12-02-2007, 02:26 AM
Counterpoint: The Taslima ControversyAds By Google
Sheetal Sheth Photos
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Taslima gives in, withdraws linesNovember 30, 2007
Edit: Our con artistsNovember 29, 2007Vir Sanghvi
December 01, 2007
First Published: 23:50 IST(1/12/2007)
Last Updated: 02:02 IST(2/12/2007)
I knew, last week, that I would be expected to write about the Taslima Nasreen controversy. I chose not to for a variety of reasons, the most important of which was exhaustion.
How many times can one make the same points again and again? How many times will readers be expected to read more or less identical liberal-outrage pieces on Taslima, all of which make roughly the same points? Frankly, there's not much left to say on this subject that I haven't said already or that others haven't written on these pages.
But because the Taslima controversy refuses to go away, I'm going to have to devote this week's Counterpoint to the subject. You will forgive me if I don't rehash the usual free-speech-is-a-basic-right arguments all over again. For the record, yes, I believe in freedom of expression, in the fight against religious fundamentalism and all the other worthy values that we are expected to subscribe to, so you can take those as a given.
My concern this Sunday is less with the actual controversy than with the manner in which all of us and especially the intellectual establishment have reacted to Taslima's enforced flight from Calcutta and to what it says about the current state of the liberal consensus.
I have very little patience with people who act as though they always regarded free speech as an absolute value. I am something of an uncompromising fundamentalist on the subject of freedom of expression but let's not forget that no matter what they say now, Indian liberals have traditionally been willing to trample on free speech in the name of religious sensitivity.
Most of you will remember the fatwa against Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses. What you may have forgotten is that even though Ayotollah Khomeini signed the death warrant, he was provoked not by the book itself â which he had never read â but by the actions of educated Indians.
It happened like this. Penguin was supposed to publish the Indian edition of The Satanic Verses. The manuscript went to Khushwant Singh, then Penguin's consulting editor, who read it and pointed out that Muslims would find the book incredibly offensive. Khushwant's views were communicated to the Penguin management who decided not to publish The Satanic Verses in India for the fear of provoking riots.
Shrabani Basu, then the London correspondent for Sunday magazine, went to interview Rushdie and asked him about Penguin India's reservations. In a now-famous remark notable for its mixture of hubris and ignorance, Rushdie responded, "It is a funny view of the world to think that a book can cause riots."
When Shrabani's interview appeared in Sunday, along with a piece outlining the contents of The Satanic Verses, Syed Shahabuddin demanded a ban on the book. The matter was referred to the then home minister Buta Singh. He promptly decided to forbid the sale of The Satanic Verses.
Even though the book had been banned, various Muslim organisations in India and Pakistan then took it upon themselves to demonstrate outside British Council offices and to burn cars â apparently to register their outrage that such a book had ever been written. Ayotollah Khomeini saw one such demonstration on TV and issued his fatwa.
The most notable aspect of the genesis of the fatwa is that nobody who called for the ban had read the book, except for Khushwant Singh â and he was ambivalent. Shahabuddin went by the Sunday piece. There is no evidence that Buta Singh knows how to read. And by the time the demonstrations began, the book was unavailable for the protestors to read, anyway.
How should liberals react to a demand for a ban from people who haven't even read the book? Judging by the current public response to Taslima, we should have all spoken up for free speech then. In fact, we did no such thing.
Khushwant Singh's view became the prevailing consensus and the widely-accepted liberal argument was that as regrettable as it is to ban a book, it is far better to impose such a ban than to risk riots and public disorder. No book is worth the loss of lives.
It intrigues me that many of the same people who cheerfully acquiesced in The Satanic Verses ban are now singing a different tune. Could it be that the liberal consensus has shifted? Have we all changed our minds on where to draw the line restricting freedom of expression? Or do we just have double standards?
Another interesting aspect of the Taslima controversy is the extent to which it has become an exercise in Left-bashing. State governments ban books all the time. A Congress government prevented the distribution of a scholarly book on Shivaji in Maharashtra, for instance. The BJP's record is especially shameful. Sangh Parivar thugs prevented Deepa Mehta's Water from being shot in Banaras while the government did nothing to protect the unit. And, of course, the Husain controversy is still fresh in our minds.
So, why has the Left received so much flak? Writing in the HT on Friday, Sitaram Yechury suggested that we were being unfair to the CPM by looking at the Taslima controversy in isolation. Of course, he's right. But the Left has painted itself into a corner. Every time there's an attack on Husain or on a cinema hall showing Fire, assorted fellow travellers and crypto-Communist 'secular' organisations march in the streets in favour of free speech.
