Patar fears politicians could damage Akademi’s autonomy

CHANDIGARH: Why is the returning of Sahitya Akademi awards irking politicians, poet Surjit Patar, who recently returned the award he had received in 1993, has asked and raised doubts that they could dent the autonomy of the top literary body.
“I got this award from the Sahitya Akademi and I returned it,” Patar says. The Akademi is an autonomous body, he says, and no politician is invited to its events.“But the way issue of writers returning their awards has angered politicians shows they don’t consider it autonomous,” Patar, a Padma Shri awardee and one of the most famous contemporary poets, says.
Calling the Akademi a family of literatures, he says he has returned the award so that the Akademi becomes a voice of the nation’s conscience, a voice that can’t be silenced by any fear.
In his letter to Akademi president Vishwanath Prasad Tiwari on Tuesday, he wrote he had never imagined he would ever return his award and said he had done so with a heavy heart. In the end, he said he wished the Akademi became like Tiwari’s poems. “I hope it becomes the nation’s voice like his poems, not politicians’ voice,” he says.
On Wednesday, finance minister Arun Jaitley had called writers returning awards a “manufactured revolt”.
Ten writers from Punjab have returned their Sahitya Akademi awards in protest against the rising intolerance and threat to freedom of expression in the country since Sunday. Eminent Punjabi writer Dalip Kaur Tiwana had also returned her Padma Shri on Tuesday.