Hair-Trigger Hysteria

One glaring difference between India and a mature democracy is that in India, any group with a grudge and the goons to back it can resort to violence or the threat of violence to shut down free speech. Extremist Hindu groups attack shops selling Valentine’s Day cards, fundamentalist Muslim clerics urge their followers not to sing the national anthem, and Christians attempt to shut down screenings of the allegedly blasphemous The Da Vinci Code. In this kindergarten of religious communities, freedom of expression has been one of the first casualties.

Maqbool Fida Husain is a Maharastrian artist with middling talent who managed to gatecrash into the limelight on the back of his controversial paintings. Two days ago, it was made public that the Government of the Arab state of Qatar has offered him citizenship (which he may not have applied for) and which has been accepted. The Husain case is yet another example of the hypocrisy that the Government of India continues to practice - on the one hand, freedom of expression is proclaimed, but on the other, the state has done an abysmal job of defending it.

Husain is no stranger to controversies. His depiction of Hindu deities in the nude or performing sexual acts enraged Hindu nationalists in 1996 (though the paintings themselves were from the 1970s), while he had to redact his film, Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities (2004), owing to strong Muslim opposition to the song Noor-un-Ala-Noor (they claimed it was blasphemous as it contained lines from the Qur'an). Husain also found himself in hot water when he painted India as a nude woman (Mother India, 2006), the names of the states written on various parts of her body. Hindu nationalists have been behind many vicious campaigns against Husain, while some have petitioned that he be awarded the Bharat Ratna because "life and work are beginning to serve as an allegory for the changing modalities of the secular in modern India — and the challenges that the narrative of the nation holds for many."

Had this been the end of the matter, it could all have been chalked up to "crazy nationalists" and India's unique brand of two-faced democracy. Although he deeply regrets the way Husain was treated and forced into an exile because of mob culture, another Indian artist, Satish Gujral, has poignantly asked on the record whether [Husain] will be bold enough to treat icons of Islam in the same manner. Meenaxi was apologised for and withdrawn from the theatres the day after it was released, while Husain's paintings have gone on to sell for millions of dollars and breaking records at Christie's South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art sale.

In September 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of twelve cartoons depicting the Islamic Prophet Muhammad (salla Allaahu 'alayhi wa salaam) as a terrorist. Haji Mohammed Yaqoob Qureshi, a minister in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, publicly offered a US $11 million bounty for beheading the Danish cartoonists who had drawn the Prophet Mohammed. When Dinamalar, a leading daily in Tamil Nadu, reprinted the cartoons so that Tamilians can see what the brouhaha was all about, their office was stoned and four public buses were burned. The Government of India recalled their Ambassador to Copenhagen in protest. The following year, in the hi-tech city of Hyderabad, three legislators of a local Islamic party, the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM), roughed up Taslima Nasreen, a Bangladeshi author critical of her country’s treatment of its Hindu minority and Islam’s treatment of women. Subsequently, the government of West Bengal state in eastern India had to call in the army to quell rioters in Calcutta, whose demands included Nasreen’s expulsion from the country. Again, the pusillanimous government made a feeble speech about hurting the sentiments of the public and requested the author to leave.

Just a few weeks ago, the Shiv Sena threatened to disrupt screenings of My Name is Khan because of Shah Rukh Khan's naive statements on Pakistan. In October 2009, faced with a similar threat from another political outfit, the same producer had to publicly apologise for a film in which characters used the anglicised name Bombay rather than the official Mumbai. The state government could not curb the activities of the rogue political party in either case. In another infamous incident in 2003, a mob ransacked a reputable research institute in the western city of Pune for helping an American scholar who wrote critically about Shivaji, a revered 17th century ruler. Neither the quest for greater historical accuracy nor freedom of expression curtailed their actions. In 1989, India became the first country in the world to ban Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses – Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against the author followed press reports of protests in India. It might be noteworthy to remember that Muslims are only about 13% of the country's total population. In an overwhelmingly Hindu country, it is intriguing why the government always bends over backwards to appease the Muslim vote.

