South Asia Citizens Web

When litterateurs decide to return their awards, as writer Nayantara Sahgal and poet Ashok Vajpeyi have chosen to do, their action reveals a state of agitation among India’s intelligentsia. By returning the prestigious awards, the authors have strongly conveyed their disquiet over the recent spate of violence leveraged by various groups to enforce cultural norms, supposedly identified with the Hindutva ideology.

It is, of course, a fallacy that there is a hierarchy of agreeable and less agreeable Hindutva ideologues. As such, it could be a Brahminical myth that Modi of a lower caste is by some yardstick worse than Vajpayee in his communalism. Modi is coarse. Vajpayee was urbane. Little else sets them apart. While Mohammed Akhlaq’s recent lynching by a mob of cow worshippers has set off finger-pointing at Modi, and rightly so, it was during Vajpayee’s rule that Australian Christian missionary Graham Staines and his two small sons were roasted alive in their jeep by a Hindutva mob in Orissa.

Why is the Culture Ministry sponsoring exhibitions that no serious historian will do anything other than guffaw over?

It would have been better had India and Pakistan returned any wiser from the recently concluded UN summit in New York and paid more attention to the voices of rationality than to the hawkish discourse that went on from both sides. In the din of mud-slinging, allegations and counter allegations especially with respect to peace, the message of pacifism that Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif gave was completely lost and ignored.

2015 video recording with Ananya Vajpeyi by http://www.a-id.org/