As a second group of scientists joined the wave of protests by the intelligentsia, 53 historians including Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, K N Pannikar and Mridula Mukherjee hit out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi for not making any "reassuring statement" following concerns over "highly vitiated atmosphere" prevailing in the country.
"Differences of opinion are being sought to be settled by using physical violence. Arguments are met not with counter arguments but with bullets," the statement by historians said referring to Dadri lynching incident and the ink attack on Sudheendra Kulkarni during a book launch function in Mumbai.
Bhargava, who founded the prestigious Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, said he will return the award conferred on him in 1986 because he felt the climate in the country was of "very strong fear" and it was "against rationality, against reason and against scientific temper".
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Charging the Modi government with "not keeping its promises", Bhargava said, "returning the award is the only thing I can do as a scientist".
"BJP is a political front of RSS... Master is RSS. There was a CSIR meeting (directors) wherein RSS people attended it. This never happened in the history of CSIR. I will return the award next week," he said.
"It is the same climate of intolerance, and rejection of reason that has led to the lynching in Dadri of Mohammad Akhlaq Saifi and the assassinations of Prof Kalburgi, Dr. Narendra Dabholkar and Shri Govind Pansare," said the scientists and academicians including Bhargava and other Padma Bhushan recipients Ashoke Sen, P Balram, Madabusi Raghunathan, and D Balasubramanian, a Padma Shri awardee.
They protested the "active promotion" of irrational and sectarian thought by "important functionaries of government".
"Follow their tweets and their stances on various social and political issues. You will find a lot of rabid anti-BJP elements in them.
"I had already called it a manufactured rebellion. I stand by my phrase. And I think, the events as they are unfolding only indicate that kind of manufacturing is going on at faster speed," Jaitley said in Patna.