A literature festival in Puducherry has rattled the French media. Here’s why.

A literature festival will take place this month in the quaint little town of Puducherry. This has sent one of the biggest newspapers of France off its rocker, namely Le Monde. The agenda-driven bile peddled by the publication in its attempt to derail the effort, betrays deep-seated insecurity. But what is even more unfortunate is the distinct colonial undercurrent, as if they possess a god-given right to pass judgement over anything that takes place in Puducherry.

Having been associated with the festival at several levels, and working at righlog.in (they have attempted to slander tfipost.com in the process as well), I decided to debunk the writer’s claims. The gentleman seems to be weak both with facts and with his understanding of my country, and is either withholding or might not have been privy to some information.

What has caught the writer’s attention is that Alliance Francaise Pondicherry is one of the locations where some of the festival’s sessions will take place. He wonders if the Alliance is turning into a Hindu nationalist institution, considering most speakers are Hindu nationalists. This begs the question, are most speakers Hindu nationalists? They might be Hindus like most people in India, and they might be nationalists, like most people in India as well. But the term ‘Hindu nationalist’ has a different connotation. None of the speakers describe themselves thus, and the writer has provided no evidence whatsoever to back his claim.

Moreover, the Alliance Francaise Pondicherry’s president Lalit Verma has told Le Monde on the record what the mandate of the institution is. The institution is controlled by an independent Indian body, and seeks to promote Indian culture and the French language. Almost every speaker is deeply associated with Indian culture in one way or another. Yet, despite this clarification, the writer pushes his saffron-phobic agenda. How narrow-minded must one be to associate every aspect of Indian culture with political saffronization?

The writer’s main grouse is that many of the speakers are perceived to be close to the current regime. Being one of the organizers of the festival, I can dismiss this charge with something as simple as ‘so what’, but that’s no fun. Do look at it from the curators’ point of view, or the organizers’ point of view too for once. If one is to organize a festival where, for example, the economy is discussed, should we not have people who are framing the country’s economic policy today, and very successfully at that? If we are discussing history, should we have non-serious historians who write from their imaginations, or those who actually use first-hand evidence to write history? When we discuss Indian culture, should we have those who diss and dismiss it, or those who actually appreciate and understand it?

If the writer is still not convinced, here are a few tweets from our curator, professor Makarand Paranjape that will surely clear the air. These were tweeted when India’s leftist cabal conducted a concerted attack against the festival on social media, calling it one-sided. The professor immediately invited a bunch of them, including the likes of Vir Sanghvi, Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai and even S Vardharajan (who is married to Nalini Sundar), to take part. None of them accepted the invitation.

So the cabal refused to grace us with its esteemed presence, but was quick to point out that the lit fest was one-sided. It’s unfortunate that the writer from Le Monde has indulged in the same hypocrisy. It’s a simple question, whom should you label as intolerant, bigoted and biased, those who organize a festival or those refuse to attend it?

Moving to the writer’s charges against tfipost.com, he has called the portal a Hindu nationalist portal and criticized one of the speaker’s writings on the site which praise the current Prime Minister. Is it a crime to hold the opinion that Prime Minister Modi has done some great work for the country, and to write about it? For all the liberalism that media outlets like Le Monde espouse, they seem to be quite comfortable with censorship when something makes them uneasy. As for what they think of tfipost.com, I can only say that there are many people who’s opinions matter to us, but a commie rag from France is certainly not one of them.

Let me end my rant with a thought I have had in the course of these controversies. I have wondered if any of our critics would have had a problem had we called ourselves something other than a lit fest. I doubt it. What irks them is that someone has entered their citadel, someone is conducting an event that only they had a monopoly over. A lit fest without a single Naxal? How is it even a lit fest, they wonder.