Eminent author and niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, Nayantara Sehgal today returned the Sahitya Akademi award. Nayantara Sehgal said she was resigning in protest against increasing intolerance towards right to dissent in the country.
Citing various incidents of killings of writers and rationalists including M Kalburgi and Govind Pansare, she said that rationalists who question superstition are being marginalised, persecuted, or murdered.
Sehgal received Sahitya Akademi award in 1986 for her English novel ‘Rich Like Us’.
recently, a village blacksmith, Mohammed Akhlaq, was dragged out of his home in Bishada village outside Delhi, and brutally lynched, on the supposed suspicion that beef was cooked in his home, the 88-year-old author said in a statement.
“In all these cases, justice drags its feet. The Prime Minister remains silent about this reign of terror. We must assume he dare not alienate evil-doers who support his ideology. It is a matter of sorrow that the Sahitya Akademi remains silent….
Nayantara Sahgal (born 10 May 1927) is an Indian writer in English. Her fiction deals with India’s elite responding to the crises engendered by political change; she was one of the first female Indian writers in English to receive wide recognition. She is a member of the Nehru family.The second of the three daughters born to Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit.
She was awarded the 1986 Sahitya Akademi Award for English, for her novel, Rich Like Us (1985), by the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters.