dna edit: Illiberal India

There is a depressing familiarity to the ruckus centred on American scholar Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History. The extreme, unreasonable nature of the stand taken by the Hindutva group accusing Doniger of insulting Hindus is a given. And it is regrettable in the extreme that Penguin India buckled as it did, just as Oxford University Press earlier had in the case of AK Ramanujan’s essay on the Ramayana. But the presence of fringe elements in every society that use the democratic freedoms granted to them to deny others the same rights is inevitable. It is the State’s responsibility to safeguard the basic tenets of a liberal democracy and ensure these elements do not succeed. That is why the court’s timidity in allowing a baseless case to drag on for as long as it did and the deafening silence from all political quarters are so disheartening. And there is a great deal of precedent for both in the recent past.  

The treatment meted out to Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen must top any list of shame, from their books being banned to their being personally hounded. They provide august company for the likes of James Laine — run afoul of Marathi chauvinists not once but twice in the past decade for his books on Chhatrapati Shivaji, with both works being banned — and Joseph Lelyveld whose book on Mahatma Gandhi was banned in Gujarat in 2011. The best that can be said for the state is that it is equal opportunity in its cravenness, willing to back obscurantists of all stripes. If it quailed at the prospect of angering hardline Muslim elements with Rushdie, Nasreen and R V Bhasin, it has accommodated Christian outrage when it comes to the Da Vinci Code and the self-appointed guardians of Hinduism who took outrage at Ramanujan and Doniger.

As a consequence, a dangerous concept has taken root in the realm of public thought: it is acceptable to counter ideas with intimidation or outright violence. This is anathema to reasoned discourse and the academic and artistic churning that is essential for the renewal of a democratic society. It is certainly possible, for instance, to counter the literary and academic merits of Doniger’s book; various critics and reviewers have done so. But to silence the author by accusing her of possessing a “Christian missionary zeal” and being a “woman hungry of sex” is to say that only some people have the right to engage with certain issues, and only within certain bounds.

An individual’s conclusions about history, culture and individuals can be challenged, but his or her right to reach those conclusions in the manner they wish to must remain sacrosanct. This is the simple message political parties and the courts must convey. They have consistently failed to do so. If the BJP’s ideology and organisational links make it a sympathetic fellow traveller to those who would silence Doniger, the Congress has implicitly and explicitly backed similar attempts in the past. One need only look back to 2010 when then-Chief Minister of Maharashtra Ashok Chavan backed Aditya Thackeray’s push against Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey. And the courts, for all that they have delivered relief to beleaguered authors in some instances, have read problematic sections of the Indian Penal Code in the strictest possible way in others. Together, they have conspired to make the most illiberal elements of Indian society its wardens.