Right (Write) to Protest

                                                         Right (Write) to Protest.

The focus of the media during the last couple of weeks has been on the Sahitya Akademi award winners. Either it is an indictment of a few writers for returning their awards or am endorsement  of a few others choosing to keep their awards, though they both protest about the growing intolerance in the country since the ascent of the BJP as the ruling party with a thundering majority to  back it. The overzealous ministers of the government and the hawkish RSS members have questioned the integrity of the writers who have returned their awards in protest. The harshest criticism has come from the Finance Minister, taking on the role of the super spokesperson of the PM  and wondering quizzically whether the protest was a real or a manufactured one? For him the writers’ protest is a case of ideological intolerance. He follows this with his characteristic swipe: “Writers with Left or Nehruvian leanings who enjoyed the patronage of the previous establishment are not comfortable with the Modi dispensation.” One wonders if the Finance Minister was acting like the Big Brother, having personal information of all the protesting writers critical  of the right wing government and coming to the conclusion that all the awardees who have renounced the literary distinction that had been conferred on them were stooges of the opposition party and were craving for a return of the  previous establishment for a revival of their lost patronage.  Normally the FM is careful with his words, but he seems to have lost his balance by making such an allegation. He failed to understand how  inter alia, his statement means that his rightist government is acting in a partisan way to  withhold patronage  of those who have  the Nehruvian and leftist leanings. In a more searing and undiplomatic language Mahesh Sharma, the Minster for Culture  sought to enquire into the background of these writers  who were protesting about the decline of freedom of expression  saying "If they say they are unable to write, let them first stop writing. We will then see."  One of the awardees was interrogated by information bureau after he had returned the award, to find out if he was spreading disaffection  among  people. The resulting offshoot from the writer’s side was a counter jibe calling the culture Minister as visanskriti minister(minister without sanskriti or culture). The incensed members of the ruling party have attacked the dissenting writers by going back to the Emergency of 1975, the 1984 riots after the assassination of Mrs.Indira Gandhi, the pulling down of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the Mumbai massacre of 1993  (of course these government spokespersons have a convenient amnesia of Gujarat violence of 2002) and the 2008 Mumbai attacks  to question why the writers did not return their awards in those dark hours. The anchors on all the TV channels verbatim echo these questions while grilling the writers who appear on their screens. “Why not then? Why now? “is a refrain that booms through the media. One is reminded of the Aesop Fables about the wolf and the lamb where a wolf spotting a little lamb drinking water at a spring down below decided to make a meal out of it.  He thought if he could find some excuse to seize the lamb and he called out to the Lamb, "How dare you muddle the water from which I am drinking?"

"Nay, master, nay," said Lamb; "if the water be muddy up there, I cannot be the cause of it, for it runs down from you to me."

"Well, then," said the Wolf, "why did you call me bad names this time last year?"

"That cannot be," said the Lamb; "I am only six months old."

"I don't care," snarled the Wolf; "if it was not you it was your father;" and with that he rushed upon the poor little Lamb and ate her all up. But before she died she gasped out: Any excuse is good enough for the strong and the mighty."  

The BJP, like the wolf, strong and mighty with a massive majority to rule –found in the silence of the writers on previous occasions a good excuse to beat them with. What it has failed to notice is that the question why now and why not then implies that the inhuman atrocities of
“then” are the same as the inhuman atrocities of the “now” and there is nothing to distinguish one act of ruthlessness and barbarity from the other.  In its reckless anger, the BJP has almost justified the outrage against all forms of assertive and collective inhumanity “then” and “now”. The bumbling Congress has been stupidly arguing back in defence of their not too illustrious past without understanding that the BJP is accepting the old adage:  What is good for the goose is good for the gander. If earlier events could well be legitimate causes for protests, the present protest is equally justifiable.

All the previous incidents cited by the ruling party members involving the killing of many innocents and the imposition of an authoritarian rule had taken place during the Congress rule. But then they happened at different times- once in a decade- 1984 murder of Sikhs was not one of communal hatred nor had it been pre-planned, pre- meditated  and executed. It was a mob capitulation to frenzy over the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi under the covert direction of a few Congress leaders. There had been no such brutality against the Sikhs in the past nor had there been one after that. The Hindus and Sikhs have never had any religious tension or communal divide at any time in the history of India. Even the clamour for Khalistan had very few takers within India. It had been one of the saddest and the most tragic happenings , but has remained just a one-off blot on Hindu-Sikh amity. The demolition of Babri Masjid eight years later, despite its  saffron colouring, had not fuelled Hindu-Muslim tension as was intended and even when the Congress government under  the soft and gentle Shri Narasimha Rao was hauled over the coals for failing to anticipate and prevent the diabolical scheme, there was no demolition of the Hindu-Muslin amity on religious lines. The Mumbai massacre was planned in  and by Pakistan with ground level operators in India  partly as a revenge against Babri demolition, partly to fuel the communal flame in the  country. This and the 2008 Mumbai attacks were provocative in intent, but despite the inept handling of the situation, the government of the day was able to prevent communal violence in the aftermath of those diabolical instances. Writers, social activists, media and the general public were angry with the government for not able to anticipate and prevent these attacks, but no one accused the government of perpetrating any communal disharmony.

