Tuesday, December 29, 2015

MP civic polls; Congress gaining by default

Why the Congress shouldn't take too much delight in its MP civic polls victory

The verdict reflects disenchantment with the BJP's farm-relief policies rather than any surge of support for the Congress.
 
Photo Credit: IANS
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For the first time in 12 years, the Congress has secured a higher tally in an election in Madhya Pradesh than the Bhartiya Janata Party. As the results came out on Sunday for polls held last week, the BJP lost four of eight civic bodies to the Congress. This is the ruling party’s biggest electoral setback since it came to power in December 2003.

The Congress won Shajapur, Dhamnod, Orchha and Majhauli urban and semi-urban civic bodies from the ruling party, besides retaining Bhedagha.  Significantly, the civic bodies it captured are spread across three regions – Mahakoshal, Malwa and Madhya Bharat. That would seem to indicate that disillusionment with the BJP is not limited to a particular region.

The news follows the Congress victory in a crucial bye-election last month, when former union minister Kantilal Bhuria took the Ratlam parliamentary  by a margin of over one lakh votes. The poll was necessitated by the death of incumbent Member of Parliament Dileep Singh Bhuria. The voters comprehensively rejected the deceased MP’s daughter Nirmala Bhuria whom the BJP had fielded to harvest sympathy votes.

State Congress spokesman KK Mishra claimed that the victory streak that began in Bihar two months ago was carried over to Ratlam and now to the civic polls. In his projection, the results indicate that the people of Madhya Pradesh are tired of the BJP’s false promises and histrionics, he claimed.

However, his claim seemed to betray a misplaced confidence. The Congress party has hardly shown any signs of fighting spirit. Its victory came by default as a result of the bi-polar polity of Madhya Pradesh. The BJP still controls over 75% of the state’s 377 civic bodies, including 16 out of 17 corporations. The Congress’s limited sway in the civic bodies is largely confined to rural areas.

Leaders shaken

Nevertheless, the two successive drubbings in a month have jolted the state BJP leadership. Party leaders admit they are unable to pinpoint exactly what has gone wrong.

Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and several of his cabinet colleagues campaigned vigorously in the local elections. For instance, two ministers stayed in the small semi-urban body of Orchha in the Gwalior region for days to oversee the BJP campaign. Yet the party lost.

The BJP had sought to explain away the defeat in the Ratlam seat by arguing that it has always been a Congress bastion. That argument sounds plausible. Except for the May 2014 Lok Sabha election, which the BJP fought on Narendra Modi’s name, the party had never won the Ratlam-Jhabua seat.

Exactly a year ago, the BJP had made a clean sweep in the civic polls held in 135 bodies in the state, capturing 83s. In August, the BJP maintained its winning streak and captured eight out of 10 local bodies in bye-elections. The chief minister claimed that the party’s huge success was a rejection by the Madhya Pradesh voters of the “baseless campaign of the Congress” against him on the Vyapam scandal. The bye-elections were held barely a month after the Supreme Court ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to take up the inquiry into the job-cum-admission racket that had caused outrage across the nation. The massive furore followed reports of 40-odd mysterious deaths of suspects related to the scandal.

New situation

So, what has happened in the last four months that the BJP’s electoral fortune has taken a knock?

While a plethora of arguments are being advanced to explain the outcome, Chief Minister Chouhan’s inability to address the worsening agrarian crisis seems to be a major factor behind the BJP’s poor show. Farmers are angry that despite the chief minister’s repeated assurances, the state government has done precious little to ameliorate their plight. Kharif crops, particularly, soyabean, have got extensively damaged in 31 out of the state’s 51 districts, according to the state government’s own estimate. But though the state government has earmarked Rs 2,000 crores for relief, the money has yet to reach the distressed farmers.

In the last two months, at least 50 farmers have committed suicide in Madhya Pradesh.  As per the latest National Crime Report Bureau, the state accounted for 826 farmer suicides in 2014, the third highest among all states in the country.

Chouhan’s problem is that the debt-ridden state government has no money to provide relief to farmers. Debt on the government has already crossed Rs one lakh crore, even after curtailing budgets in various departments to pool in Rs 2,000 crore for farmers.

