The award this year has been jointly awarded to Prof Aditya Nigam’s book Aasmaan Aur Bhi Hain: Vaicharik Swaraj Ke Taqaze, and Hilal Ahmad’s book Allah Naam Ki Siyasat
Waquar Hasan | Clarion India
NEW DELHI – Prominent author and political theorist Aditya Nigam has declined to receive the Ramchandra Khan Social Science Award in protest against the invitation extended to Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) leader and Bihar’s Deputy Chief Minister Samrat Chaudhry to attend the event.
The award, given annually by the Patna-based Lok Darshan Nyas, has this year been jointly awarded to Prof Aditya Nigam’s book Aasmaan Aur Bhi Hain: Vaicharik Swaraj Ke Taqaze, and Hilal Ahmad’s book Allah Naam Ki Siyasat. The award ceremony is scheduled for April 5 in the state capital of Patna.
On Tuesday, Nigam took to social media to announce that he will not receive the award from any BJP or RSS leader.
“I have written to the organisers saying that I will, under no circumstance, receive the award from any Sangh or BJP person and that they should cancel my tickets etc.,” he wrote on Facebook.
“All of yesterday so many friends congratulated me on the award for my Hindi book ‘Aasman Aur Bhi Hain’, which I happily accepted. I thank all those friends from the bottom of my heart. However, a little while ago I received the poster for the inaugural event and came to know that the chief guest will be the BJP Deputy Chief Minister of Bihar, Samrat Chaudhary. And who knows, he might even hand out the award,” he added.
He stated that arguments to the effect that he has been called as Deputy CM and not as a party person do not hold water for him. “Even Modi and Shah can be called as PM and HM by that logic,” said Nigam.
Earlier, Kumar Varun, secretary of Lok Darshan Nyas on Sunday said that the award selection committee found both of these books possessed “global intellectual quality, creative vision, and profound discourse”.
“This will have a significant perpetual impact on Hindi social thought. The award will be presented to the distinguished authors at a programme organised on April 5 in the memory of Ramchandra Khan, Gandhian thinker and founder-president of Lok Darshan Nyas,” Varun said in a press statement.
The award, for original works in Hindi, covers the field of social sciences. As part of the award, the authors will receive a cash prize of ₹1 lakh each, along with certificates of appreciation.
The four-member award selection committee comprised Professors Yogendra Yadav, Manisha Priyam, Raj Kumar, and Manindra Nath Thakur.
Nigam is a political theorist based at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. His recent work has been concerned with the decolonisation of social and political theory. He has earlier worked on ideological and discursive formations and their relationship to the constitution of political subjectivities. In particular, his interest lies in theorising the contemporary experience of politics, populism and democracy in the non-West – treating the non-West as the ground for ‘doing theory’, rather than a field for application or testing of standard frameworks derived from the Western experience.
A parallel and related part of Nigam’s work has been concerned with interrogating the received ‘philosophical history’ of capital, once again from the vantage point of the experiences of India and the non-West in general.
Nigam also works with the CSDS’s Indian Languages Programme and its Hindi journal Pratiman. He regularly comments on contemporary political issues on the blog Kafila.online.
He is the author of The Insurrection of Little Selves: The Crisis of Secular Nationalism in India (2006), Power and Contestation: India Since 1989, with Nivedita Menon (2007), After Utopia: Modernity, Socialism and the Postcolony (2010), and Desire Named Development (2011), and Decolonising Theory: Thinking Across Traditions (2020).
