I came across a beaming Dr. Gopi Chand Narang at a get-together to honour O. P. Jain, also my friend, whom I admire very much for becoming one of the country’s greatest art connoisseurs despite his profession of selling paper. The gathering was at the residence of Dr. L. M. Singhvi, member of the Rajya Sabha, himself a celebrity of many accomplishments including diplomacy, poetry, the arts and humanism above all. Everyone was congratulating Narang. Among them was the former secretary of the Sahitya Akademi, Dr. Indra Nath Chaudhari, the famous Punjabi writer and scholar, Dr. Maheep Singh, the famous singer Surrinder Singh and, of course. O. P. Jain, Dr. Singhvi and I. One of the guests told him that his father, a good Muslim and well known liberal and radical in literature, had prayed for his success.

I have known Professor Narang for nearly half a century and have been a great admirer of this "great voice of Urdu" and trend-setter for all the languages of India and Indian language literature. I was, in fact, pained during the two months of media hype by some literary ‘mujahideen’ who tried to brand him as an RSS crony and nominee of a group of political parties. Now, how could these ladies and gentlemen, seemingly with at least some reputation because of their public eminence and credibility, be so naive as to believe that a man who had known and lived with the great non-rightist champions of Urdu like Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Ali Sardar Jafri and Kaifi Azmi, championing the cause of Urdu and using it as a bridge between various Indian languages, be accused of the "virtues and vices" he was suddenly alleged to have acquired suddenly because he decided to contest the election for the presidency of the Sahitya Akademi. Anyway, the dust has settled now and clouded vision can perhaps see things with more clarity. I can say with all honesty and literary authority at my humble command that the future of the Sahitya Akademi is safe, bright and full of hope in the hands of the new President and his team. I see him neither as a leftist or rightist, but as simply "literaturist". And, thank God, the senseless and sterile campaign by the frustrated and bad-livered folk of literary politics has exposed and defeated itself. I hope they won’t carry on their ridiculous "categorisation and communalisation of literature" to ridiculous ends. For, they could raise controversies about whether Kalidas and Tulsi Das and Kabir were leftists or rightists. They could also question whether Ved Vyas and Balmiki were conservatives or radicals. They can question Ghalib, Mir, Zafar, Warris Shah and Bulleh Shah and ask someone to prove that they were not anti-leftists. But they must be reminded, at least in the hour of their defeat, that literature is much older and was born millennia before the West foisted on us the concept of "Left" and "Right" which has failed all over the world, in any case.

I am no lover of obscurantism. So, I must recount what happened during the run-up to the Sahitya Akademi elections 2003, concluded finally on the historic day of February 17; what made me both unhappy and happy in the end.

Newspapers all over the country carried the news about the Akademi election on their front pages. The Hindu, for example, carried on its front page on February 18, the news item: "In one of the most politically charged elections for the post of president of the Sahitya Akademi, Gopichand Narang, a well known Urdu literary critic, defeated Jnanpith Award winner, Mahashweta Devi".

This is what happened at the election in which about 96 top literary figures, representing the languages and literature of different parts of India participated as voters. While the former Vice-President of the Akademi, Gopi Chand Narang, bagged 56 votes, Mahashweta Devi bagged 30. He bagged almost twice the number of votes which she could secure despite a virulent "character assassination campaign" against him, not carried out by her personally, but other behind-the-scene literary warriors. Other interesting things also happened on that day, February 17. Mahashweta Devi’s running mate for Vice-Presidency, eminent Malayalam writer, M. T. Vausdevan Nair withdrew from the contest, sensing that the wind was blowing against her. That resulted in the election of a famous Bengali writer, Sunil Gangopadhyaya as the Vice-President of the Akademi. The point was that Mahashweta Devi and the group of her promoters, a group of Hindi writers with familiarly loud voices and views, lost, but not Bengal and Bengali literature. And there was one more upset. Ram Chandran ‘Bala’, well known Tamil writer was declared elected, defeating a senior Tamil writer and Akademi Award winner, Samuthiram. The angry defeated group made allegations of flouting of conventions and unscrupulousness against those who won. Perhaps, they could remind themselves how scrupulous and conventional their own campaign against their rivals had been. An interesting detail which appeared during the Sahitya Akademi election campaign was that Mahashweta Devi did not seem to know, or at least think, that literary critics had anything to do with literature or whether an eminent literary critic was recognised as a man or woman of literature. The Akademi should circulate its view of literary critics and their status in the world of literature. Copies could be sent to Mahashweta Devi, Gopi Chand Narang and some literary critics who were in the forefront of the campaign for Mahashweta Devi. All I would say is that, in the interest of Indian literature and the Sahitya Akdemi, the defeated need to forget their defeat and stop licking their wounds; the victors should stop gloating over their victory and spare the defeated their contempt and wrath. Of course, that is only the suggestion of an humble literary critic like me, old and old-fashioned, who generally keeps himself away from the glitter and litter of the glamorous Page Three celebrities of literature in the so called big media, infested with bristling small minds and visions.