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In The Land of Intolerance:
30 Years After 1984

SARBPREET SINGH

This is the first of a new series on sikhchic.com by the author to mark the 30th anniversary of the Indian Army’s desecration of the Golden Temple in Amritsar.

Reporters Without Borders (RWB) is a non-profit group that was founded in Montpellier (France) in 1985 by four journalists, Robert Ménard, Rémy Loury, Jacques Molénat and Émilien Jubineau.

It has rapidly grown to become an international institution that acts as a watchdog for press freedom and provides material, financial and psychological assistance to journalists assigned to dangerous areas.

RWB has consultant status at the United Nations and UNESCO. The following excerpt from the RWB website articulates its vision:

Freedom of expression and of information will always be the world’s most important freedom. If journalists were not free to report the facts, denounce abuses and alert the public, how would we resist the problem of children-soldiers, defend women’s rights, or preserve our environment?

In some countries, torturers stop their atrocious deeds as soon as they are mentioned in the media. In others, corrupt politicians abandon their illegal habits when investigative journalists publish compromising details about their activities. Still elsewhere, massacres are prevented when the international media focuses its attention and cameras on events.

Freedom of information is the foundation of any democracy. Yet almost half of the world’s population is still denied it.

Recently RWB issued its 2014 World Press Freedom Index, which spotlights the negative impact of conflicts on freedom of information and its protagonists. According to the RWB:

The ranking of some countries has been affected by a tendency to interpret national security needs in an overly broad and abusive manner to the detriment of the right to inform and be informed. This trend constitutes a growing threat worldwide and is even endangering freedom of information in countries regarded as democracies.

The report ranks 180 countries according to the freedom of press enjoyed by their respective citizens.

India, the ‘largest democracy in the world’, was 140th out of 180!

Lower than Afghanistan, lower than Angola, much lower than the Republic of Congo … none of which are countries that one thinks of as bastions of freedom and democracy!

Clearly, India is a functioning democracy. Why then does it occupy such a dismal place on the RWB World Press Freedom Index?

The RWB Index is based on several criteria:

• Pluralism:  Measures the degree of representation of plural views in the media space

• Media independence:   Measures the degree to which the media are able to function independently of the Authorities

• Environment and self-censorship:   Analyses the environment in which journalists work anniversary of Operation

• Legislative framework:   Analyses the quality of the legislative framework and measures its effectiveness

• Infrastructure:   Measures the quality of the infrastructure that supports the production of news and information


An examination of each of these criteria is in order.

This reflection will focus on the general environment in India and its conduciveness to thinking and speaking freely, which of course, has a bearing on all forms of expression, including reportage.

Pankaj Mishra is an award winning Indian author and writer of literary and political essays. His books include “Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond” and “From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia.” He received the 2014 Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction and is a regular contributor to top notch publications such as The New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the New Yorker and Granta.

In 2009, Mishra published a review of a book titled “The Hindus: An Alternative History” by Wendy Doniger, a scholar of Indian religions at the University of Chicago, in the New York Times. The following excerpts from the review provide a sense of Mishra’s opinion of the book:

Doniger sets herself the ambitious task of writing “a narrative alternative to the one constituted by the most famous texts in Sanskrit.” As she puts it, “It’s not all about Brahmins, Sanskrit, the Gita.” It’s also not about perfidious Muslims who destroyed innumerable Hindu temples and forcibly converted millions of Indians to Islam. Doniger, who cannot but be aware of the political historiography of Hindu nationalists, the most powerful interpreters of Indian religions in both India and abroad today, also wishes to provide an “alternative to the narrative of Hindu history that they tell.”

She writes at length about the devotional “bhakti” tradition, an ecstatic and radically egalitarian form of Hindu religiosity which, though possessing royal and literary lineage, was “also a folk and oral phenomenon,” accommodating women, low-caste men and illiterates. She explores, contra Marx, the role of monkeys as the “human unconscious” in the “Ramayana,” the bible of muscular Hinduism, while casting a sympathetic eye on its chief ogre, Ravana. And she examines the mythology and ritual of Tantra, the most misunderstood of Indian traditions.

She doesn’t neglect high-table Hinduism. Her chapter on violence in the “Mahabharata” is particularly insightful, highlighting the tragic aspects of the great epic, and unraveling, in the process, the hoary cliché of Hindus as doctrinally pacifist.

Both “dharma” and “karma” get their due. Those who tilt at organized religions today on behalf of a residual Enlightenment rationalism may be startled to learn that atheism and agnosticism have long traditions in Indian religions and philosophies.

I will refrain from commenting on Doniger’s book at length as I haven’t finished reading it yet.

Mishra, no intellectual lightweight himself, is clearly impressed! To me, Doniger seems to write with the sensibilities of a Professor Howard Zinn writing A People’s History of the United States. Clearly an alternative view of Hinduism, which attempts to present the Hindu ethos without the slant of generations of mostly British Indologists, who put forth a narrowly Brahminical view, in a classic replay of the ‘blind men’ describing an elephant!

In a plural society that values the open exchange of ideas, one would expect Doniger’s work to be celebrated. Debated for sure, because of its alternative viewpoint, but also welcomed for its attempt to examine the Hindu tradition in a much more nuanced manner.

On February 12, 2014, Penguin India, the publisher of Doniger’s book ‘voluntarily’ decided to stop selling the book and recall and pulp all copies that were in circulation!

The move was prompted by protests from right wing Hindu groups who did not like Doniger’s portrayal of Hinduism and her suggestion that the Indologist-driven view that emphasized the importance of texts like the Bhagvad Gita, was flawed and incomplete. Doniger’s critics, who also decried as offensive, her ‘sexualizing’ of Hindu deities, had perhaps not been exposed to the depictions of Hindu divinities at, inter alia, the Khajuraho temples!