His bigger problem is that he lacks the clout to exert pressure on the Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance government to provide aid to the state’s farmers. The chief minister is conscious of the perception that his relations with Narendra Modi aren’t cordial enough for him to effectively push the farmers’ case with the Centre.
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CBI making shivraj breath easy

Why the Vyapam scam is more likely to defeat the CBI than Shivraj Singh Chouhan

Five months after taking over the probe into the jobs and recruitment scam, the investigating agency is still coming to terms with the complexity of the case.
 
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By the time Madhya Pradesh holds its next assembly elections at the end of 2018, the Vyapam scam may not be a problem for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and state chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan. They could well say that the Central Bureau of Investigation is still probing the alleged irregularities with regard to jobs and recruitment at the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board, and that the Opposition should await the outcome.

The Congress, the main opposition party in the state, may find it hard to counter this argument. The scam had come to light in 2013, with reports of candidates seeking government jobs and admission in medical colleges allegedly paying bribes to government officials, who in turn allowed imposters to take the entrance tests.

The Congress had spent two years pressing for a CBI probe, even as nearly 50 people connected to the case died during this period, many of them in mysterious circumstances. On July 9, the Supreme Court finally handed over the case to the national agency.

But given the tardy pace of the CBI’s investigation, it’s quite plausible that the case will not be solved within the next three years. More than five months have passed since the Supreme Court ordered the CBI to take over from the Special Task Force in Madhya Pradesh. But there has been no tangible progress so far, with no fresh arrests being made.

The blood trail

Contrast this with the work of Special Task Force, set up in August 2013 to probe cases related to the Vyapam scam.  In 23 months, the STF arrested more than 2,200 people including impersonators, bogus candidates, job aspirants, middlemen, politicians, and bureaucrats. When the STF was disbanded in July after the CBI took over, more than 400 suspects were still absconding.

The CBI has conducted just one field operation over the last five months. On September 24, investigators carried out 40 searches in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. More than half the raids were conducted in Bhopal, as most of the top exam board officials lived there. Among the raided locations included properties owned by former technical education minister Laxmikant Sharma and officials of the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board.

However, the searches did not yield any substantial results. The investigators also traced call details of some of the key accused, but the CBI has refused to provide further details about this exercise.

Apart from taking over 150 cases of rigging from the now-defunct STF, the CBI also registered 18 preliminary inquiries into more than 40 Vyapam scam-related deaths.

However, the bureau only picked up the mysterious death of medical student Namrata Damor for further investigation and registered a murder case against unidentified accused. Damor’s body was found on the railway tracks near Ujjain in January 2012. While the Ujjain police sought to label the death as a suicide, a forensic report that conclusively proved it was a murder.

A student of Indore’s Gandhi medical college, Damor allegedly used fraudulent means to get admission through alleged kingpin Dr Jagdish Sagar. While Dr Sagar is in jail, the CBI has yet to nab Damor’s killers. The investigation into Damor’s death had triggered nationwide uproar over the scam.

On June 29, Akshay Singh, a television journalist, died mysteriously in Jhabua where he had gone to interview Damor’s parents. A day earlier, two accused in different Vyapam cases had died. Narendra Singh Tomar, a veterinary surgeon, died in an Indore jail, while another accused, Dr Rajendra Arya, died in a Gwalior hospital. A day after the journalist’s death, Jabalpur medical college dean Dr Arun Kumar was found dead in a Delhi guest house.

Four deaths in three days alerted the nation to the magnitude of the scam. The subsequent media furore forced chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan to agree to a CBI probe into the scam. He had initially resisted an independent probe, arguing that the special task force had been doing a competent job under the supervision of the Madhya Pradesh high court. But the Supreme Court eventually ruled in favour of a CBI probe based on several petitions filed by Congress leaders and whistleblowers.

Reaching the top

While the alleged irregularities date back to 2007, the scam began to unravel with the arrests of 20 impersonators in Indore in July 2013 after they had come to take the place of genuine candidates at a pre-medical test.

Their arrests opened a can of worms. More arrests followed in quick succession as it transpired that not only admissions in medical colleges, but also all the recruitment tests conducted by the professional examination board were rigged.

