Yes, this is the ‘Write’ Gesture.

Writers can only write; they can’t right the injustices in the world. Not only that: Writers actually have little purchase on realities and can hardly effect any positive change. Even people who could admire great works of art were capable of horrible savageries.  Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of Auschwitz was a great admirer of Beethoven and liked to listen to his symphonies after getting home from the busy death sites he designed.

Probably, the guilty were not merely those who were admirers of great art. Some of the artists and painters themselves were active colluders in nefarious genocidal and inhuman projects. Even the great Pablo Neruda who sang most sweetly about liberty and inveighed against bondage, showed little hesitancy in admiring Joseph Stalin, one of the biggest dictators of all  times.

Given this unsavoury background, often luridly portrayed in our daily discourse, how should one judge the recent protest by Indian writers all the way down from Nayantara Sahgal to Sara Joseph? There has been a lot of bitching going around: Some have called their action as a mere publicity stunt; others have questioned the validity of returning the awards claiming that the awardees have already ‘gobbled up’ the money they got from the Academy. A few like the Malayali cine- actress Shobana haven’t simply understood the logic of returning the awards; nor does she or her ilk seem to care much about the happenings around her like the Kalburgi murder or the Dadri event. For them nothing matters as long as their waist lines grow slimmer and purse linings plumper.

For the rest of us, who have neither awards to return nor cushy positions to forfeit, however, the writers’ gesture means much. One wonders what someone like Vaikom Mohammed Basheer, would have done in a situation like this. The plucky Malayalam writer who considered his greatest moment to have been the tactile pleasure derived from touching Mahatma Gandhi would certainly have been appalled to see the happenings in Modi’s India. He had a special use of the parchment he received from Sahitya Academy. He had reserved it as a missile for the dogs and foxes that strayed into his homestead. Had he been alive today he would have known whom he could better target with his parchment.

Certainly he would not have wasted it on Najma Heptulla who has been busy sullying the name of her great ancestor Abul Kalam Azad and proven herself not to be worth her own salt. For the minority affairs Minister, what took place in Dadri was a slight event, not even worth the minor attention of a Minority Affairs Minister, let alone the serious attentions of a Prime Minister. How could it be otherwise? The lynched Akhlaq was only an ordinary man with no noble ancestry to boast. He had only an ordinary heart and ordinary brain. Unlike Heptulla, he didn’t have a degree in zoology nor could he count Amir Khan as his second cousin. Unlike the honourable Minister, he hadn’t done a doctoral thesis on the heart systems of mammals and mastered the art of being heartless even in most atrocious circumstances. His CV did not include a morphed photograph of him posing with any great leaders buried or living. Neither do Comets appear nor do Prime Ministers cause their cavernous mouths to open when such men get lynched.

In a sense, it was better if the Prime Minister had remained silent. Because his words were more hurtful than his deafening silence. He didn’t find the Dadri event devastating, shocking or heart-wrenching as the rest of us did. For him, it was saddening. But let us be grateful: at least he didn’t say it was as saddening as watching a puppy - certainly not a calf- getting crushed under your wheels. Here is certainly a Prime Minister who knows how to swallow what he means and leaves little for others to guess what he leaves unsaid. He also came up with another great piece of defence: law and order is a state subject, he informs us with a seriousness borrowed from an eighth standard Social Science teacher. God certainly would pity us, for it took a prime minister to wise us up on such a crucial thing. 

Yes, no prime minister could be truer: It is the role of the states to maintain law and order. The role of the centre is to hire hoodlums to disrupt peace; to sow communal division and to make the ground ready for the elections. Wherever the Hindutva is in power, it is autocratic and repressive; wherever it is in waiting, it is belligerent and sinister. In places-like Kerala- where it anticipates a longer wait, it is devious and ravenous .

Dadri is actually not the name of an isolated event. It is one of the numerous symptoms of a larger disease that has afflicted our body politics. It is not a mere malaise that renders one temporarily lethargic. It is a virus as deadly as the deadliest HIV. It has made our immunity system vulnerable to the assault of all germs and microbes, the kinds that are fast proliferating in the country.

Dadri was one in such a chain of events. The murder of the Dalit youth for listening to a mobile tune that valourized Ambedkar in March this year, the killing of Kalburgi, that followed the murders of Pansare, and Dhabolkar; the killing of the Muslim IT professional Mohsin Sadiq Shaikh in Pune and numerous other instances of assault on minorities and Dalits fit into this litany. The list of the victims of this wanton violence stretches all the way down to the boy called Fahad who was butchered by a Hindutva volunteer whom the police quickly identified as insane (Indeed insanity is a privilege that only the Parivar hoodlums enjoy).

What is at stake is the very notion of the nation ‘India’ as a pluralistic society where mutual accommodation and tolerance thrive. (As I write this the news of a Dalit family being burnt alive in Faridabad is being flashed on the TV screen; beside me, the newspaper screamer shows the statement by a BJP leader lambasting all those who claim this country to be going to dogs).

Here the decision of the writers to give up the honours heaped upon them by the state is more than an artistic gesture. If they hadn’t done so, and let new headlines simply erase the old ones, it would have been the most unkindest act of all.

Adorno long ago said it would be barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. In India, we do not have an Auschwitz yet, but there are certainly Auschwitzes in the making. The children with inflated tummies after being fed cooking gas and then set on fire with matchsticks during the Gujarat riots were grim reminders of such a possibility.

The role of the intellectuals here should be more than symbolic. They should fight to salvage what is left from the savage flames eating away at our vitals. Returning awards and honours and thus trying to shame the shameless is a bold gesture here. Certainly, it is much more than a mere gesture and much nobler than playing ostrich by burrowing our head in the sands. 

(Dr. Umer O Thasneem teaches English at Calicut University. The views expressed here are personal. He may be contacted at uotasnm@yahoo.com)