In the last fifteen months, there has been a spate of incidents more catalytic in spreading intolerance and hatred between the two communities. Love Jihad, Ghar wapsi, the killing of rationalists and intellectuals who were quizzical about religious superstition and the Hindutva ideology were deliberately planned to bring about disaffection between the Hindus and the Muslims. It is not that the ruling party had a direct hand in these incidents, but its silence over the spectacle of these bizarre happenings by the fringe groups within the party was fomenting an atmosphere of hatred and intolerance in the nation. The Dadri lynching of a Muslim and his son on an alleged but false suspicion that the family ate beef and had kept beef in their refrigerator was the last straw in the writers’ back.

The protest of the writers was not pre-engineerd  one as there was no attempt to use the social media to bring the protesters together. It was a spontaneous anger at the rising intolerance in the society and the eerie silence of the Prime Minister and the members of his cabinet, backed by the ir parent organization RSS. All these happenings have come in waves –one after the other within a span of fifteen months. The periodic attempt to spread communal hatred and the murder of writers who were seen to be advocating a secular and pluralistic India made the writers rise in protest. Their number is too small to be counted on fingers, but the massive ruling party is up in arms against these miniscularly small pen wielders. What can this minority of forty odd literary scholars do against the might of the government? Then why this unseemly attack on the Akademi writers who have returned their awards in protest ad who have resigned from the Sahitya Akademi? Why is the government afraid of this small group and their impotent protest through renunciation of the awards given to them?  Why do all the PM’s men indulge in tongue lashing that is worse than whip lashing? 

But in the cacaphony of charges and counter charges, the reason for the protest has been sidelined (maybe that is what the ruling party desires). In a functioning democracy, protests play an important and positive role so that the government does not become dictatorial and insist on a single point of view without considering the other side of the argument. A protest cannot take place in a vacuum .There must be a cause- legitimate in the eyes of the protesters –to express dissent. By deflecting from the root cause and  to charge the protesters as having an political and ideological agenda may seem clever in the short run but will boomerang on the government sooner than later.

Who are the protesters today? Not the aam admi but the public intellectuals. In a forthright  interview with Seema Chishti of the Indian Express, the Emeritus Professor of history of JNU, Romilla Thapar speaks about the importance of the public intellectual to speak out and stand up for the survival of democracy.  “… a public individual has a vision of the kind of society he or she wants and is willing to debate it and be open to debate. A public intellectual is not expected to be dictatorial and insist on a single answer without seriously considering the argument of the others. Negating discussion is negating the fundamental right to freedom of speech; as also an Indian philosophical tradition, which was that a debate begins with presenting the opponent’s point of view, as correctly and as fully possible; this is then refuted, and out of the proposition and refutation, an accommodating point of view maybe found… without sounding arrogant, I would insist that a certain intellectual investment is needed for debating an issue.”

We need the public intellectual to be given the space so that people can think and debate about issues that are either today glossed over or a single point of view is thrust on unthinking minds. Today in major parts of the world the intellectual elites have been silenced or replaced by moneyed or power dominated elites. If we go back to the last century, in the second half of the 1980s, Eastern Europe Czechoslovakia ushered in the Velvet revolution under the leadership of Vaclav Havel that brought the curtains down for Soviet Union and Communism. Havel wrote: “I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.”

For the first time after the emergency, Indian writers have come forward- not as a rebel group to fight the duly elected government, but to follow the Indian philosophical tradition that encourages debates that revolve round thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis. It is said,  “language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is… Without this refusal,…we would turn forever on the treadmill of the present.”(George Steiner) .

The issue today is not whether it is right to return or retain the award bestowed on a writer or an artist by Sahitya Akademi or Sangeet Natak Akademi. That is the democratic choice given to the individual writer. None of the awardees who have returned their awards have coerced others to do so. This is where the public intellectual stands up, seeking a debate on the core issue of intolerance that is slowly overtaking the country.

It is time for the political parties to affirm the Right(Write) to Protest for it is in this protest that democracy gets its sustenance and survival. Creative writers often bring a world that is not, as it is a fictitious world created in their imagination. But the world they create is a world that they either desire or reject as it is founded on reality as they see around them. A work of art thus becomes not a creative falsehood, but a creative truth as it holds to the society the mirror of a world that truly conforms to their refusal to accept the world as it is and to their effort to replace it with a new world of beauty, peace and harmony. May our intellectuals continue their effort and succeed as Havel succeeded in Czechoslavakia.  May the Right(Write) to Protest serve the Nation in line with our Best Philosophical traditions