NEW DELHI—When a gang of thugs ambushed a Mumbai book launch by dousing the compere in ink, India’s literati saw the attack as yet another blot on the country’s reputation for tolerance since Narendra Modi came to power.
“Such attacks may have happened earlier too but this time it’s different,” said celebrated writer and historian Nayantara Sahgal, following Monday’s incident.
“Now the ruling ideology is Hindutva, which, in a classic fascist tactic, demands that all Indians think alike,” Sahgal told AFP.
The 88-year-old niece of India’s first premier Jawaharlal Nehru caused a storm earlier this month when she handed back her ‘Sahitya Akademi Award’, which is bestowed by the government to honur India’s leading writers.
More than a dozen writers from across the country have since followed suit, several of them saying they were protesting the “rising culture of intolerance” since the right-wing Modi won a landslide election last year.
India’s overwhelmingly left-leaning cultural elite has never been a fan of Modi or his Bharatiya Janata Party, which has an unashamedly Hindu nationalist agenda.
But while there was an uneasy truce between the two sides during Modi’s first year in office, a series of recent episodes have prompted many to warn of a major threat to India’s cultural and religious pluralism.
The killing of a leading rationalist author in the southern state of Karnataka in August sent a shiver down writers’ spines, while the recent lynching of a Muslim accused of eating beef caused further deep unease.
Police have detained for questioning several Hindu activists for applauding writer MM Kalburgi’s murder.
“I cannot accept, leave aside understand, that in my country scholars are murdered because they have campaigned against religious superstition or because they’ve criticized Hindu idol worship,” the prominent television journalist Karan Thapar wrote recently in The Hindustan Times.
“And I’m appalled that a man is barbarically battered to death for eating beef or possessing it in his fridge. This is not my India. It can never be. And, yet, it is,” Thapar said.
Comments by Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma pledging to cleanse India of “cultural pollution” from the West, and that the Bible and Koran are “not central to the soul of India” in the same way as Hindu holy books, have fuelled fears that the country is being run by religious ideologues.