India gagged and bound: What the Deoband/Rushdie affair reveals about us

By Lakshmi Chaudhry and Sandip Roy We Indians are a vastly sentimental people. We possess way too many sentiments and each in perpetual risk of grave injury. Be it over The Dirty Picture poster, the title of a Hindi movie or a Siberian court case on the Gita, someone, somewhere in this great land of ours always has their panties in a twist. The latest reason for umbrage is the imminent arrival of Salman Rushdie on our shores. Never mind that the man has been in and out of the country innumerable times in the past without comment or concern. Never mind that his slated panel at the Jaipur Literary Festival is on Midnight’s Children, not the controversial Satanic Verses. But hey, his very presence is sufficient to give offence, or so claims Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani, the vice-chancellor of the Deoband seminary: “I call upon all the Muslim organisations of the country to mount pressure on the Centre to withdraw the visa and prevent him from visiting India, where crores of community members still feel hurt owing to the anti-Islamic remarks in his writings.” Or how about this crazy idea. Maybe the bigger problem is this: that some of us “still feel hurt” 23 years after the publication of a book, 22 years after the death of the Iranian bigot who issued the unconscionable fatwa, 17 years after Rushdie finally emerged from hiding. The world too has moved on. There are plenty of other things for Muslims to worry about in a post-9/11, -26/11 world than a book most of them have never read. Nomani’s posturing is just par for course in what passes for a national debate in our country. Over the past six months, various people for various reasons have been outraged over: an essay on different versions of the Ramayana, a Rohinton Mistry novel that referenced the Shiv Sena, a Bollywood movie on reservation politics, Prashant Bhushan’s comments on a Kashmir plebiscite. The immediate cause may vary, but the triggers for our outrage remain reliably the same. Religion is always a big one, and not just for those overly sensitive Muslims.  From the naked goddesses in a Husain painting to the cat-faced Krishna on Aerosmith’s Nine Lives CD to those designer slippers and bikinis featuring the pantheon, they all gotta go. The Da Vinci Code was banned in Goa, Andhra Pradesh and Nagaland. Hell, the Congress party now wants to cancel the entire Jaipur festival – because they really, really care about the Muslims (who vote). [caption id=“attachment_177986” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Never mind that his slated panel at the Jaipur Literary Festival is on Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, not the controversial Satanic Verses. But hey, his very presence is sufficient to give offence. Reuters”]  [/caption] We censor, exile, ostracise anything and anyone who offends. But don’t you even think of banning the Gita. Hypocritical much? Oh, and let’s not forget all those worthy citizens who aren’t daunted by the images of gods when it comes to relieving themselves on someone’s boundary wall. We can pee on our gods, but don’t you dare put that Ganesh on your beer bottle. If it isn’t religion that has us all worked up, then it’s our overdeveloped sense of patriotism. Our other great sacred icon is the national flag which got poor Sania Mirza in trouble because she put her feet up in the wrong place at the wrong time: i.e. on national television and in the proximity of a Tiranga. The Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act and the Emblems and Names (Prevention of Improper use) Act was invoked to sue Mandira Bedi for stamping on tricolor balloons and wearing a sari with flag on its border (which then touched her feet). Sachin got in trouble for cutting a cake depicting the jhanda. But the silliest perhaps is the ongoing lawsuit against Sushma Swaraj for accidentally holding the flag upside down at a public event. Be sure to keep these poor sods in mind when you see hundreds of little plastic flags – overflowing in dustbins and strewn on the ground — come Republic Day. Then there’s Kashmir, of course. The idea of holding a referendum in Kashmir has been part of the public debate for the past 60 years. And yet, just putting plebiscite and the fair name of the state in the same sentence can earn you a public beating, threat of a seditions charge, or at the very least a public interest lawsuit. The notion of an Azad Kashmir is not just wrong – it’s literally unspeakable. In a land where everything is sacred, why not our politicians — who surely rule us by divine right. Before their recent Rohinton Mistry-inspired meltdown, the Shiv Sena burnt copies of Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh for a caricature of Bal Thackeray. And for all of Kapil Sibal’s posturing about “communal sentiments”, 255 of the 358 official requests submitted to Google last year were to pull material critical of political leaders. Think Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh dancing to a reworked song from Dabangg. Bring out the riot police already! It would be bad enough if this knee-jerk propensity to ban was just a naïve nanny-state version of preserving the peace. It’s more often the reverse – aimed at stirring up some communal mischief before the UP elections or launching someone’s political career or prospects by playing to parochial instincts. But by ever lowering the national threshold of insult, we have descended into a ping-pong game of censorship. “We expect the government to be prompt and tough, the way it was over the Russian court’s ban on Gita for allegedly promoting terror activities,” said Nomani, “We expect Hindus to support us. Last month, when Gita controversy was at its peak, Deoband was first to publicly condemn the proposed ban”. Right, let’s all defend our common right to get excessively exercised in the name of our faith. His logic is as ridiculous as those who respond to any defense of the Ramanujan essay by invoking the infamous Danish cartoon of Mohammad. If you think that one thing was out of line, then you must be for banning everything that upsets anyone at any time. This tit-for-tat version of equal protection has the entire nation sliding down a slippery slope to illiberalism. When everything offends – from a birthday cake to a novel – the principle of freedom of expression loses all meaning. Maybe it’s time we stopped being so easily and predictably offended by the same things, over and over and over again. In a nation of way too many sacred cows, it’s about time we learned to say moo to it at all.