Clearly, hair-trigger hysteria is not the monopoly of any one group in India. Like little brats, they threaten unpleasant consequences and demand attention and capitulation. However, it is of note that the government has acted against those "hurting the sentiments" of Christian and Muslim people but not against those acting against Hindu beliefs (on the issue of censorship itself, I have written previously - A Rudderless Party, August 25, 2009). Rushdie's book was banned, Nasreen asked to leave the country, and although a citizen filed a criminal case against UP Minister MY Qureshi's blatant lack of civilised behaviour, nothing came of the case. Nafisa Ali has been quite vocal about the rights of Husain, but she has nowhere been heard commenting on the Danish cartoons or Rushdie's unfair treatment. Hindu sensitivities are left to brigands to defend and clueless and unsophisticated retards that they are, outfits like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Bajrang Dal, and the Shiv Sena fall into the trap and obfuscate the issue with their very presence. So freedom of expression is not only an iffy proposition for successive Congress governments and the Indian intelligentsia, it is also an idea that is applied selectively.

Obviously, it would be better if Indian politicians were literate and understood the laws they are meant to uphold, but in the meantime, can we please just expect the violations of our civic rights to be consistent?

Echoes of Gokhale

We have talked about the Partition. Now let us talk about Independence. Gopal Krishna Gokhale is not a name you hear too often in the Indian public sphere. And why should you? After all, he was not as exciting as the fiery Bal Gangadhar Tilak or Bhagat Singh. Nor was he the implacable force MK Gandhi became after the Round Table Conference in 1930-1931. He did not even ask for purna swaraj, settling instead for dominion status within the British Empire. How can this man be a hero for the new, resurgent India, brimming with confidence after their rise from the economic doldrums experienced under a socialist Congress? All too often, it happens that the quietest voices impart the greatest wisdom.

I don't know too much about Gokhale - there was never time in class after the hagiography of Gandhi that we

were fed. A quick search on Google will also confirm that there exist very few books indeed on Gokhale written with academic rigour as compared to Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi, Tilak, or Bhagat Singh. However, recent happenings have made me go back to what little I know of Gokhale's message and reappraise his work. The banning of books, the latest being Jaswant Singh's Jinnah – India, Partition, Independence, in Gujarat is not a new phenomenon in India. There are a multitude of reasons for this, none of which I find convincing. There was Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses that caused a furore, and there was MF Hussain's nude Saraswati. Understanding Islam through Hadis by Ram Swarup, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India; The Epic of Shivaji by James Laine, Islam - A Concept of Political World Invasion by RV Bhasin, Lajja by Taslima Nasreen, Nine Hours to Rama by Stanley Wolpert, and The Polyester Pince by Hamish McDonald are but a few of the books banned by some states in India or nationally. Admittedly, some of these works may make us cringe at their arguments or implications, but that is not reason enough to ban them. Some deal with sensitive issues like religion while others like Wolpert's Nine Hours to Rama merely point out the lapses in Gandhi's security on that fateful day in 1948.

In a truly free society, ideas should not be suppressed regardless of their content. Indian politicians have argued that Western standards of liberal discourse to not apply to highly emotive issues such as religion. That is quite disingenuous, particularly in India. With official literacy figures at barely 62%, it is unlikely that the average Indian would have cultivated a habit of reading some fairly sophisticated literature or history. The issue can be highly emotive only if educated people choose to make it so. Thus, the onus for riots and disturbances is shifted upon the intelligentsia of a group, be they Muslims, Rajputs, Marxists, brahmins, women, or homosexuals. If that is the case, why is it that the aggrieved leadership respond to the challenge with a another book arguing just the opposite, or easier, a scathing review? After all, if books like Jaswant's and Rushdie's are read by people of a certain economic and social class, they would be best addressed in their own medium?

The fact of the matter is that the supposedly afflicted intelligentsia is playing a different game. Since it is easy to rile the unlettered

masses into action (Jim Hacker has a wonderful quote in Yes Prime Minister: Ordinary people are stupid), politicians publicise an interpretation of a book that is extremely skewed and champion against it, thereby ensuring the continued support of the particular vote bank that is now aggravated. In the case of Jaswant Singh vs. the BJP (at least the Advani-led faction, if the media is to be believed), that is exactly what happened. Jaswant Singh's (JS) book portrayed Sardar Patel in a less than flattering light just before the Assembly elections in Gujarat. Narendra Modi, whether he cared about JS' argument or not, knew that the opposition would use the 'slanderous' accusations levelled at Patel against him in their election campaign if he did not act on it. The people of Gujarat would see this as Modi failing to protect their honour. Their icon had been attacked, that too by an outsider (JS is a Rajput from Rajasthan). Indians seem to be high-strung divas when it comes to their icons, be they religious, political, or from the world of entertainment and sports. They cannot seem to realise that their heroes most definitely made mistakes as all humans are prone to do once in a while. The average Indian, it seems, cannot bear to see his demi-gods with warts and all. Perhaps a tad politically incorrect, but maybe the British were right when they called their Indian subjects effeminate.

