### Pen Soldiers Are Never Neutral : Vedvyas

Renowned satirist Harishankar Parsai once said about eminent Hindi poet Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh that Muktibodh was tormented by the coalition of active dishonest and passive honest people. Today, neither Muktibodh nor Parsai is with us, and in the era of globalization and free trade in the 21st century, our literary world is suffering from this unholy grand coalition. Observing the silence of writers on any problem, challenge, or question of the changing India, I still feel that writers are making more compromises and submissions rather than confronting the times. Like a self-absorbed heroine. Hence, it belongs neither to you nor to me but to literature, society, and time. This ailment of passive dishonesty and active honesty has grown miserably since 2014 in the Hindi world, and everyone is searching for salvation and profit through propaganda and confrontation on their fronts.

Nevertheless, writers and cultural activists have become irrelevant in the literary market because they have abandoned their conscience and embraced intellectual luxury to ensure security before progress. History also notes that the Progressive Writers' Association was established (1936) for the first time in the struggle for political and socio-economic change in the country, and at that time, storyteller Premchand had said that literature is the torch that leads politics and not a business of entertainment and social gatherings. Since then, all organizations with Leftist and Marxist ideologies (Progressive Writers' Association, Democratic Writers' Association, Cultural Platforms, etc.) have fragmented under the extreme interference and contradictions of Leftist parties in all linguistic consciousness in India and have been taking dips in the flowing Ganges of individualism and market-driven systems. Announcements have been made of the death of ideologies, and writers have taken the opportunistic path of leaving all options open. In 1977, for the Congress, poet Srikanth Verma and bureaucrat poet Girija Kumar Mathur had formed the National Writers' Organization during Indira Gandhi's Emergency, but at that time, Leftist writers' associations had not surrendered before the Emergency, and Srikanth Verma's dream had shattered. I, too, lost my job at All India Radio under the Emergency and hence want to say that since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of socialism in 1990, the free market globalization that began in India has led to fragmentation, exodus, and the coalition of active dishonesty and passive honesty in our literature, and the constitution of secularism, democracy, and socialist dreams has begun to weaken, which today has turned into an open play of Farukhabaadi. Surprisingly, the so-called All India Literary Council, initiated by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Jan Sangh, and BJP, is still not broken and scattered, but post-2014, it has openly sounded the trumpet of cultural Hindu nationalism in the fields of literature, culture, art, music, education, science, and information broadcasting and history, and is also building a new India. The truth is that since 1925, the right wing has remained united, but our movements of democratic socialist and secular literature and cultural consciousness have been continuously breaking due to internal conflicts and individualist egos. In such difficult times, my experience and request say what will happen to this new India tomorrow? Where today there is no opposition from Parliament to the street, no intervention from Janpath to Rajpath, and no Rabindranath, Subrahmanyam Bharti, Premchand, Kaifi Azmi, Mahasweta Devi, Mahadevi, Meera, Muktibodh, or Parsai in the fields of literature, culture, and education. I feel that a dark age is looming over the experiments of literature, culture, education, freedom, and truth in India because we are silent, afraid, and trapped in the market of profit and loss and anti-people thoughts, and are deceiving literature, society, and time. Because centuries of slavery have made our truth of being human fight each power system as Dalits, tribals, women, and minorities. The credibility of words has been crushed and sold in the market today. Where is the consciousness and tradition of Taslima Nasrin and Ganesh Lal Vyas Ustad now, which can again flow the Nirgun stream of Govind Guru and Kabir? We have witnessed the partition of India and Pakistan, we were organized during the Emergency, and we were not part of the Somnath to Ayodhya Rath Yatra, so why are we silent and spectators now? Who is making us fight, and who is making us puppets of the government and the market?