The truth, of course, is that only in India do we make a bizarre association between Communism, a totalitarian ideology that has little respect for human rights and whose leading lights have murdered millions of people, and liberal freedoms. But because the Left has rushed in to occupy this space, it is judged on different standards from other political parties. And so, the liberal outrage is greater when Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee behaves in a manner that we might expect from, say, Murli Manohar Joshi.
Plus, I have a growing sense that the liberal consensus has turned against the Left. There are many reasons for this shift, including the rising prosperity of the liberal elite. But, the most obvious ones include the spoilt-child behaviour of the CPM as a constituent of the UPA, the suspicion that the opposition to the nuclear deal was motivated by patriotism on behalf of China rather than India, and anger over the coup staged by CPM cadres in Nandigram.
Much of the outrage over Taslima has nothing to do with her. It's just become another stick to beat the CPM with. And I also think that Sitaram is right when he says that it's silly to compare Bengal with Gujarat. As much as I disapprove of how the Left has behaved, I do not see how comparisons to mass murder can be sustained.
And finally, the Taslima controversy shows us how much Indian liberals have matured in our understanding of secularism. The Satanic Verses controversy demonstrated our double standards in the 1980s â Hindus should learn to take it on the chin but we must be very careful not to offend Muslims.
My sense is that we are now much more even handed in our approach to religious fundamentalism.
I sensed this first in the manner in which we regarded the Muslim political leadership's attempts to turn the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad into a domestic political issue in India. There's no doubt that pious Muslims would have found the Danish cartoons deeply offensive (if they had seen them; most people know they exist but have never actually seen the cartoons themselves), but liberals felt that a) there's no reason why non-believers should consider their freedoms circumscribed by the standards of pious believers, and b) that even if some Scandinavian had insulted the Prophet, this had very little to do with us in India.
It's always dangerous to draw broad general conclusions from a single event so I will be careful in claiming that I detect a tectonic shift in the liberal consensus. But even so, it does seem to me that we now regard free speech as more important than we ever have, that the Left has lost its status as the favourite party of the well-meaning but moderately-informed artist and intellectual, and that we are finally treating Muslim communalists with the firmness that we previously applied only to Hindu fundamentalists.
Regardless of how things turn out with Taslima, these are still positive steps and genuine gains for Indian liberalism.
Sheetal Sheth Photos
edited
Maxim.com/Sheetal Sh
Movie Times
Find listings for local movie theaters - indie, multiplex & more.
Movies.YellowPages.c
HP Project
irectThe Top 20 Directors Have Been Determined. Vote On A Final Winner!
www.YouTube.com/Proj
ALSO READ
Taslima gives in, withdraws linesNovember 30, 2007
Edit: Our con artistsNovember 29, 2007Vir Sanghvi
December 01, 2007
First Published: 23:50 IST(1/12/2007)
Last Updated: 02:02 IST(2/12/2007)
I knew, last week, that I would be expected to write about the Taslima Nasreen controversy. I chose not to for a variety of reasons, the most important of which was exhaustion.
How many times can one make the same points again and again? How many times will readers be expected to read more or less identical liberal-outrage pieces on Taslima, all of which make roughly the same points? Frankly, there's not much left to say on this subject that I haven't said already or that others haven't written on these pages.
But because the Taslima controversy refuses to go away, I'm going to have to devote this week's Counterpoint to the subject. You will forgive me if I don't rehash the usual free-speech-is-a-basic-right arguments all over again. For the record, yes, I believe in freedom of expression, in the fight against religious fundamentalism and all the other worthy values that we are expected to subscribe to, so you can take those as a given.
My concern this Sunday is less with the actual controversy than with the manner in which all of us and especially the intellectual establishment have reacted to Taslima's enforced flight from Calcutta and to what it says about the current state of the liberal consensus.
I have very little patience with people who act as though they always regarded free speech as an absolute value. I am something of an uncompromising fundamentalist on the subject of freedom of expression but let's not forget that no matter what they say now, Indian liberals have traditionally been willing to trample on free speech in the name of religious sensitivity.
Most of you will remember the fatwa against Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses. What you may have forgotten is that even though Ayotollah Khomeini signed the death warrant, he was provoked not by the book itself â which he had never read â but by the actions of educated Indians.
It happened like this. Penguin was supposed to publish the Indian edition of The Satanic Verses. The manuscript went to Khushwant Singh, then Penguin's consulting editor, who read it and pointed out that Muslims would find the book incredibly offensive. Khushwant's views were communicated to the Penguin management who decided not to publish The Satanic Verses in India for the fear of provoking riots.
Shrabani Basu, then the London correspondent for Sunday magazine, went to interview Rushdie and asked him about Penguin India's reservations. In a now-famous remark notable for its mixture of hubris and ignorance, Rushdie responded, "It is a funny view of the world to think that a book can cause riots."
