Who's afraid of rightwing bullies? Far too many liberals

By Avirook Sen Last month, Delhi University decided to drop A K Ramanujan’s essay Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five examples and three thoughts on translation from its history syllabus. The decision came three years after ABVP activists had registered their objections by breaking the windowpanes of the office of the head of the history department. In October, on the basis of one dissenting note (from an expert panel of four) that said non-Hindu professors would not be able to teach the essay competently, the essay was dropped without further damage to property. Delhi University’s decision to succumb to this threat is shameful, as is the silence of the government, and there has been a chorus of seething liberal voices that has made these points. The essay, however, hasn’t been reinstated, nor a replacement selected (will this require the permission of the ABVP?). In short, there’s nothing to show for all the outrage expressed. It would be comforting to believe that religion is the only area where we paint or write or say stuff with care. Unfortunately it isn’t. In a less-noted incident, maraa, a media and arts collective based in Bangalore, cancelled a 5 November event titled Pause: In times of Conflict aimed at discussing “literature, performing and visual arts in Kashmir” due to threats issued by the Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena. Its president, Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga, started a Facebook campaign encouraging supporters to gather outside the venue with eggs, tomatoes, shoes and black paint to teach the allegedly “anti-Indians and stone-pelters” a “lesson.” [caption id=“attachment_126852” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“With each passing day, India seems to get a little less liberal; a little less willing to challenge popular sentiment; and a lot more tolerant of stupidity. AFP”]  [/caption] With each passing day, India seems to get a little less liberal; a little less willing to challenge popular sentiment; and a lot more tolerant of stupidity. The reasons are many, but at least one key cause is the liberal middle class fear of rightwing violence — or even a threat of the same. Teaching dissent In 1925, at a time when the state of Tennessee had outlawed the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution, preferring to believe that the world was created in a week and a talking snake had a part to play, those on the side of learning took a clever (and bold) step. It was decided that a teacher would deliberately break the law: teach Darwin and be charged for it. The idea was to force a national debate and a verdict. The Scopes or ‘Monkey’ trial played a part in eventually shaping laws that gave Darwin (and science) its due, even if it hasn’t reshaped the beliefs of a peculiar section of Americans. Now that Ramanujan’s essay has been dropped from the curriculum, what stops history professors from continuing to teach it in open violation of the university’s guidelines? I think this boils down to whether or not the poor history professor on the frontline is brave enough to risk the descent of the lumpen army that will crush his bifocals and trash his classroom. On the other hand, would that illiterate mob dare attack if they knew they would fail? That is, if the act of teaching the essay was planned, made public, and had the support of students and academics all over the country? Alas, from what I’ve seen of DU, or even the larger India of students and scholars, it isn’t the kind of place where such a plan would work. We do not “after tea and cakes and ices” have the “strength to force the moment to its crisis” as TS Eliot put it. We turn out in numbers for protests where the risk of personal harm is minimal — the Anna circus, say. This works for protests against the state, because in urban India by and large, the state is relatively benign when it deals with candle-light vigils or bhajan-sandhya agitations by the educated middle-class. Courts of little resort The plan doesn’t work at the next level either — if a court, for instance, is asked to decide whether we must have just one official version of an epic or more. We are a country where deities have the legal status of minors (according to the Civil Procedure Code, 1908). A man called Deoki Nandan Agarwal filed suit on behalf of ‘Ram Lalla’ after collecting revenue records to support his claim that part of the disputed land at Ayodhya belonged to ‘Ram Lalla’. Agarwal, whom the court called the deity’s ’next friend’ died in 2002, but last year the infant Ram was awarded his portion of land by the Allahabad High Court. This has parallels goings on in Saudi Arabia. There, the descendents of the prophet Mohammad (about 94,000 people) were represented by a Saudi law firm and sought apologies for the publication of caricatures of the prophet by newspapers in Denmark. After the first cartoon appeared in Jyllands Posten in 2005, the Danes suffered a series of violent retributions. In 2008, a terrorist plot to murder the cartoonist was discovered, leading to a bunch of newspapers republishing the cartoons in an act of solidarity. These newspapers could hardly have imagined that they would receive a legal notice from the descendents of the Prophet, but they did — and one paper actually apologised to anyone who was offended. Writing about the demand for an apology in