A group of 135 scientists submitted a petition to President Pranab Mukherjee.
By Sreejith Vallikunnu
Top Indian scientist Dr PM Bhargava has joined the writers and filmmakers who are returning their awards in protest of the alleged rising intolerance in the country. Bhargava has decided to return his Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award in India.
Bhargava, the founder-director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), told the Times of India that he felt “no sentimental attachment” to his award “when the government tries to institutionalise religion and curtail freedom and scientific spirit”.
“I, however, hope young scientists too will raise their voice”, he added.
Bhargava’s announcement comes hours after a group of filmmakers and artists returned their national awards for the same cause on Wednesday.
Dibakar Banerjee, Anand Patwardhan, Paresh Kamdar, Harshavardhan Kulkarni, Hari Nair, Rakesh Sharma, Indraneel Lahiri and Lipika Singh Darai are among those who returned their awards. Their decision was also part of showing solidarity with Film and Television Institute of India students who have been protesting against the appointment of Gajendra Chauhan as the institute’s chairman.
“I am not here out of anger, outrage. Those emotions have long been exhausted. I am here to draw attention. Returning my very first National Award which I received for ‘Khosla Ka Ghosla’ is not easy. It was my first film and for many my most loved,” Dibakar Banerjee, who won his National Award for Best Feature Film in Hindi in 2006 for ‘Khosla Ka Ghosla’, said.
Documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan said, “I haven’t seen so many incidents happen at the same time. This is a sign of what is beginning to happen and I think that is why people are responding all over the country in different ways.”
Bhargava is the first Indian scientist to return an award as part of a protest. A group of 135 scientists including Bhargava had submitted a petition addressing President Pranab Mukherjee in protest against the ‘climate of intolerance’.
“The scientific community is deeply concerned with the climate of intolerance and the ways in which science and reason are being eroded in the country. It is the same climate of intolerance and rejection of reason that led to the lynching in Dadri of Mohammad Akhlaq and the assassinations of Prof. M.M. Kalburgi, Dr.Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare. All three fought against superstition and obscurantism to build a scientific temper in our society,” said the petition.
Apart from Bhargava, among those who signed the statement are P Balram, former director of Indian Institute of Science; Ashoke Sen of the Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad; A Gopalakrishnan, former chairman of Atomic Energy Regulatory Board; B Ravindran of the Institute of Life Sciences, Bhubaneswar; Partha Pratim Majumdar of the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics in Kalyani and Satyajit Rath of the National Institute of Immunology in Delhi, the Indian Express reported.
1 Comment
When Scientists within India are shunted off or humiliated or harassed Dr PMB dd not remember to return the Award……….Dr PMB shd also think of the future of Indian scientists who were stopped from serving the Country bcoz they were honest and daring enof to expose Scientific corruption in Indian labs including the lab he founded……By returning nothing is going to change……I remember him saying on inauguration of CCMB in 1987 that in next 20 years i.e., 2007, his CCMB wud produce one Nobel Laureate…………..wonder why he dd not return the award in 2007 as his costly experiment ‘CCMB’ failed on all fronts except wasting 1000’s of crores of public money in name of modern science……….so it is such ppl who have failed to deliver and not others……….