All democracies becoming dictatorial and intolerant: Devi
GOANEWS DESK, PANAJI | 30 December 2015 12:48 IST
All democracies in the world are becoming dictatorial as well as intolerant and India is not lagging behind, cautions Ganesh Devi, veteran multilingual writer from Gujarat.
He has thus appealed to all the writers, artists, thinkers, social activists as well as all those who are working sincerely to save the Mother Earth to come together and fight the intolerance rising all over the World.
Speaking after honouring writers with Bimb Awards at Agacaim, Devi said tolerance is no more a political issue but has become the need for survival of all of us and to develop society through diversity.
According to Devi, who was honoured with Padmashree last year for his work with nomadic tribes, USA, Germany, France and almost all the democracies in the world are becoming dictatorial and intolerant.
“India is not lagging behind but following the footsteps of world democracies”, he observed.
Having led the People's Linguistic Survey of India in 2010, Devi also said that linguistic and cultural diversity is the need of the hour to move forward and develop our consciousness, knowledge and communication.
He feels conserving, protecting and developing diversities in the world is non-negotiable, but is today threatened by the forces who are displaying intolerance.
He also observed that diversity would prevail only if there is tolerance and intolerance doesn’t allow diversity.
“The choice is death, extinction or diversity”, he put it bluntly.
To elaborate on his theory of diversity vis-a-vis tolerance, Devi explained how the whole universe has evolved through diversities in the last lakhs of years.
“When diversity shrinks, process of evolution gets stagnant. When there is diversity all around, evolution facilitates smoothly”, said Devi, the fellow of Leeds University of UK.
He said the struggles for diversities are today witnessed not only in India but Egypt, Bulgaria, Pakistan, Australia and almost all the countries.
The human animal has always tried to control and suppress diversities all over the world and the language diversity is the worst affected among all, he said.
Though language is comparatively a small issue, it becomes pertinent when cultural diversity being made the victim of suppression of diversity by the intolerant ruling classes.
He thus appealed to the writes, artists, cultural workers and thinkers gathered at the Bimb Award ceremony to realise the magnitude of the issue and come out of their shells to fight the onslaught on diversified development of the world, threatened by intolerance.
The writers were earlier felicitated at the hands of Devi with Bimb Awards, instituted by Bimb monthly editor Dilip Borkar.