Slate, Christopher Hitchens said: “It’s not enough that faith claims to be the solution to all problems. It is now demanded that such a preposterous claim be made immune from any inquiry, any critique, and any ridicule.” Given the number of deities in the Hindu pantheon, we can be sure to hear from someone close to them (a large mob of ’next friends’, perhaps) in the case of any “inquiry, critique or ridicule.” Remember how MF Husain was hounded out of this country? Continued on the next page Shrinking space for dissent Were we always like this? I don’t think so. As the disgraceful episode of the Three Hundred Ramayanas played out, I happened to be reading a set of essays from another time. The Best of Quest is a collection of writing from the now defunct magazine of that name. It stopped publication at the time of the Emergency. Were the pieces to be published today, the magazine’s office would need a constant supply of windowpanes. This is Hamid Dalwai on Muslims, in an 1973 essay on Jinnah (A Study in Hatred): “Wherever the Muslims lack a decisive majority and cannot monopolise state power, they refuse to identify with the nation. Thailand, Ethiopia and the Philippines, all of which have a sizable Muslim minority like India, face the same problem of Muslim separatism… refusing to accept any national identity based on secular or non-communal principles.” Critiques of a religious group weren’t out of bounds and neither were iconic spiritual leaders. In Sri Aurobindo: Superman or Supertalk (1975), Claude Alvarez executes a detailed takedown of the sage and his French consort, Mira Richard (the Mother). Both made bizarre claims. Aurobindo said he could write “perfect” poetry and offered his ‘Voice of a tilted nose’ as an example (this is not a joke). The Mother told a gullible band of devotees that a “supramental being” had descended on to the earth in 1956. The essay goes on to meticulously illustrate how the Pondicherry Ashram enriched itself and practiced a form of apartheid: its opulent estate was off limits for locals unless they needed work at exploitative wages. [caption id=“attachment_126859” align=“alignright” width=“380” caption=“By the end of the year, the BJP had won 85 seats in the general elections, shouting about Hindutva and a uniform civil code. AFP”]  [/caption] The late Dilip Chitre, the writer who features most in the collection, seems to have gotten away with articles that called Indira Gandhi (then PM) a “gatecrasher” into politics, labeled Bal Thackeray the “Fuhrer of the Shiv Sena” and observed that Maharashtra suffered from a “surfeit of Shivajis”. Quest was a product of its time. Launched during the Cold War, along with UK’s Encounter, its sister publication, it was designed to use intellect as the weapon to protect liberal values. That it survived till the Emergency suggests that India had room for it. Nowadays, we don’t seem to have the space to accommodate a (brilliant) essay as part of a history lesson. As the Mumbai academic R Srinivasan writes at the end of the volume, Quest existed in an “intellectual climate that has passed us by.” Raising the violence bar The “intellectual climate” is informed and defined by the political climate, which steadily deteriorated in the Emergency and its aftermath. By ‘89, the defining year, the Cold War had been settled, and it’s byproduct was a burgeoning insurgency in Kashmir. Ram Rajya was the winning slogan of the day. By the end of the year, the BJP had won 85 seats in the general elections, shouting about Hindutva and a uniform civil code. This result was an astounding improvement from the 2 seats it secured in the previous poll. Even accounting for the sympathy wave in view of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 (which cost them), it was an exceptional achievement and it spoke to the spirit of the time. The period post 1989 saw a crucial change: an enhanced disposition towards violence. This revealed itself in killings in Kashmir, the destruction of property (God knows whose) in Ayodhya, bombings in Mumbai and many riots. In the years that have followed, the ‘violence bar’ had been raised: damaging property or sending individuals to hospital was ok. Sort of acceptable, because it wasn’t as bad as killing — which is also justified in certain cases. It is this raising of the violence bar that middle-class India — the chaps who learn history or decide syllabi — cannot handle. To them (or us) it is like the invasion of Hijras when there’s an addition to the family. You do your best not to provoke their ire. You just pay whatever it takes to make them go away. Writing in 1969, in the context of ‘Hindu Society’, Dilip Chitre said there was a “pact” of “non-interaction” and “non-confrontation” that existed between the believers and the “dropouts” from faith. There was an understanding, therefore, that led to dignified mutual coexistence, an understanding that allowed the small, significant space that Quest occupied. This has ceased to be the case post 1989. The middle-class that allegedly learned to turn the other cheek from their parents (who learned it from Gandhi/the Bible) has a contemporary understanding of the metaphor. Their non-violence is of the preemptive kind aimed at avoiding that slap entirely. This brings me to my final point. If the liberal middle-class has been so pushed, isn’t it time that we, “after tea and cakes and ices”, found the strength to “force the moment to its crisis?”