Gujarat IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt and noted journalists Zafar Agha have declined to receive the Maulana Mohd Ali Jauhar Award as a mark of protest against honouring of Sikh riot accused Jagdish Tytler with the same award.
Delhi-based Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar Academy had announced to honour eight people at India Islamic Cultural Centre here in New Delhi on December 10.
“I told them that I cannot accept an award or share a platform with Mr Tytler,” Bhatt told a group of activists, who had requested him to stay away from the function.
Almost 40 writers and activists in a signed appeal have also urged other awardees including chief election commissioner S Y Qureshi, chief income tax commissioner Mohd Najeeb Ashraf Chaudhri, chairman, Deoband Nagar Palika Parishad Maulana Mohd Haseeb Siddiqui, poet Nusrat Gwalliori, and Mumbai- based social activist Begum Rehana AR Andre to reject the award.
The appeal says awarding a riot accused with an award named after Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar, a prominent figure of the Indian freedom movement, will be misuse of the name of the distinguished personality of Indian and Muslim history. The Maulana was the sixth Muslim president of the Indian National Congress and also a leader of the Khilafat movement.
“The undersigned appeal to the other seven awardees to not accept the award as a mark of protest against honouring Tytler, whose contribution in the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom has been recorded by several fact-finding reports, including those by PUCL and PUDR,” the activists said in a statement.
