Shame

The Jaipur Literary Festival is starting this week. Everyday newspapers and TV channels carry stories contradicting each other or contradicting what they had published the previous day. Is Salman Rushdie coming, or is he not? He wants to come but some sections in the population don't want him here. And just because some sections of the population don't want him here, another section of the population wants him here. The rest of the sections don't care.

It all started after Rushdie wrote a book called Satanic Verses in the year 1988. Now I have not read the book (or many many more books for that matter), but he allegedly wrote blasphemously about the prophet of Islam, Mohammad. India was the first country to ban the book and Iran's supreme spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (a religious edict calling for his death) on him. Two of his translators were killed, perhaps murdered (I don't know), one of whom was Japanese. Rushdie himself went into hiding and many of the West's prominent writers washed their hands off him, saying they "understood the insult" and Rushdie "knew what he was doing". 

Put yourself in Rushdie's shoes and it seems pretty scary, with your death being incentivized and your fellow tribesmen refusing to stick up for you. Christopher Hitchens and Susan Sontag (both dead) were prominent among the literary figures to come to Rushdie's help. Read further here www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/02/hitchens200902      

It's a pretty disturbing event, isn't it? The apparent/ perceived insult and the ensuing threat and the siege like situation. And it's not as if we're done with it. These things come back to haunt and taunt. Most of the times politically motivated and sometimes (you can't deny it) because people genuinely feel offended, their religious passions aroused. MF Husain and Tasleema Nasreen (recently James Laine and Rohinton Mistry too and they were not even dealing with the divine) are merely two of the many examples. But would ordinary folk demand nothing short of death for the culprit (in their opinion), if they were not led in that direction by the clergy or politicians is the question. After all there is the option of not reading the book or looking at the paintings (which most of them don’t do anyway). Surely, the offensive piece of art is not being forcibly shipped to your residence? 

Anyway, for an Indian these issues get compounded many times over. While in the West one can sense a sort of hostility towards religion, here in India we pride ourselves on having so many of them. We call ourselves secular and never miss out on the slightest opportunity of extracting a holiday on account of some religious festival or the other. On the whole, most of us may not be religious, but have a fairly bonhomous relationship with religion and wish it well, if we were asked to do so. But this seems nothing to do with religious sentiments, especially 23 years later.

The other theory gaining credence is that the UP elections are approaching and in the absence of any worthwhile issues this is one subject that could be ratcheted up and milked later. Does this kind of a ploy actually yield any favourable results (and for whom?), we’ll never know. One would like to know the starting-point of this year’s Rushdie controversy. The politicians feign ignorance, even if they are not willing to take a summary stand on the subject. If it were the clergy (the Deoband seminary did express its displeasure), it’s equally perplexing because the same Rushdie attended the Jaipur Lit Fest in 2007. That’s the question we might need to ask, who is benefitting and how? There’s less disgust – politicians notwithstanding – and more bewilderment here. Anyway, we will know.