Slow Lane: India grapples with ‘award wapsi’

The Union culture ministry has been hesitant about a parliamentary committee’s recommendation to get Sahitya Akademi award winners to sign an undertaking that they will not return the literary honour for any reason, including as a political protest.

The panel informed Parliament about this in its action-taken report on Monday, saying that the ministry has expressed doubts about the legal enforceability of such undertakings.

The Union government had been responding to recommendations made by the parliamentary standing committee on culture in July 2023.

While making the recommendations, the committee had cited the “award wapsi” protest of 2015, when 39 Sahitya Akademi recipients had returned their prizes to express their dismay at the growing incidents of communal violence in the country, particularly the murder of Kannada language writer MM Kalburgi.

The panel had said that returning the winners returning their prizes to protest “certain political issues” that were “outside the ambit of the cultural realms” undermined the achievements of other awardees and “impact the overall prestige and reputation of the awards”.

The ministry said that it agreed with the panel’s “perspective and would like to avoid controversies” when it comes to returning of the awards, The Hindu reported. “However, obtaining a signed commitment from the writer prior to the award announcement would unfortunately compromise the confidentiality surrounding the selection process,” the ministry was quoted as saying.

In 2015, among those...

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