It is important to understand that this was not an official decision that had anything to do with the Indian Government, but the publisher’s actions speak volume about the cultural ‘environment’ that is an important criterion used by Reporters Without Borders to gauge the level of press freedom in India.

Indian society has had a long standing and very unfortunate tendency to suppress ‘unpalatable’ ideas rather than debating them. This tendency directly leads to a form of non-official censorship that is every bit as pernicious as the state-sponsored version, which too is alive and well, but will be the subject of a
separate reflection.

In 1927, Katherine Mayo published a polemical book called “Mother India“, which mercilessly attacked Indian society, religion and culture of the country of India. It pointed to the treatment of India's women and lower castes and focused on the squalor and poverty of the country. Mayo suggested that the rampant and fatally weakening sexuality of Indian males had led to masturbation, rape, homosexuality, prostitution, venereal diseases, and, most importantly, premature sexual intercourse and maternity.

The book created outrage across India, and it was burned along with her effigy.

Now Mayo was certainly no scholar of Doniger’s caliber! She was seen as a racist, who had been funded by the British government to trash India in an attempt to undermine India’s nationalist independence movement.

The future ‘father of the nation’ Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s voice was raised the loudest in condemnation of what he termed was a ‘drain inspector’s report’!

Given Mayo’s lack of objectivity, independence or scholarly credentials, a robust intellectual response to her writing was certainly justified. However, despite her agenda and her bigotry, one cannot lose sight of the fact that the ‘drain inspector’ was bang on target when she focused on the ills that Indian society suffered from, in particular the manner in which women and the lower castes were treated.

The shrill defensiveness from Gandhi downwards was perhaps the first documented instance of the intellectual intolerance that was to become a major malaise in independent India in the decades to follow.

The satirist Aubrey Menen, saw his play, “The Ramayana” banned as was Stanley Wolpert’s “Nine Hours To Rama“ -  the latter, both the novel and the film based on it, was a detailed account of the murder of Gandhi by RSS directed Hindu extremists.

The arguments for such actions were always couched in wooly, sympathetic cluckings about the desire to shield sensitive souls from injury. “Lady Chatterly’s Lover“, the celebrated novel by D.H.Lawrence, is still banned in India on grounds of obscenity, sixty years after the ban on the book was lifted in the UK!

Yes, we are talking about a literary novel by one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, that is banned for obscenity in a country that has open internet access and a thriving pornographic industry!

India also has the unique distinction of being the first country to ban Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses“, which in my opinion is a horribly written clunker that deserved no attention at all, before any other country saw fit to pay attention to the rantings of the Iranian Ayatollah!

Muslim groups were similarly able to influence the organizers of book fairs to pull all copies of books by Taslima Nasrin, a Bangladeshi writer, who extremist Mullahs found offensive!

The brilliant Rohinton Mistry, who is clearly one of the world’s best living writers today saw his wonderful book, “Such a Long Journey“, banned because Bal Thackeray, the Shiv Sena supremo, found it to be offensive to Maharashtrians! (By the way, If Balasaheb actually read the book, he would deserve brownie points, but it is suspected the input actually came from some anonymous underling).

Arundhati Roy, had her Booker Prize winning “The God of Small Things” vilified because of ‘obscenity’.

On October 15, 1988, that paragon of plurality and sensitivity, Rajiv Gandhi responded to a protest by several Christian organizations in India, protesting the potential release of Martin Scorses’s film, “The Last Temptation of Christ“, based on a novel by the great Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis (already renowned for his other book, “Zorba The Greek“.)

The Indian Express reported:

Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi has given assurances that the film "The Last Temptation of Christ" will not be screened in India. Gandhi´s assurance, given Oct. 15 in response to a memorandum which he had received from some Christians, is the third time within two months that media works termed by different religionists as offensive have been banned in India.

In late August, a Malayalee stage play based, like the film, on the novel of the same name by Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis, was banned by a court ruling in southern India´s Kerala state.

Then, of course, there’s the case of MF Husain, India’s most acclaimed painter of the second half of the 20th century. His studio and paintings were trashed in Mumbai by … who else, the followers of the above-named Bal Thackeray, the godfather of Hindu extremists going under the banner of Shiv Sena (Shiva’s Army). He was forced to flee the country, and died in self-imposed exile, a broken man.

Hyperventilating Hindus! Mad Muslims! Chagrined Christians!

All hell-bent upon making sure that ideas that did not appeal to their own sensitivities would be suppressed from any and all public airing.

And achieving great success under the aegis of India’s brand of ‘democracy‘!

A cynic or a wag might actually deem this as pluralism, albeit of a twisted kind!

I call it competitive intolerance.

And by the way, if any of my Sikh readers are starting to smugly pat their backs in self-congratulation, they need to stop right away. We, as a community, do not get off lightly either in this analysis. We have our own share of bigots, who cry foul when presented with ideas that they deem offensive.

The vilification of Dr. Hew Mcleod as an agent of the Indian Government out to malign Sikhism, in response to his polemical writings, the treatment of Dr. Pashaura Singh when his thesis was published; these are but two examples of the same malaise that bedevils Indian society at large.

There have been many other instances of the banning of books, films and songs in India, that have been politically motivated to serve narrow personal or Party interests. While those are reprehensible, these examples are even more so as they are cynically couched in deference to the sensibilities of various religious and ethnic groups.

Collectively they create an environment where any unpopular idea is fair game for suppression.

An environment that at least partially explains where India ended up on the 2014 rankings published by Reporters Without Borders.

April 23, 2014
 

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