Things got murkier when the Special Task Force sought to lodge a first information report against Ram Naresh Yadav, the Governor of Madhya Pradesh. However, the STF’s efforts were quashed by the Madhya Pradesh High Court, which cited constitutional immunity to the governor.

In another twist, the Congress accused Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and his wife Sadhna Singh of direct complicity in the recruitment rigging.

With the CBI taking over the probe, the opposition and whistleblowers hoped that the chief minister’s days in office would be numbered. Their optimism was bolstered by the widely-held view that Prime Minister Narendra Modi considers Chouhan a strong rival in the Bharatiya Janata Party and a CBI probe would only make life difficult for the Madhya Pradesh chief minister.

Truth in a hard disk?

Chouhan was also accused of tampering with a hard disk maintained by Vyapam chief system analyst Nitin Mahindra. The original hard disk allegedly had 40 entries of the chief minister’s name in connection with recommending candidates for the assistant teachers test.

In an affidavit filed in February, Congress leader Digvijaya Singh alleged that the chief minister had got the original disk replaced. In addition, Singh claimed that Chouhan had replaced his name with that of former chief minister Uma Bharti and others.

While the Madhya Pradesh high court dismissed these allegations as baseless, the CBI has opted for a fresh examination of the hard disk. On November 3, investigators recorded the statement of whistleblower Prashant Pandey, who had given the supposed original hard disk Digvijay Singh.  A forensic lab in Hyderabad is currently verifing its authenticity and a report is awaited.

“I am optimistic that the CBI will take the probe to its logical conclusion,” said Pandey. CBI spokesman Devpreet Singh has also promised that action will be taken against those found to have tampered with the evidence.

The Congress, however, isn’t as positive. Party leaders feel the CBI will act against Chouhan only with approval from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who they feel will not risk destabilising any BJP-led government on the issue of corruption.

Complex case

The current situation is in stark contrast to the alacrity with which the CBI began the investigation.

On July 13, a CBI team comprising more than 60 sleuths arrived in Bhopal. They occupied several rest houses and visited the Special Task Force office to take over the Vyapam case files. There appeared to be a sense of urgency about the operation.

Shortly, however, CBI officers realised the vast complexity of the scam. Their focus shifted from investigation to seeking adequate staff.

In August, the CBI told the Supreme Court that it was short of manpower and had a backlog of 1,237 pending cases. But a three-judge bench led by Chief Justice HL Dattu was unmoved.

“Whether it is simple, complicated, complex, super-complex... we don't know, but you will take over,” Chief Justice Dattu told Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar, the CBI’s counsel. “You cannot say that some cases the STF will continue to do, some others the Special Investigation Team will do, and some the CBI will do.”

Two months later, the CBI once again approached the Supreme Court about being short-staffed.

"The colossal task of investigating 107 cases pertaining to alleged corruption and nearly 50 cases pertaining to the suspected deaths related to the Vyapam scam, having more than 2,000 accused, cannot be met with the existing manpower and infrastructure of CBI," said the agency in its status report submitted before the Supreme Court.

The CBI has sought sanction for 496 posts. This would require an overall expenditure of nearly Rs 80 crore.

According to CBI spokesperson Devpreet Singh, the agency’s demand for setting up a special branch for Vyapam scam has been notified. This will enable the investigating officers to avail of housing facilities in Bhopal and other places in Madhya Pradesh.

Having got its special branch proposal approved, the CBI is looking for officers across its branches to work on the Vyapam scam. This exercise is likely to take a long time and till then investigation will be slow, if not altogether dormant. It’s uncertain as to when the CBI will finally begin investigating the high and mighty in connection with the scam.
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Barwani blinded by corruption

Blinded by corruption: Systemic failures cripple Madhya Pradesh healthcare

40 people blinded in a botched eye camp underline corruption and rot across the state’s hospitals.
Photo Credit: Reuters (Illustrative File Photo)
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Rasheed Kasim of Ekalwara village cannot see.

In order to correct an uncertain vision, he underwent a cataract operation at a camp in Barwani district, Madhya Pradesh, last month – and lost the little sight he had. “I have two daughters to marry off,” Kasim wailed. “What will I do now?”