The last sentence of the previous paragraph is, I confess, highly unfair. The cause for this sort of reaction is largely due to the high illiteracy in India. When the British left, literacy hovered around 12%. Today, it has risen 50 percentage points after 62 years of independence. To put things into perspective, Sri Lanka has attained 92% literacy despite a civil war and China is at 91% despite the Big Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Without being equipped by the proper intellectuals tools for life in a democracy, such ignorance of civil liberties and due process is bound to persist. Even educated people seem to harbour illogical reactions. Consider the following case: in a TV reality show presently running, the participant is strapped to a polygraph machine and asked various questions. In a recent episode, a woman was asked if she would ever consider being unfaithful to her husband. As polygraph machines measure stress and not veracity, the needle jumped and the crowd howled and clapped. The reaction, judging by letters to newspapers nationwide, was a plea to ban the show as it was obscene and violated the honour of the woman. Now please note that the participant had willingly signed up (it is difficult to get on the show) knowing full well that the questions would hardly be about her favourite colour. Further, given the viewer ratings, there was a significantly large group of people who enjoyed the show and did not think it to be a problem. This sort of black-and-white thinking (by those who wished to ban the show) is the result of a deficient education. So not only is literacy important, the ability to think critically is equally important. Again, this is not to say that ome things may be in poor taste and the great dumbing down of life (by pandering to the lowest common denominator) throws up such incidents. But this is no reason to ban things - subjectong taste to censorship is an express route

to Orwellian Hell!

There is, of course, the diminishing marginal utility of good education. Of what use is a good education if there is no outlet for it? Corruption and nepotism counters the positive effects of a good education. A quick look at the people in power and the contenders for power leave one thoroughly disillusioned - in what dark and twisted world can Mohammad Shahabuddin and Shibu Soren (to name just two) be Members of Parliament? Convicted murderers running the county...can we truly claim to not be a failed state? We are just a little bit ahead of civil war-ravaged Africa. In this situation many people turn inwards, looking at values and concepts rather than practicality - it is their way of dulling the evereyday reality. Others leave the country for greener pastures - why should they waste their lives being unappreciated and working for a near-hopeless cause? The few who remain withdraw from civic life. They are usually urban, upper-middle class voters with good jobs who stop voting and are resigned to bribing their way through everything. One can blame the genetically apatehtic but I personally find it difficult to blame a learned apathy that took 60 years in the making. How else does one react to a murder case dragging on for 21 years (Sayed Modi, eight-time national badminton champion, was gunned down in 1988. The Courts finally declared a verdict last week)? What options do we have when the judiciary is 124 years and over THIRTY MILLION cases backlogged?

And so we come back to Gokhale. More than a freedom activist, he was a social reformer. He warned Gandhi that Indians were not ready for independence because democracy (Gokhale did not even consider other forms of government) required an educated and civic-minded public. Democracy has an inherent danger of being corrupted and devolving to populism or majoritarianism. This is the flaw in the system, and the only thing that can rectify it is a liberal education. Unless children are exposed unreservedly to Aristotle, al Farabi, Maimonides, Spinoza, Hobbes, Mill, Voltaire, and Burke right alongside Bhaskaracharya, Adishankaracharya, and Vivekananada, unless they read from the Torah as well as the Gita, unless they can talk about Valmiki, Virgil, Dante, Goethe, Dostoevsky, and Rushdie in the same breath, they are not ready for life in a democracy. Obviously this is an ideal but it nonetheless points in the right direction. The politicisation of education in India has been a great disservice to the nation. Romila Thapar, Mushirul Hasan, Irfan Habib, Asghar Ali Engineer, Gyanendra Pandey, and others with their own brand of 'secular' axes to grind have crippled the Humanities in India. They have included sub-alterns, peasants, Muslims, women, communists, and Dalits in their national narratives - they have included everything except any sense of reality or even partial truth. Gokhale was right in 1915 - India was not ready for independence. By 1947, India may have been ready for independence but certainly not for democracy.