Indian writer Arundhati Roy returns National Award in protest

[Musafir117]

Indian writer Arundhati Roy returns National Award in protest

- November 05, 2015 - Updated 1313 PKT - From Web Edition


Indian writer Arundhati Roy returns National Award in protest


Renowned Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy has said that she is returning her 1989 National Award for Best Screenplay to protest rising attacks on minorities, murder of rationalists, and threats to free speech in India.

Roy becomes the latest to join a number of Indian filmmakers, writers and scholars who have returned their awards in what is a growing chorus of anger at perceived intolerance and spiraling Hindu nationalism under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The author of "The God of Small Things", who won the National Award for Best Screenplay in 1989 for the film "In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones", announced that she was returning the award in a column published in an Indian newspaper today.

She said returning the award allowed her "to be a part of a political movement initiated by writers, filmmakers and academics in this country who have risen up against a kind of ideological viciousness and an assault on our collective IQ that will tear us apart and bury us very deep if we do not stand up to it now."

"I believe what artists and intellectuals are doing right now is unprecedented, and does not have a historical parallel. It is politics by other means. I am so proud to be part of it. And so ashamed of what is going on in this country today," she wrote in her column for the Indian Express.

Today, we live in a country in which, when the thugs and apparatchiks of the New Order talk of “illegal slaughter”, they mean the imaginary cow that was killed — not the real man who was murdered. When they talk of taking “evidence for forensic examination” from the scene of the crime, they mean the food in the fridge, not the body of the lynched man. We say we have “progressed”, but when Dalits are butchered and their children burned alive, which writer today can freely say, like Babasaheb Ambedkar once did, that “to the untouchables, Hinduism is a veritable chamber of horrors”, without getting attacked, lynched, shot or jailed? Which writer can write what Saadat Hasan Manto wrote in his “Letters to Uncle Sam”? It doesn’t matter whether we agree or disagree with what is being said. If we do not have the right to speak freely, we will turn into a society that suffers from intellectual malnutrition, a nation of fools. Across the subcontinent it has become a race to the bottom — one that the New India has enthusiastically joined. Here too now, censorship has been outsourced to the mob. —Arundhati Roy

Critics of the ruling right-wing BJP accuse it of not doing enough to counter the extremism of Hindu nationalists and to protect freedom of expression in secular but Hindu-majority India.
Indian writer Arundhati Roy returns National Award in protest - thenews.com.pk
............
Ji oye Modi Sarkar getting slaps in home land

 

[livingdead]

shame on you aru... you should have been the first.

 

[GR!FF!N]

murder of rationalists

is there any such "Murder" did happen recently??

 

[Neutron]

Few sane Indian voices......modi don't like

 

[chhota bheem]

its will be really fun to find out,how many of the people who are returing the awards have given up the gas subsidy.

 

[INDIAPOSITIVE]

The novelistArundhati Royand two dozen Bollywood figures have added their voices to the artists, scientists and historians by returning their awards in protest against a climate of religious intolerance and violence in India.

Film-maker Sanjay Kak, who was among film industry figures returning National Film awards in Mumbai on Thursday, said those protesting “have deployed their visibility – and credibility – to articulate the growing anxiety of a vast number of Indians, those who may remain less visible but are no less perturbed at what is going on around them”.

Roy, most famous for her Booker prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things,said in a sharply worded editorial in the Indian Expressthat millions of minority people including Muslims, Christians and members of low-caste or tribal communities “are being forced to live in terror, unsure of when and from where the assault will come”.


Already dozens of writers have returned awards to the country’s top literary institution, the Sahitya Academi, over disappointment that it has not condemned the killings of atheist activists who campaigned against religious superstition or Muslims rumoured to have slaughtered cows or eaten beef. Among India’s majority Hindu population, cows are considered to be sacred.

Roy said she was “so ashamed of what is going on in this country” and was pleased to return her 1989 national screenplay award and “to be a part of the political movement.

“I believe what artists and intellectuals are doing right now is unprecedented, and does not have a historical parallel. It is politics by other means,” said Roy, who in recent years has become a civil rights activist.

Many of those protesting have also criticised the prime minister,Narendra Modi, and his nationalist Bhartiya Janata party for not speaking out against religious attacks, saying their silence has encouraged Hindu hardliners to justify the attacks and assert Hindu superiority.

Communal violence and prejudice are nothing new forIndia. Hindu-Muslim violence claimed an estimated 1 million lives in the runup to partition in 1947. Since then, deadly riots and clashes have erupted at intervals, mostly between Hindus and Muslims.

Some people voiced concern with Modi’s meteoric rise and landslide election victory last year, warning that his support was grounded in the BJP’s Hindu base and noting that he had come up through the militant Hindu organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which translates as the National Volunteers Association.

Modi insisted during his election campaign that he would be prime minister for all of India and guaranteed protection for minorities. He has said little on the subject since taking office.

His administration has dismissed the growing protest as a political ploy to tear down the governing party.

“The entire purpose of these protests is to derail the development agenda of the Narendra Modi government,” the urban development minister, Venkaiah Naidu, said on Thursday. “The country is being subjected to damage and unnecessarily wrong information is being given about political intolerance.”

On Thursday, a separate group of writers, academics and artists came out in support of that stance and accused their protesting colleagues of political vengeance after Modi’s BJP election victory last year.

“A section of the nation’s intelligentsia has expressed outrage at a perceived mounting intolerance in society,” said a statement signed by 36 Modi supporters including the head of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. “Failure in the elections is now sought to be avenged by other means.”

Arundhati Roy returns award in protest against religious intolerance in India | Books | The Guardian

 

[Barrel-Bomba]

Why I am returning my award by Arundhati Roy

 

[Barrel-Bomba]

Why I am returning my award by Arundhati Roy
Indian writer Arundhati Roy returns National Award in protest

 

[Musafir117]

Give her an international award of Courage.

 

[Bhasad Singh Mundi]

finally

 

[FULL_METAL]

Thats why you should clean up your room every week, she missed last week and see what happend, she came last in returning awards

Ontopic: Arundhaty you beauty , every time i see her wrinkled face i get turned on i dont know why, I feel the same way for sigourney weaver, helen mirren and many other hollywood buddhis , do i have a thing for grannies ?

 

[zebra7]

Pakistan can issue them the award and dully posted at their address.

Does any damage for the authors to return the award. Or they get some advantage in returning the award.
Bhai mere Lime light me raeha hai to Uchal Kuud Karte Raho -- Bollywood formula.

 

[IndoCarib]

She is late to the party. There is already lot of back lash against Award wapsi

 

[MilSpec]

She should also denounce Indian Citizenship in protest.

 

[dray]

She should also denounce Indian Citizenship in protest.

Next round of protests before the next crucial election, this round ends with the last phase of Bihar election.