The Congress on Sunday said that the Centre’s decision to award the Gandhi Peace Prize for 2021 to the Gita Press publishing house was a travesty.
Based in Gorakhpur, Gita Press is one of the largest publishers of Hindu religious texts. The Gandhi Peace Prize is an annual award conferred by the government as a tribute to the ideals of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
On Sunday, a jury headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the decision to award Gita Press “in recognition of its outstanding contribution towards social, economic and political transformation through non-violent and other Gandhian methods.”
“They have done commendable work over the last 100 years towards furthering social and cultural transformations among the people,” Modi wrote in a tweet.
Congress General Secretary Jairam Ramesh, however, likened the decision to awarding Hindutva ideologue VD Savarkar and Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse.
“There is a very fine biography from 2015 of this organisation by Akshaya Mukul in which he unearths the stormy relations it had with the Mahatma [Gandhi] and the running battles it carried on with him on his political, religious and social agenda,” he wrote in a tweet.
Mukul’s Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India details the publisher’s impact on Indian society and its relationship with the Hindu nationalist movement.
Also read: How the Gita Press opposed birth control to shore up the Hindu population
Rashtriya Janata Dal MP Manoj Jha told PTI that the central government itself is “fundamentally anti-Gandhi”.
Meanwhile, Bharatiya Janata Party leader Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi criticised the Congress, saying that the party wants all awards and recognitions to fall into the kitty of the Gandhi family. “Do they even know about the contribution of Gita Press?” Naqvi questioned.
The awardees of the Gandhi Peace Prize receive an amount of Rs 1 crore, a citation, a plaque and an exquisite handicraft or handloom item.
The award has previously been conferred to organisations such as the Indian Space Research Organisation, Ramakrishna Mission and Sulabh International and to personalities like former South African President Nelson Mandela, social worker Baba Amte, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, environmentalist Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Bangladesh’s first Prime Minister Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
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