Romila Thapar, at Pratirodh - the Writers' Convention organised at Mavlankar Hall on 1st October -, began her talk with an anecdotal account of her recent lecture on secularism in Mumbai, a lecture for which she was advised to take police protection. She asks, “After sixty eight eight years of independence, I thought, it is not possible for an academic to give an academic lecture on the subject of secularism without needing police protection; what have we reduced ourselves to?” She refers specifically to the accusation that the current protests have never protested before and are only intolerant of the RSS. To this she provides a litany of events against which the same intellectuals and writers have protested before: the Emergency, the Sikh riots of 1984, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the manufactured history of Ramjanmabhoomi and the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the Nandigram progrom by the CPI(M) in West Bengal, and most recently, the fatwa against A. R. Rahman. If such is the case, “why don't the BJP and the media do some homework?” she asks. She also makes an objection to the manner in which television debates are carried out in the media and says that if party spokespersons must be held accountable in the way they conduct themselves in such platforms. She also categorically reiterates that she has declined the Padma awards from the Congress governments twice previously - and not returned them now, as one media house states incorrectly - because she feels that such awards are not conferred by the state, but the current government in power.