‘Intolerance is the wrong word for lynching, burning and mass murder’

Arundhati Roy on why she has returned her National Award

Renowned South Asian writer Arundhati Roy returned her National Award for Best Screenplay to the Indian  government on Thursday. She had won the award in 1989.

Returning her award, the Booker Prize winner said she was “so proud” to join the writers, filmmakers and academics who have returned their awards to protest against attacks on minorities, murder of rationalists, threats to free speech, enforcement of beef bans in India, and the vicious remarks by leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

“I am very pleased to have found [from somewhere way back in my past] a National Award that I can return, because it allows me to be a part of a political movement initiated by writers, film-makers 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,” Roy said, in an article in The Indian Express.

“First of all, ‘intolerance’ is the wrong word to use for the lynching, shooting, burning and mass murder of fellow human beings. Second, we had plenty of advance notice of what lay in store for us — so, I cannot claim to be shocked by what has happened after this government was enthusiastically voted into office with an overwhelming majority,” she said explaining her decision.



“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 added.

“Life is hell for the living too. Whole populations — millions of Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims and Christians — are being forced to live in terror, unsure of when and from where the assault will come,” she added.

Further, she said, “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.”



Pointing out that she had returned her Sahitya Akademi Award in 2005 when the Congress was in power, Roy said, “It has gone way beyond all that.”

The author’s decision to return her award comes after many Indian intellectuals and artists did the same in an effort to protest against “intolerance” in India. Roy said that this “political movement” by artists and intellectuals “is unprecedented, and does not have a historical parallel.”

Many in India’s literary community,  similar to Roy, have expressed their disgust. Dozens of writers say every day brings more evidence of intolerance and bigotry going mainstream — a man lynched allegedly for eating beef, an atheist critic of Hindu idol worship gunned down — all met by a deafening silence from the government.

Earlier, 41 novelists, essayists, playwrights and poets had returned the awards they received from India’s prestigious literary academy to protest what they call a growing climate of intolerance under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, according to Associated Press writer Aijaz Hussain in Srinagar.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 6^th, 2015.

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