Moments after Nayantara Sahgal announced her decision to return the Sahitya Akademi award, given in 1986 for her novel, Rich Like Us, reactions came in, revealing the sharp polarization of Indian politics. In her statement, she condemned the government over its failure to protect India’s diversity, and said, “The prime minister remains silent about this reign of terror. We must assume he dare not alienate evil-doers who support his ideology."

Earlier in September, within days of the murder of the Kannada scholar M.M. Kalburgi, the Hindi writer Uday Prakash had returned his Sahitya Akademi award, given in 2010 for his work, Mohan Das. Kalburgi had won the Sahitya Akademi award for Kannada in 2006, for his essays, Marga – 4. While returning his award, Prakash said: “This is not the time to remain silent to protect oneself. Silence will only embolden such forces." Other Kannada writers have also returned state honours. In 1919, Rabindranath Tagore returned his knighthood to protest the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre. Prakash, Sahgal and the Kannada writers remind the nation of how far it is from the heaven of freedom in which Tagore wanted the country to awake.

Those who know Sahgal were not surprised by her decision. But adverse comments came promptly. Among the questions, out of rhetoric and ignorance: Who was she? Who gave her the award? Her supporters and her critics pointed out that she was “Nehru’s niece," as though that singular fact, and not her 11 novels, described her best.

We can’t choose our relatives; we choose our commitments and causes. We inherit some values, and we rebel against others. That her mother Vijayalakshmi Pandit was Nehru’s sister is as much of a fact as Varun Gandhi being Nehru’s great-grandson. In fact, Sahgal had criticized her cousin Indira Gandhi’s authoritarianism and the Emergency. She was horrified over the treatment of Jayaprakash Narayan. “She has never been blinded by her privilege," novelist Hari Kunzru wrote in The Guardian in 2012. You won’t find Sahgal’s biography, Indira Gandhi: Tryst with Power on most Congress leaders’ bookshelves. In the 1980s, she was a vice-president of the People’s Union of Civil Liberties, which would, with the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, publish Who Are the Guilty?, the first investigative report on the 1984 massacre of Sikhs. Sahgal believes in the idea of an inclusive republic, which she now sees being torn asunder.

What is that idea? Not clichés like “unity in diversity", but the recognition that a vast, multi-everything country can progress only when it is built on the principles of freedom and justice, with the values of tolerance and compassion, and which regards the dignity of the individual and respect for each others’ rights as of paramount importance. It has room for everyone, but it is not perfect.

Politicians believing in a narrower identity and businessmen keen to prosper by trampling on others’ rights may find such an India unattractive. To understand that idea, turn to Rich Like Us, which also won the Sinclair Prize in Britain. The novel showed the romantic pre-independence aspirations collapsing in the harsh reality of the Emergency, a period when “sullenness is building up heavily along New Delhi’s roads". The novel condemned grandiose ambition and was sharply critical of double standards, smugness and unprincipled corruption. Two women, Sonali and Rose, are outsiders to the ethos of the new politics that has emerged. Sonali is an Oxford-educated IAS officer, a conscientious bureaucrat who is puzzled when she is removed from her post arbitrarily. Sonali has taken the procedurally correct decision of turning down an application to open a factory called Happyola, which would make soft drinks. That act marks her as an outsider in the new India, where values of the Constitution are becoming less important than the values of the market. Rose has married an Indian businessman, already married, and she knows that, but nonetheless she makes India her home. The businessman’s son resents her and his father, and Happyola is to quench his pursuit of happiness. The story weaves together compelling strands—of politics, nepotism, corruption, wealth, power, colonialism, ideology, feminism and feudalism, portraying India’s complicated mosaic.

Rich Like Us showed how the Emergency weakened India’s institutional underpinnings. Today, the crisis is more pervasive, insidious and doesn’t come from only one direction. Critical voices feel vulnerable as they face threats from the state or from others. A lynch mob kills someone on suspicion that he may have eaten beef. A police officer tears up a journalist’s business card and threatens him with jail; a sub-inspector demolishes an old typist’s typewriter for no reason. And the rights of the offended trump the rights of the artists.

Of course, India is a large country and there are exceptions, and you can’t blame the prime minister for everything, his supporters say. But through his silences and refusal to condemn, he implies his tacit approval of what he sees. Uday Prakash and Nayantara Sahgal are the canaries in that coal mine.

Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London.

Your comments are welcome at salil@livemint.com. To read Salil Tripathi’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/saliltripathi

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