Column

It’s exactly 20 years since I learnt the word fatwa.

Ayatollah Khomeini, we heard, had issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for insulting Islam in his book Satanic Verses.

I was horrified. Could we really demand an author’s head for writing a book? I had grown up in a family of writers in Calcutta, a city that obsessively celebrated literature, where authors were demigods, Rabindranath Tagore was the ruling deity and even politicians and policemen routinely quoted poetry.

The very thought that an author could be punished was unbelievable, a death sentence seemed surreal. Fatwa, I repeated to myself, what a curious word. That was February 14, 1989. Valentine’s Day hadn’t come to India then.

The world was different. Rushdie was just a brilliant writer. Islam was just another religion. India was a tolerant country. But all that was changing. However hard we tried to distance ourselves from the Ayatollah’s death sentence, we couldn’t ignore the fact that his fatwa was triggered by riots in India and Pakistan, and India’s banning the book right after it was published in the UK.

For those of us who then worked with Sunday, the now deceased newsmagazine, the unfolding drama was of particular interest. In a Sunday interview Rushdie had talked of the book, which Penguin had decided not to publish in India for fear of hurting Muslim sentiments and causing riots. How can a book cause riots, laughed Rushdie.

And India Today mentioned that Muslims would protest. Syed Shahabuddin, Janata Party MP and editor of Muslim India, instantly took offence, even without reading the book, and rallied Muslim opinion to demand a ban. Taken aback by book burnings and demonstrations, Rajiv Gandhi’s government promptly agreed. That set the ball rolling. Three months later Pakistan and Bangladesh also banned the book.

Apparently, the Ayatollah saw the demonstrations in Pakistan on television and swiftly issued his fatwa.
Would things have been different if we had not banned the book? Possibly. There might not have been pressure among the Muslim nations — particularly Pakistan — to take up the issue. But then, the fatwa could have been triggered by something else. So we don’t really know whether it would have been different.

But in India, banning Satanic Verses was part of a new appeasement politics that slowly eroded our sense of right and wrong, attacked our freedom of speech and expression and nurtured a dangerous intolerance that now looms menacingly over our private and public lives.

In short, I believe today we would not be debating pub-going women’s rights or what Indian culture allows, MF Husain would not have been driven out by Hindu fanatics, and a Union minister would not be threatened with arrest for talking of the ‘Talibanisation’ of Indian society if we had not given in to the demands of some Muslim fanatics 20 years ago.

The process of appeasement had begun with the Supreme Court’s judgment on Shah Bano being reversed by the Congress government in 1986. It was also the time when the gates of the Babri Masjid were unlocked, unleashing the mandir/ masjid whirlwind that transformed India from a tolerant, secular, pluralistic country to an intolerant, less secular but still somewhat pluralistic homeland of Hindus.

Now fatwas are common. MF Husain has several against him — curiously, mostly issued by Hindus. Informal social censorship has almost crippled our culture, affecting literature, art, film, theatre and academia. Respecting cultural sentiment has been replaced by bowing to mob sentiment. Yes, much has changed since the fatwa, 20 years ago. Now we live in a fatwa culture, its repressive values steadily poisoning our tolerant democratic tradition.
Email: sen@littlemag.com