Ahmedabad, Oct. 16: An Intelligence Bureau officer showed up at Vadodara writer Ganesh Devy's home a day after he announced he was returning his Sahitya Akademi award, asking if his protest was an "organised movement" and whether he was "spreading disaffection".

Devy said he gave the lady officer a copy of his email to the Akademi, telling her it was "self-explanatory as it explains the circumstances why I chose to return the award".

The 65-year-old, who won the prize in 1992 for his book After Amnesia, described Monday's exchange with the IB officer as "very cordial" and said "there was no harassment, no intimidation, no insult".

"Yet I felt I had not done anything disruptive for which I should have been questioned. I was not the first author to return the award. Nothing I did should impel the government to interrogate me," said the former English professor of Baroda's M.S. University.

In his email, Devy had condemned the "shrinking space for free expression and growing intolerance towards differences of opinion in the country". He and other authors who have given back honours have done so against the August murder of rationalist M.M. Kalburgi, an Akademi member and awardee, by suspected Hindu zealots in Karnataka, and the Dadri lynching.

"The lady officer was curious why I had returned the award, whether it was an organised movement, whether I and the others (returning such honours) had launched a campaign to spread disaffection among the people," Devy said.

The writer said the officer told him the Union home ministry had sought a report. "When I asked what the purpose of her visit was, she told me she had to give a report to home ministry about what was happening (why writers were returning awards)," said Devy, adding he would have been "scared" if he was only a soft-hearted poet" and not an activist too. A well-known linguist, Devy once led a survey that researched and documented 780 Indian languages.