Kasim is one of 40-odd people, most of them over 60, who have suffered complete loss of vision after being operated on at the camp. 27 of the victims are now being treated at two of Indore’s hospitals- Maharaja Yashwant Rao Hospital and Sri Aurobindo Institute of Medical Science. Doctors there however say these patients will likely never recover their sight.

Photo courtesy by Hemant Garg,Barwani 

Dr NK Agrawal, deputy director of the National Programme for Control of Blindness, in a report to the state government said the issue is with a contaminated eye-wash, manufactured by the Indore-based pharmaceutical company Beryl Drugs.

Dr RadheshyamPalod, head of ophthalmology at Barwani district hospital, and six paramedics who assisted in the camp, have been suspended – an act of appeasement that diverts attention from more serious systemic issues.

Barwani’s district hospital, like most others in Madhya Pradesh, is housed in dilapidated premises and lacks basic operating room facilities. Despite the conditions, eye camps have been regularly organised at Barwani – Palod has an estimated 30,000 operations to his credit.

Palod says he has been writing to the health department and the district administration for six years now, asking for facilities to be upgraded. Ajay Singh Gangwar, District Collector of Barwani, admits he is aware of the conditions but has no funds to spare. “Not just the operation theatre, the entire hospital building needs urgent renovation”, Gangwarsays.However Gauri Singh, the state’s Principal Secretary (Health), says the issue of lack of funds was never raised to her.

While bureaucracy passes the buck, "incidents" such as the botched Barwani camp occur with predictable regularity. Three years ago, six patients developed infection after routine eye operations in Seoni district. In the same year, two patients lost their sight at a camp in Khandwa district. In 2014, four patients were blinded in a camp in Chhindwara district.

The state health department facilitates an estimated five lakh cataract operations across the state, almost all of them in hospitals where conditions mirror the sorry state at Barwani.

Where does the money go?

An investigation by the Hindi daily DainikBhaskar in the wake of the botched Barwani camp found that operation theatres in most of the state’s 51 districts are ill-equipped, unhygienic and in violation of the health department’s own basic guidelines.

A day after the story appeared, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhantold the state assembly that surgical operations in district hospitals across the state would be suspended till facilities were upgraded. He further announced the formation of a three-member committee to suggest improvements. In related moves, the state government banned 19 substandard drugs being supplied by 13 companies, and announced an ‘infectionaudit; of operation theatres across all district hospitals.

Ironically, the state health department’s budget has more than doubled over the past four years –from Rs 2,165 crore in 2011-‘12 to Rs4,805 crore in 2014-‘15. Of this, the government has earmarked Rs180 crore towards purchase of drugs for this financial year alone, in addition to the Rs85 crore that the state received via the Central government’s sponsored health programmes.

Funding, thus, is impressive – and so too, on paper, is the state’s public healthcare system: 51 district hospitals, 334community health centres,66 civil hospitals, 1,171 primary health centres and 9,192 sub-primary centres.

Photo courtesy by Hemant Garg,Barwani 

Staffing, however, is woefully inadequate. Against 3,195 sanctioned posts, the state employs only 1,215 medical specialists; only 2,996 medical officers are employed against the 4,833 sanctioned posts. Of these, the majority of officers are unwilling to work in the rural health centres – a problem the chief minister himself has underlined at various times.

Three scams, one big mess

Coupled with this administrative failure is the more glaring inability of the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government to check large-scale corruption in the health sector. The Vyapam scam exposed how a nexus of bureaucrats, middlemen and politicians facilitated admissions of ineligible candidates to the state’s six medical colleges.

A bigger scandal is the large-scale rigging of admission tests for the 1,500 seats in the state’s five private medical colleges. The DMAT (dental and medical test) scam is worth Rs10,000 crore annually, according to whistle-blower Dr AnandRai who has pointed out that private colleges have been admitting affluent students on the basis of sham DMATs, and charging fees ranging from Rs 30 lakh to Rs one crore per seat.

Despite the Vyapam and DMAT scams being widely reported, the state government has done little to make the admission process to medical colleges more transparent.Meanwhile, seven more medical colleges are in line to start operations in the state.

