Posted by: metta October 17, 2015
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India Writers Return Awards to Protest Government Silence on Violence



In the last month, 35 leading Indian authors and poets have returned coveted awards from the National Academy of Letters in a collective revolt against what Salman Rushdie this week called the “thuggish violence” creeping into Indian life under the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The writers’ revolt, which began in September after a 76-year-old critic of Hindu idolatry was gunned down in his home, rapidly gained strength this month when Mr. Modi failed to promptly condemn the killing of a Muslim manMohammed Ikhlaq, by a Hindu mob because they suspected he had killed a cow and eaten its meat.

Is he a Twitter-savvy technocrat obsessed with boosting development for all India by slashing red tape, wooing foreign investors and building a modern digital economy? Or is he a canny ideologue intent on imposing a strict Hindu code of values on a nation that prides itself on tolerance, diversity and pluralism?

One of Mr. Modi’s favorite modes of communicating is Twitter, where he has 15 million followers and more than 9,500 posts. On Twitter, Mr. Modi presents himself as cheerleader in chief for all things India, celebrating achievements, sending birthday greetings and offering condolences. Yet, as many commentators have pointed out, not one of his Twitter posts has offered condolences to the Ikhlaq family, which was brutally attacked by a Hindu mob last month in a village 30 miles east of Delhi.

Uday Prakash, a renowned Hindi writer, was the first author to renounce his award from the academy, in September. “I have never seen such hostility before,” he said.

In interviews this week, the writers returned to the same refrain: That Mr. Modi’s failure to confront intolerance by fellow Hindu nationalists is giving tacit permission for more intolerance. “The tide of violence against freedom of speech is rising every day,” Ms. Sahgal said.

Indian activists shouting slogans against Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a protest in New Delhi calling for an investigation into the recent beating death of a Muslim man.

It is the kind of encounter that has become more common under Mr. Modi, in part because his ascendancy to prime minister has been accompanied by growing activism from conservative Hindu nationalists who seek to suppress forms of expression they view as offensive to their religion. They have pressured publishers to withdraw books, pushed universities to remove texts from syllabuses and filed criminal complaints against those they deem to have insulted Hinduism.

Few writers have drawn more criticism than M.M. Kalburgi, a noted rationalist scholar who enraged far-right Hindu nationalists through his criticism of idol worship and superstition. Mr. Kalburgi said he received multiple death threats, and on Aug. 30 was shot dead at point-blank range in his home in Karnataka, a state in southern India. No arrests have been made.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/world/asia/india-writers-return-awards-to-protest-government-silence-on-violence.html?_r=0

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