Online campaign for 'clean' Padma awards

NEW DELHI: The controversy over NRI hotelier Sant Singh Chatwal being awarded Padma Bhushan has taken the form of an online protest campaign to "cleanse national awards", spearheaded by two prominent media personalities Vir Sanghvi and Pritish Nandy.
The duo on Thursday kickstarted the website 'honestawards' a day after the home ministry issued a statement defending Chatwal's nomination and refuting reports of pending CBI cases.
Sanghvi and Nandy on Wednesday had tweeted their decision to file an RTI application questioning Chatwal's nomination. "Pritish and I have started a site honestawards. Send in your tweets if you want to participate in the cleansing of our various national awards," Sanghvi tweeted.
Nandy in his tweet to Sanghvi said, "Was Padma award for honesty???? Please find out." Speaking to TOI, Nandy said he had reasons to believe that Chatwal's name was not in the original list. Rooting for systemic changes, Nandy said, "We would like the process of choosing nominations to be transparent."
This is not the first time that the Padma awards have been surrounded in controversy. Despite MHA's admission that no minutes of meetings are maintained, it had admitted that during the NDA regime, guidelines established by the high level K R Narayanan committee had been flouted.