Alongside these two scams is a third, involving misuse of centrally-sponsored health funds to purchase drugs from spurious companies. Three successive state health directors –Dr Yogiraj Sharma, Dr Ashok Sharma and Dr AK Mittal – have been found to possess assets worth hundreds of crores, in income tax raids conducted between 2008 and 2011. Yet, as the Barwani incident underlines, sub-standard drugs continue to be in use throughout the state’s healthcare system.

The political opposition has blamed state Health Minister Dr Narottam Mishra of having links with Beryl Drugs, the Indore-based company that supplied the eye-wash used in Barwani.

The minister has denied the allegation.

 

Soyabean dream turns into nightmare

In Madhya Pradesh, farmers find their soyabean dream turning into a nightmare

While Punjab looks to rescue its cotton farmers, a dozen suicides are reported from MP due the failure of a crop that once brought unprecedented prosperity to its farming community.
Photo Credit: Illustrative image. NDTV Video grab
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Hailed three decades ago as a miracle crop that brought about unprecedented prosperity to millions of Madhya Pradesh farmers, soyabean has turned into a fatal cause of agrarian distress in the state. Over a dozen debt-ridden farmers have either committed suicide or died due to shock in the last one week alone because of extensive damage to their crops.

There are reports of the crop being destroyed in 26 out of 51 soyabean  growing districts of the state –  due to scanty rains, in 11, attack of yellow or white mosaic in 12 and excessive rain in three districts.

The government estimates the damage from 35% to 40%, though local newspapers have projected the damage up to 70%, quoting farmers from across the state.

No relief

Whatever the actual assessment, the crop failure is driving farmers to end life while the chief minister is still mulling a relief package for them.

“A relief package is in the work for distressed farmers,” Shivraj Singh Chouhan announced on October 9, soon after he landed in Bhopal from his 10-day foreign sojourn, while assuring farmers that his government would ensure maximum benefit to them on crop insurance.

The troubling fact, though, is that the Rs 515 crore compensation package announced by the state government for over four lakh distressed farmers last year is yet to reach them even as a spate in farmer suicide continues.

The state agriculture minister Gauri Shankar Bisen did not help matters when instead of empathising with the farmers' distress, he said, "Seventy per cent of people live in villages in Madhya Pradesh and most of them are farmers. There could be other reasons for suicide too."

Bisen’s assertion was of a piece with Union Agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh’s statement in Lok Sabha in July when he quoted from the National Crime Records Bureau in a written reply in the Rajya Sabha to say that reasons for farmer suicides included "family problems, illness, drugs...dowry, love affairs and impotency".

According to the bureau, of the 5,650 farmers who committed suicide, 1400 had done so due to agrarian distress, as reported by the state governments.

The highest 2,568 suicides by farmers were in Maharashtra (45.5%), followed by 898 suicides in Telangana (15.9%) and 826 in Madhya Pradesh (14.6%).

Although no official figures are available for 2015 in Madhya Pradesh, the number of farmer suicides, it is feared, would  be higher than last year because damage to various crops is more extensive this time around.

The miracle that failed

Most of the farmer suicides and shock-deaths in Madhya Pradesh this year have, however, occurred due to destruction of soyabean.

Imported from the United States of America in the 1980s, soyabean spectacularly adapted itself to the environs of Madhya Pradesh and the state emerged as the largest soyabean grower in India, getting to be known as the "soyabean bowl of India", accounting for over 65% of the country’s total production.

The cash crop changed the life of millions of farmers as they opted for mechanisation of agriculture in a big way in  the 1980s. Many farmers bought tractors and other farm equipment from savings earned from soybean cultivation, according to agriculture experts.

However, production started declining in the late 1990s. Experts say a large number of farmers have continued to cling to soyabean cultivation because despite erratic rains and pest attacks over the years, this cash crop of kharif season had proved to be more dependable than traditional crops such as wheat, gram or paddy.

Until this year.

Experts attribute two main reasons for decline in soyabean production: one, lack of research to develop new seed varieties and, two, inability to protect the crop from increasing attack of pests such as white mosaic.

Agriculture expert and former director in state’s  agriculture department, GS Kaushal, says the crop has been suffering almost every year from diseases, and since the annual production is average, prices crash.” Yet, the fall in yield had not been as precipitous in the past as this year, he added.

“The production this year has been hit by white mosaic and shortage of water,” said Rajesh Rajora, the state's principal secretary, agriculture.

