By Newsgram Staff Writer

Bhopal: A large section of Hindi scholars from the city were dismayed at not having been invited to the World Hindi Summit being hosted in Madhya Pradesh.

About 5,000 scholars from across the country and the world are expected to participate in the September 10-12 Vishva Hindi Sammelan.

Though the invitations have been sent to a number of people in India and abroad, many of the litterateurs in Madhya Pradesh are appalled at being ignored for an event to be held in their own country and that too, in their home state.

"It seems the focus of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government is only on wooing non-resident Indians," noted writer Ram Prakash Tripathi said.

"Be it education or language, everything is politics-driven. But the organisation of this summit reflects a narrow-minded psyche. Though literature is a vital characteristic of a language, this summit is being kept away from literature itself," he added.

"Politics has never strengthened any language. It gains strength from literature. No regime has offered power to a language. History shows that whenever a language was interfered into by the government or politics, the language weakened and controversies erupted," Dhruv Shukla, a veteran writer, remarked.

The absence of invitations to various well-known writers like Rajesh Joshi, Vijay Bahadur, Rajesh Shah, Mehrutrisha Parvez and Ram Prakash Tripathi — all of whom reside in Bhopal's writers' colony, Nirala Nagar– shows the sheer disregard for excellence in the Hindi literary world.

(With inputs from IANS)