When Shrabani's interview appeared in Sunday, along with a piece outlining the contents of The Satanic Verses, Syed Shahabuddin demanded a ban on the book. The matter was referred to the then home minister Buta Singh. He promptly decided to forbid the sale of The Satanic Verses.
Even though the book had been banned, various Muslim organisations in India and Pakistan then took it upon themselves to demonstrate outside British Council offices and to burn cars â apparently to register their outrage that such a book had ever been written. Ayotollah Khomeini saw one such demonstration on TV and issued his fatwa.
The most notable aspect of the genesis of the fatwa is that nobody who called for the ban had read the book, except for Khushwant Singh â and he was ambivalent. Shahabuddin went by the Sunday piece. There is no evidence that Buta Singh knows how to read. And by the time the demonstrations began, the book was unavailable for the protestors to read, anyway.
How should liberals react to a demand for a ban from people who haven't even read the book? Judging by the current public response to Taslima, we should have all spoken up for free speech then. In fact, we did no such thing.
Khushwant Singh's view became the prevailing consensus and the widely-accepted liberal argument was that as regrettable as it is to ban a book, it is far better to impose such a ban than to risk riots and public disorder. No book is worth the loss of lives.
It intrigues me that many of the same people who cheerfully acquiesced in The Satanic Verses ban are now singing a different tune. Could it be that the liberal consensus has shifted? Have we all changed our minds on where to draw the line restricting freedom of expression? Or do we just have double standards?
Another interesting aspect of the Taslima controversy is the extent to which it has become an exercise in Left-bashing. State governments ban books all the time. A Congress government prevented the distribution of a scholarly book on Shivaji in Maharashtra, for instance. The BJP's record is especially shameful. Sangh Parivar thugs prevented Deepa Mehta's Water from being shot in Banaras while the government did nothing to protect the unit. And, of course, the Husain controversy is still fresh in our minds.
So, why has the Left received so much flak? Writing in the HT on Friday, Sitaram Yechury suggested that we were being unfair to the CPM by looking at the Taslima controversy in isolation. Of course, he's right. But the Left has painted itself into a corner. Every time there's an attack on Husain or on a cinema hall showing Fire, assorted fellow travellers and crypto-Communist 'secular' organisations march in the streets in favour of free speech.
The truth, of course, is that only in India do we make a bizarre association between Communism, a totalitarian ideology that has little respect for human rights and whose leading lights have murdered millions of people, and liberal freedoms. But because the Left has rushed in to occupy this space, it is judged on different standards from other political parties. And so, the liberal outrage is greater when Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee behaves in a manner that we might expect from, say, Murli Manohar Joshi.
Plus, I have a growing sense that the liberal consensus has turned against the Left. There are many reasons for this shift, including the rising prosperity of the liberal elite. But, the most obvious ones include the spoilt-child behaviour of the CPM as a constituent of the UPA, the suspicion that the opposition to the nuclear deal was motivated by patriotism on behalf of China rather than India, and anger over the coup staged by CPM cadres in Nandigram.
Much of the outrage over Taslima has nothing to do with her. It's just become another stick to beat the CPM with. And I also think that Sitaram is right when he says that it's silly to compare Bengal with Gujarat. As much as I disapprove of how the Left has behaved, I do not see how comparisons to mass murder can be sustained.
And finally, the Taslima controversy shows us how much Indian liberals have matured in our understanding of secularism. The Satanic Verses controversy demonstrated our double standards in the 1980s â Hindus should learn to take it on the chin but we must be very careful not to offend Muslims.
My sense is that we are now much more even handed in our approach to religious fundamentalism.
I sensed this first in the manner in which we regarded the Muslim political leadership's attempts to turn the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad into a domestic political issue in India. There's no doubt that pious Muslims would have found the Danish cartoons deeply offensive (if they had seen them; most people know they exist but have never actually seen the cartoons themselves), but liberals felt that a) there's no reason why non-believers should consider their freedoms circumscribed by the standards of pious believers, and b) that even if some Scandinavian had insulted the Prophet, this had very little to do with us in India.
It's always dangerous to draw broad general conclusions from a single event so I will be careful in claiming that I detect a tectonic shift in the liberal consensus. But even so, it does seem to me that we now regard free speech as more important than we ever have, that the Left has lost its status as the favourite party of the well-meaning but moderately-informed artist and intellectual, and that we are finally treating Muslim communalists with the firmness that we previously applied only to Hindu fundamentalists.
Regardless of how things turn out with Taslima, these are still positive steps and genuine gains for Indian liberalism.