Falling exports

Apart from crop related issues, India’s soybean meal exports have dropped drastically by about 85% from a record level of 4.24 million tonnes during fiscal year 2008-09 to a meagre 0.64 MT in 2014-15, noted a just-concluded study by apex industry body Associated Chamber of Commerce.

“Soyabean scenario in India is currently at crossroads due to erratic production, declining soybean meal exports and consequent idling of plants, poor soyabean oil output while edible oil imports are growing and currently account for almost 60 per cent of country’s total requirement,” said DS Rawat, national secretary general of ASSOCHAM, while releasing the findings of its study.

Fall in production has resulted in rise in soyabean price by Rs 10,000 per  tonne this year to Rs 37000 per tonne,  according to Soyabean processors  association of India.  The soya processing sector in Madhya Pradesh, which is estimated to be worth Rs 25000 crore, is under extreme stress. Out of 70 soya processing units in the state, 20 are not in a position to start production.

As the government machinery takes its own time to react to the farmers’ plight on crop loss across the state, series of protests and agitations have started from farmers in various districts.

Damage to other crops, particularly wheat, accounted for most farmer suicides in the state in previous years. Destroyed soyabean  has added one more crop to the list this year, on which cotton has been a prominent name this year from Punjab, in addition to Mahrashtra and Telangana.
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Saturday, September 12, 2015

Uday Prakash's and coward Hindi writers

What has brought about a rare unity among Hindi writers, left, right and centre?

Is it just a shared sense of humiliation? Or has Uday Prakash’s recent stand against Kalburgi murder and barb at their perpetual subservience played a part in making them take a stand?
Photo Credit: Facebook
The World Hindi Conference organisers have, involuntarily, brought about a rare unity among Hindi litterateurs of left, right and centre ideologies. Most of the prominent Hindi writers have not been invited to the ongoing three-day conference in Bhopal which Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated on September 10.  And even those who were invited boycotted the meet to protest against the organisers’ controversial decision to exclude deliberations on Hindi literature from the global meet’s agenda.

However, as a prominent Marxist writer admits, this fragile unity is borne more out of a shared sense of humiliation than a genuine anger against “the dangerously illiberal BJP governments in states and the Centre”.  This observation finds ample resonance in noted writer Uday Prakash’s polemical view that “the Hindi-speaking region has always yielded to subjugation and same is true about its literature.”

Prakash has recently been in news for returning his Sahitya Akademi award as a mark of protest against Kannada scholar Professor MM Kalburgi’s murder in Karnataka by unidentified assailants on August 30. The former vice-chancellor of Hampi University had raised the hackles of right-wing outfits such as the Vishva Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal with his views on idol worship by Hindus.

In a recent interview to Catchnews, Prakash cautioned:
“Don’t expect anything from the sphere of Hindi literature. No luminary from the Hindi belt has ever been the cause of any positive change in the Indian sub-continent. Ambedkar came from West India, Gandhi was from Gujarat and Vivekananda came from Bengal.”

A mirror to Hindiwallahs?

Has he overstated his point out of sheer anger over the Kannada writer’s murder? Or, has he really shown a mirror to Hindi writers?

Most of the dozen-odd Hindi litterateurs, writer-journalists, culture activists the Scroll spoke to tended to agree with Uday Prakash’s viewpoint. A few of them, however, pointed out that many left-leaning writers had registered protests against Professor Kalburgi’s murder in north Indian cities such as Bhopal, Jabalpur, Lucknow, while admitting that stronger actions were needed to wake up people against increasingly intolerant right wing forces.

However, most of these left-liberal personalities with such views also happened to be Prakash’s friends from his home state Madhya Pradesh. Prakash’s close friend and prestigious BD Goenka awardee journalist-poet Raaj Kumar Keswani said he couldn’t agree more with the rebel writer. “Not only in literature, in all spheres of creative writing, including journalism, conformism has increased alarmingly. The regrettable trend is more pronounced in the Hindi belt as Uday Prakash rightly pointed out.”

Keswani, though, was optimistic that “the cosy-club relationship between the establishment and the intelligentsia is sure to break up as saffron dictatorship under the Modi regime is most likely to degenerate into an Emergency-like political chaos.”  Recalling a surge in rebel literature after the Emergency, he said, the "best writing always emerges during the time of crisis.”

