaniyat ka wo nanga khel khela ke poori insaniyat he sharmsar ho kar rah gaee. Har taraf loot mar, qatl o gharatgiri, ismat dari, aatish zani aur aqliyati nasl kushi jaisi sangeen wardaar karva kar oos ne poore mulk men khauf o hirass paid kar diya tha” (page 14).
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The English translation of the remark, which was subsequently deleted after it led to trouble, read: “May good come the way of Narendra Modi, who has finished off Urdu in this State on coming to power and did not stop at that, but under a well thought-out plan, (he) played such a naked game of communal riots and barbarism which put to shame the entire humanity. By spreading terrific incidents of loot, murder and mayhem, rape, burning and genocide of the minority community, he created an atmosphere of terror in the whole country.”
The book was released at a public gathering on October 28, 2008, but the offending remark came to the Academy’s notice only in November this year. The author has been told that by including such remark in the book “outside the knowledge of the Academy”, he had violated the norms of not adding or altering anything in the manuscript after its approval.
He has been told that the piece in question amounted to showing the Chief Minister in a poor light, with a potential to “spread misgivings about him in the society”.
The poet has also been told that he had “dishonestly hidden the impugned sentence in the copies submitted to the Academy” but it existed in the copies available in the market. “Which is a deliberate attempt of misguiding the Academy on your part”, said the terse notice issued by the Academy registrar. He was asked to explain his position on this within a fortnight from receiving the letter.
Shatir, on his part, replied on December 1, 2010, that not a single copy was available in the market that carried the offending sentence because he had immediately corrected the copy and printed pages 13 and 14 afresh, minus the offending remark, as soon as his attention was drawn to the impugned text. “The remark is seen only in those 80-odd out of the 400 copies that he gave as complimentary copies at the launch event and nowhere else”, he maintained.
Interestingly, the notice was issued after Shatir filed a slew of RTI queries about the functioning and state of accounts of the Urdu Sahitya Academy, which according to him, reeked of many irregularities.
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