Is Trashing The Right, Wrong?

It’s not just the rightwing which likes banning and pulping books which don’t meet with their approval.

WrittenBy:Arunabh Saikia
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The “liberals” and “fundamentals” of India are on war footing yet again. As a post-mortem of the episode deluges facebook timelines and Twitter feeds, you can’t help but cringe at the oversimplification of most of the analyses. The common underlying sub-text of most of the dissections demonises a certain political party (or more precisely a political ideology).

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Yes, freedom of speech got stifled once again in the country and to be outraged is more than justified. It’s a shame for any country that vouches (or at least pretends to) to honour its citizens’ right to free speech. However, to conclude that – as Gargi Gupta of the DNA did –  “the ban of The Hindus signals a rising intolerance among Hindu fringe groups” sadly does little else than trivialising what is a much greater issue (The usage of the word “ban” is incorrect).  The above quote is hardly an isolated one – in fact it reiterates what has been the essential essence of the “liberal” discourse on the subject.  In a column in the Mumbai Mirror, author Arshia Sattar wrote “Penguin has succumbed to the undercurrents that encourage us to censor ourselves even before we are asked”. While Sattar’s ire, in all fairness, is directed at the book’s publisher Penguin, her reference to the “undercurrents that encourage us to censor” leaves very little to the imagination as to what she thinks the “undercurrent” is. Meena Kandasamy, a poet I admire as much for her unbridled commitment to social issues as for her body of work, also echoed the same sentiments in a tweet.

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Author Nilanjana Roy, whom I hold in very high esteem, also took to Twitter to ask:

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All the above examples carry a common undercurrent. They unflinchingly hold the “right wing” responsible for books getting banned in the country. A deduction that can at best be described as knee-jerk and one that can be refuted by a simple Google search on the history of banned books in India.

The last few months have been particularly bad for the cause of free speech in India – as many as three books (including the one in question) have been shelved by publishers in less than two months. One of them was a book called “The Descent of Air India” by Air India’s “top honcho” Jitender Bhargava. The book’s publisher Bloomsbury was made to tender an apology to former civil aviation minister Praful Patel who had been pilloried in the book as the man who caused the downfall of the airline. This was after Patel’s lawyer had filed a criminal defamation case against Bhargava and Bloomsbury in Mumbai.

There’s another book that seems to have escaped most people’s memory. In 2010, the Congress had forced Javier Moro to withdraw his novel, “The Red Sari: When Life is the Price of Power”” based on its President Sonia Gandhi’s life from releasing in India. Congress supporters even took the effort to download electronic versions to burn them. When it was pointed out that the book is a novel, not a biography, Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi had replied that “there is no question of fictionalising a living person”.

The list goes on and all political parties – irrespective of ideology and leaning – have been guilty of stifling free speech whenever it’s not met with their approval. Mamata Banerjee has done it time and again. The Communist Party of India (Marxist), for all its self-righteousness on issues like these, had betrayed little hesitation in telling author Taslima Nasreen that she wasn’t welcome in Kolkata. Therefore, when Digvijay Singh accuses the Bharatiya Janata Party of promoting “a conservative, regressive public discourse which reflects through events such as banning of a book on Hindus”, he is effectively doing what politicians do best – making hay while the sun shines.

The BJP and the right wing are by no means paragons of the freedom of speech. Far from it in fact, and for all their notoriety it’s only fair that we are extra critical and cautious of them. But I wish all free speech absolutists, would raise their voices as loudly every time – even when the rightwing isn’t involved.

The author can be contacted at arunabh.saikia90@gmail.com and on Twitter @Psychia90

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