Octogenarian editor-writer Gyan Ranjan shared both Udai Prakash’s cynicism and Keswani’s optimism. Editor of Pahal , one of the most prestigious Hindi literary magazines, for over 42 years, Ranjan reasoned that protests by the Hindi writers have been rather subdued in the past partly because, with all their weaknesses, the previous governments did not pose so great a danger to creative freedom as the Modi government does.

He said he barely escaped arrest during the Emergency because there were “many liberal enough people in the Madhya Pradesh government” who respected freedom of expression.  “But”, he warned, “dissenting voices face existential crisis and not just danger to creative freedom as saffron forces rise menacingly with tacit blessing of the BJP government. Professor Kalbugi’s murder is another chilling reminder of this. ”

Veteran theatre director Arun Pandey of Jabalpur faced threat to his life from saffron activists in 2002 when his group “Vivechana” staged Uday Prakash’s play Aur Ant me Prarthana (And prayer at the end).  In the midst of the performance, Bajrang Dal and VHP members barged into the theatre hall and vandalised the show in Jabalpur. The play has an oblique reference to the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh which the hooligans did not like.

Pandey completely endorsed Prakash’s decision to return the government award. The theatre director also felt that most Hindi writers succumb to allurement or pressure when chips are down.

Timid response

“What to speak of government, we have seen prominent writers prostrating before just a bureaucrat. Can we forget how Hindi litterateurs would wag their tails before then culture czar and IAS [Indian Adminsitrative Service officer] – poet Ashok Vajpeyi in 1980s and 1990s?”

Vajpeyi was trustee-secretary of multi art complex Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal. During his stint, the Hindi literary world appeared to be divided neatly between those who supported or opposed him. With Vajpeyi at the helm of Bharat Bhavan, the fulcrum of Hindi literary polemics seemed to have shifted from New Delhi to Bhopal. On one side were litterateurs known as ideologically social democrats and ranged against them were Marxists. Veteran Hindi critic Dr Namvar Singh was leading the Marxist charge against Bharat Bhavan, ably assisted by Gyan Ranjan from Jabalpur. Ranjan, though already famous, had risen to prominence as a leftist torch-bearer after he successfully organised a national convention of the Progressive Writers' Association in 1981 in Jabalpur. The meet was acknowledged in literary circles as the most successful since the association’s first conference in 1936 in Lucknow which was presided over by Munshi Prem Chand.

Ashok Vajpeyi’s younger brother Udayan, a noted poet himself, said he too is agitated over Kalburgi’s murder and the timidity of the response from Hindi litterateurs. But he said the government was displaying even more timidity by not inviting prominent litterateurs in the World Hindi Conference. “The government is afraid of intellectuals,” he said. “And such a government can never be democratic.”

Need to speak up

Noted poet Rajesh Joshi, who is leading the protests against the World Hindi Conference, said he didn’t mind that he was not invited but would like to know what the participants and organisers had to say on Kalburgi’s murder. “Independent-minded writers have been kept off the event because the government was apprehensive they would have discussed issues like murder of Kalburgi which it does not want discussed,” he charged.

Like Uday Prakash, Marxist poet Joshi is also a Sahitya Akademi award winner. However, Joshi is non-committal over whether he too would return the award. Speculation is rife in Hindi literary scene that some poets, notably Virendra Dangwal and Manglesh Dabral are mulling returning their respective awards bestowed on them by governments for literary contribution in the past.

Octogenarian journalist-activist Lajjashankar Herdenia said that if the Hindi litterateurs don’t unite against fascist forces now, the very socio-political fabric of secular India will be in peril.

Herdenia  is known in Bhopal for always being at the forefront in organising protests against regressive decisions of  governments,  on such varied causes as communal riots, the appointment of Gajendra Chouhan as FTII chairman or the murders of professor Kalburgi, CPI leader Govind Pansare and rationalist Narendra  Dabholkar.

“Unlike in the past, careerism has crept into creative writing in the Hindi belt. Most writers are employed in government or private sector, particularly in teaching, and they don’t want to jeopardise their career by openly raising their voices against the establishment”, he said.
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