The India We Want
The India we want 2 Dec 2007, 0021 hrs IST , SWAPAN DASGUPTA , TNN Print Save EMail Write to Editor The controversy over Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen has forced Indians to confront a larger question: what sort of an India do we want to live in? The answers are neither easy nor uncontested. For a start, there is the weight of inheritance.
When minister of external affairs Pranab Mukherjee invoked ”civilisational heritage” in Parliament to define the government’s policy of sheltering the persecuted, he probably had Swami Vivekananda’s Chicago address of 1893 in mind: ”I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. ” From the time it accorded sanctuary to harried Jews and Parsis, India has played willing host to the persecuted.
Armenians escaping ethnic cleansing, Chakmas dodging Bangladeshi settlers, Tibetans at odds with Chinese occupation and Afghan opponents of the Taliban have at various times made India their home. And this is not to include the three million people who fled East Pakistan in 1971 to escape army retribution. Unlike western powers that knowingly sent back tens of thousands of Lithuanians, Estonians, Ukranians and Tartars to certain death in Stalin’s Soviet Union after World War II, India has allowed compassion to prevail over both realpolitik and even economics.
The present government may be wary of the Dalai Lama but, unlike Nepal, India is unlikely to forcibly handover a Tibetan asylum seeker to the Chinese authorities. The information that the government overruled the Left Front’s objections to give Taslima an Indian visa is reassuring. The question of sanctuary apart, the agitation over Taslima’s writings has thrown up another complex question: what constitutes legitimate curbs on free expression? The Constitution and other laws acknowledge that freedom of expression is not total and is tempered by other considerations, notably decency, harmony and national security.
The administration and the judiciary have been conferred extraordinary powers to be the arbiters of the common good. The presumption is that robust commonsense and an innate commitment to pluralism will guarantee against unreasonable restrictions on the climate of openness. To a very large extent, India has maintained an adequate balance between rival compulsions. Like anywhere else, there was always a mismatch between ordinary decencies and creative licence. But conflicts were sought to be settled on the principle of mutual accommodation and generosity towards contrarian views.
Vote-bank politics complicated matters but odd distortions haven’t made India less of an open society. We are not Sudan; we don’t jail people for naming their stuffed toys inappropriately. Since the ban on Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, a religious police has arrived with a determination to impose the rules of blasphemy on a democratic culture. Both Taslima and M F Husain are in the dock for allegedly defiling a sacred space. Telegenic maulvis are projecting the controversies as battles between believers and non-believers – a clever twist that conceals their distaste for the liberal space.
Despite the government’s implicit assurance to extend her visa, the deportation of Taslima is being plotted with the very same instruments of judicial harassment that forced Husain into exile. Artists and writers have traditionally been heretics, questioning staid conventional wisdom. They neither shape popular thinking nor are they the soul of democracy; yet they are indispensable to an open society – a reason why Communists and the Taliban can’t digest their existence. If a rebel like Taslima is allowed to be judged through the prism of blasphemy, India will become a much smaller country.
