http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/49280039.cms
Poke me: Returning a national award shows Zuckerberg-hugged India in a bad light
So, when you push a nerve-point, very interesting reactions can ensue. Some people, writers of novels, poetry and non-fiction -- to most of society an obscure group, at best -- one by one, return awards given to them by a literary institution designed, funded and driven by the national government.
They do this as a protest against the silence of the current government about various closely packed atrocities committed in the name of the ideology propounded by the party currently in government. They do this to express revulsion against the brazen apologists for the atrocities, who are ministers in the government.
At one level, this is patently ridiculous. No one, in the scale of our national demographics, has heard of these writers. No one, in the scale of our national literacy levels, has read their writings. No one, in the scale of our national cultural awareness, even knows what 'sahitya' is, what 'kala' might mean in this context, or what is meant by 'akademi', never mind the huge mouthful of Sahitya Kala Akademi (SKA).
Yet, instead of sniggering and ignoring from some moutain-top of contempt, Orange-toxicised people on Twitter are threatening these writers with rape and murder for returning their obscure awards to this hardly known quasi-governmental institution.
At one of the protesters, Nayantara Sahgal, these Orange-outangs scream their knee-jerk Hindutward equivalence: Who is this Sahgal? And why didn't she, this Sahgal, protest against the murders of Sikhs in 1984? This wave of ignorant tu-tu mai-mai also washes over people like journalist Rajdeep Sardesai, who I know detests the Hindutwards as much as I do.
Sardesai writes: "Yes, Sahgal is guilty of selective outrage. As the niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, she must answer why she has failed to question the Congress's track record of running with the secular hare and hunting with the communal hound." (Disclosure: Sahgal is also closely related to two of my closest kin.)
So, let's look at some selective research here. What Sardesai doesn't seem to know is that Nayantara Sahgal was on the advisory committee of the self-same SKA for English during the Emergency and that she resigned in protest at the SKA's failure to challenge Indira Gandhi's censorship crackdown. Also, Sahgal was the deputy chairperson of the People's Union for Civil Liberties when it was investigating the anti-Sikh pogroms in 1985-1986.
Someone could argue that neither Indira Gandhi's censorship during the Emergency nor the mass murders of Sikhs post-Gandhi's assassination were 'communal' or 'secularism' issues as such. Someone else could point out that Sahgal was close to Jayaprakash Narayan, and on quite cordial terms with Morarji Desai, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and George Fernandes when they came to power in 1977.
All this would be either diversionary smoke or deluded fumbling for some notional journalistic 'even-handedness'. I could, in reply, say that I was in Sahgal's house a couple of weeks after the Babri Masjid was demolished and the atmosphere of gloom and anger was palpable. She was writing clearly and cogently against the various compromises that led to the masjid's demolition.
Somebody else could also ask what connection the Kannada writers who began the movement of returning their awards had to do with the Jawahar-Vijayalakshmi Nehru family, and ask whose nieces they were.
The point is, all these various so-called arguments being thrown at the 'returnees' are complete dogshit. The reason why it hurts the Hindutwards, why the returning of awards has pushed such a delicate nerve-point is simple. As our prime minister we have a man who can't even be dignified by being called 'uncultured', but an ignorant egomaniac who has deliberately made a successful political career of being an enemy of culture wherever and whenever he suspects he may have found it.
Yet, Narendra Modi's ambitions and delusions are such that he wants to mix as an equal with those he vaguely recognises as the 'top' people in the world, the Obamas, the Gateses, the Zuckerbergs. Therefore, we get the embarassments of the multi-lakh rupees suits, the wetly cloying hugs that world leaders are at pains to avoid, the cheap melodrama of the tears that are unfurled only when abroad.
The people Modi is trying to embrace know very well that this man has hardly read a book in his life. That he wouldn't know the difference, forget between Tagore and Turgenev, but even between Saraswatichandra and Saratchandra.
And when they hear, as they inevitably will have, that in Modi's India, people are being casually and brutally murdered - everyone from rationalists to god-fearing tailors who happen to be Muslim, anyone who doesn't fit the Modi-RSS's ubermensch-untermesch scheme - they will balk a teeny bit more from the fetid Narendra-love our PM is offering.
The Hindutwards are angry and posting murderously because they know that India is now justifiably listed alongside barbaric, blasphemy-murdering Pakistan, with blogger-butchering Bangladesh and with teenager-crucifying Saudi Arabia.
They are infuriated because this returning of awards by supposedly obscure writers throws an international spotlight on the fact that their suited-booted emperor is walking around naked and covered in the blood of innocents.
