FINANCE minister Arun Jaitley has characterised the expanding revolt by eminent award winning writers against the growing assault on constitutional fundamental rights by a neo-conservative regime, as a ‘paper rebellion’ and a manufactured revolt. Such a statement shows that the NDA government is either blissfully ignorant of history or has refused to learn its lessons from past experience. It also shows the brutal power and arrogance of a majoritarian regime that is determined to curb dissent and spread religious intolerance. As writer Uday Prakash, one of the first to return his award said in an interview, “the writer is a lonesome figure who has nothing to protect himself with, and that there is a growing feeling of insecurity, especially among those who dare to dissent against the majority view”. It is therefore clear that the writers protest reflects an outrage against the emerging indifference of the present government which remains a mute spectator towards conservative social forces that are spreading communal hatred and intolerance in society.

WHY WRITERS

PROTEST?

The NDA regime should remember that in the past, protests by writers and other public intellectuals have given voice to widespread public resentment against political regimes and also spearhead the protests against them. Perhaps one of the most famous examples of this one is of Pablo Neruda whose protest against the atrocities during the civil war surfaced in The Spain in Our Hearts  (1937) and who died during Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1973. An active member of the communist party, Neruda was killed a few days before he was to leave for Mexico and continue to voice his active opposition to the dictatorship. An eyewitness account of his funeral said, that though the ruling military regime pronounced his death as a ‘natural death’, its soldiers ransacked shops and burnt his books while he was buried. Clearly the dictatorship was aware of the power of his writings to influence opposition to the dictatorship. That this influence did not diminish was evident from the fact that the body of Pablo Neruda was exhumed by the Chilean regime in 2013 in order to try and settle the controversy over the cause of his death. Neruda’s comrades and supporters continued to believe that he was poisoned and did not die a natural death.

Latin America is replete with cases where writers, poets, journalists protested against dictatorships and their atrocities. For example, in 1977 Rodolfo Walsh, a journalist and an anti-military junta activist wrote in his History as a Weapon: An Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta that: “Censorship of the press, the persecution of intellectuals, the raid on my home in Tigre, the murder of dear friends, and the loss of a daughter who died fighting you, are some of the events that compel me to express myself in this clandestine way after having shared my opinion freely as a writer and journalist for nearly thirty years….”. It is also significant that Walsh relates the emergence of political dictatorship and moral policing by right wing gangs to the miserable state of the economy. Thus he writes that, “political economy of the government is the place to look not only for the explanation of your crimes, but also for an even greater atrocity that is leading millions of human beings into certain misery….Over the course of one year, you have decreased the real wages of workers by 40 percent, reduced their contribution to the national income by 30 percent, and raised the number of hours per day a worker needs to put in to cover his cost of living from six to eighteen, thereby reviving forms of forced labor that cannot even be found in the last remnants of colonialism”. He makes a reference to the overwhelming propaganda and the facade that Junta wants peace and that it wants to defend human rights and well being of the people. The entire letter is a demystification of the Junta, an effort to expose it before the people. It is also telling that Walsh ends his letter by saying that he has no hope that he will be heard and that he is certain that he will be prosecuted. Sure enough, Walsh went missing, and was kidnapped by a ‘work group’ or a clandestine group formed by the military junta to exterminate its enemies.

INTOLERANCE IN SOUTH ASIA

AND PARALLELS IN INDIA

These historical episodes of attacks on intellectuals who opposed right wing ruling classes find parallels all over the South Asian region and also in the recent episodes within India. Jaitley’s comment on ‘manufactured revolt’ by Left leaning and liberal Nehruvian intellectuals dangerously echoes the comments of General Liaquat Ali in Pakistan who linked the opposition to military dictatorship by Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Sajaad Zaheer to the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case and accused them of colluding with the army to “establish a communist government” in 1951. Subsequently both Zaheer and Faiz were jailed and prosecuted by successive military regimes and became important symbols of mobilisation of artistic dissent. More recently, there is the case of the Bangladeshi ‘secular and atheist’ bloggers, four of whom were killed in one district within a time span of one year. While the Bangladeshi government made some formal noises about protecting the rights of minorities and bloggers, the national police chief of Bangladesh also warned the bloggers ‘not to cross the line’ by hurting the sentiments of the Muslim majority. The killings of Kalburgi, Pansare and Dhabolkar also follow similar patterns. Hindu fundamentalist groups have claimed that these three rationalists ‘crossed the line’ by hurting the sentiments of the so-called Hindu majority. Significantly, all three were playing an important role in opposing the irrational and militant Hindu fundamentalist groups, and their murders elicited an inappropriate political response from right-wing ruling classes.

This episodic evidence shows that the power of the written word cannot be underestimated in the context of the rising influence of majoritarian Hindu fundamentalism. While the central government continues to mouth platitudes about its ‘developmental vision’, militant Hindutva fundamentalism is on the increase and is being legitimised within the society through a conspiracy of silence by the NDA government. It is therefore significant that there is an outrage against Prime Minister Modi’s indifference to the whole situation. The widespread revolt of the writers is only giving voice to this outrage and the increasing support for these writers has the potential of triggering a broad-based revolt. However this is only possible if there is a significant mobilisation of all social classes in support of the writers and in opposition to a neo-liberal and neo-conservative government.