The rising intolerance and communal atmosphere in the country as manifested by incidents such as murder of writer MM Kalburgi and lynching of a muslim man over rumour's that he had eaten beef, few eminent writers returned their Sahitya academy award in order to protest. While kannada writer Arvind Malagatti resigned from the body's general council - joining the growing protest by litterateur and cultural personalities that has already seem more than a dozen resignations and open letters directed at the literary institution . Recently literary figures like Shashi Deshpande, K Satchidanandan, PK Parakkadavu had resigned from their posts in the academy, citing similar reasons.
With the writer's protest over it's ' silence ' on nationalist MM Kalburgi's murder growing louder, sahitya academy chairperson Vishvanath Prasad Tiwari came out with a statement saying the apex literary body stands for freedom of expressions and condemns attacks on any writer or artist anywhere.
The politicians are not doing anything about the matter but gambling. PM Modi criticized the incidents, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said, " Politics by other means, by those use to enjoy the patronage of the earlier Congress govt., and also left parties." Jaitley also said there was no atmosphere of intolerance in the country, and this act of writers, returning the award was an act of ideological intolerance. WB governor, Kashinath Tripathi, " Why did they not return the sammans when Nirbhaya incident had happen in Delhi and when Muzaffarnagar incident happened in UP?"
On asking opinions on this issue from public. I found 60% of the people are in support of the protest, they say it is must in order to keep our views in front of govt., and show them the power of common man. And the rest 40% say that this might not be a good way to give our views in front of government.
This protest might bring some changes against the injustice of freedom of speech for the writers. But I don't think this is going to bring too much of change because the government is not reacting much to this, even when some of the writers are about to return their Padmashree Awards. I think we definitely should do something in order to force the govt. to do something about the injustice but returning the awards is not one of them.
