A veteran poet on Friday said he would not participate in a cultural festival in the capital because the organisers had asked him not to read poems critical of the government.
A spokesperson from the Rekhta Foundation, which is the co-organiser of the session, denied Ashok Vajpeyi’s claim that he was being censored. Vajpeyi was scheduled to attend a poetry session on Friday at the three-day Arth Culture Fest, organised by Zee, at Sunder Nursery.
“I won’t be taking part in the culture fest organised by Arth and Rekhta because I have been asked to read such poems that do not directly critique politics or the government. This type of censorship is unacceptable,” Vajpeyi wrote in Hindi on Facebook.
“A person had contacted me from Rekhta and asked if I would be reading any poems with political connotations. I told them how can poetry be apolitical, so they asked me to refrain from it,” the 82-year-old poet said.
“I do not stand for this type of censorship, that is why I will not be joining,” he added. Satish Gupta, head of communications at Rekhta Foundation, said: “We did ask everyone about what they were planning to recite at the session, but that was just so we could add it to their introduction at the programme. We or Zee never told them to not read anything political. If it were true, we would have asked the same from everyone else.”
Vajpeyi, who was chairperson of the Lalit Kala Akademi from 2008-2011, was among those who returned their Sahitya Akademi Awards in 2015 to protest the “assault on the right to freedom of both life and expression”.
PTI
