Statutory warning in awards is a bad idea

The choice of an award is as much about building the reputation of the award-giver as it’s about recognising the awardee. The same applies for the award’s terms and conditions. In a report tabled in Parliament this week, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture recommended that recipients of awards by state-run Akademis should be asked to sign an undertaking that they won’t return the awards later. This is an absurd suggestion. Such a ‘statutory warning’ would only devalue the award.

The panel cited three reasons for its ‘suggestion’: one, Akademis are ‘apolitical’ organisations; second, political issues fall outside the ambit of culture; three, ‘award wapsi‘ brings ‘disgrace’ to the country.

The suggestion itself undermines the first two reasons, as nothing is really ‘apolitical’; they are only overtly or covertly ‘political’. And the third reason is facetious, since an awardee returning an award for whatever reason, however churlish, hardly amounts to disgracing ‘country’. It simply is a protest against the award-giver. Nothing less, nothing more.

Two of the 31 MPs on the panel rightly argued that the Constitution gives every citizen the freedom to protest, of which returning awards is a form.

Whether Sahitya Akademis, Nobels or Oscars, awards gain prestige by dint of those they choose to fete. Telling, say, Marlon Brando that he couldn’t refuse his Oscar – which he did in 1973 to protest against the treatment of Native American Indians by his countrymen – would have only turned the Oscar into a Soviet-style agitprop device. In any case, how can someone guarantee that he or she won’t return an award years after he or she gets it? Not accepting a ‘returned’ award has its own comic possibilities.