Four Kerala students booked for putting Modi’s photo along with Hitler, Osama in magazine // Indian Publishers Are Dumping Books Instead of Defending Them
The principal of a government polytechnic in Kerala and four students were among seven people booked by police on Tuesday over putting a photograph of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in their campus magazine under a list of “negative faces” that also included Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden. Cases had been registered against four students, associated with the magazine, its Principal M N Krishnan Kutty, staff Editor Gopi and the owner of a printing press for offences under Indian Penal Code (IPC) including concealing design to commit offence, wantonly giving provocation, punishment for defamation and printing matter known to be defamatory. The polytechnic is located in Kuzhoor.
The campus magazine for 2013-14 was released on June 4 and one of its pages titled ‘negative faces’ featured a photograph of Modi. Others figuring in the collage include, sandalwood smuggler Veerappan, LTTE supremo V Prabhakaran, Adolf Hitler, Al-Qaeda chief Laden and George W Bush, police said. They said the case was booked on a complaint by a social worker Subash. The magazine was brought out by a team of campus editors of the institution, whose student union is stated to be controlled by a pro-Left campus outfit. The polytechnic authorities hinted that the magazine would be withdrawn as it has sparked a controversy. Local BJP workers staged a protest and burnt copies of the controversial magazine.
Meenakshi Lekhi links Sonia Gandhi with Mussolini. Will the RSS/BJP finally clarify their stance on fascism and Nazism? Since Ms Lekhi is announcing her awareness of the evil of Nazism and facism, may we expect the BJP leadership to finally make a public repudiation of Gowalkar's and V.D. Savarkar's sympathy for the Nazis and their racial hatred of Jews? There is ample evidence that the BJP's iconic figures, Golwalkar of the RSS and V.D. Savarkar, president of the Hindu Mahasabha, approved of Hitler’s murderous hatred of Jews. In 1938, Golwalkar wrote: “To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the semitic races - the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here...a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.” In 1939, the Mahasabha resolved that “Germany’s crusade against the enemies of Aryan culture will bring all the Aryan nations of the world to their senses and awaken the Indian Hindus for the restoration of their lost glory.” There is much documented evidence that the forerunners of RSS/Hindu Mahasabha were attracted to Hitler's politics as well as Italian fascism. Muslim communalists were similarly affected by Hitler’s anti-Semitism. Inayatullah Khan Mashriqi, founder of the fascist para-military called the Khaksars, visited Germany in 1926 to meet Hitler, and translated Mein Kampf into Urdu – probably the first Indian version of that book. Readers can find more on these and similar utterances in 'Hindutva's foreign tie-up in the 1930's'; and in The law of killing
http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.in/2013/07/the-law-of-killing-brief-history-of.html
Bucking the global decline in revenues, the business of
books in India is actually expanding — and at an exponential rate — buoyed by a
massive English-speaking market and a growing, educated middle-class hungry
for, and able to afford, written work of every genre and format. But instead of becoming more open,
publishing in India
these days — or at least scholarly publishing — operates in an anxious climate.
Beset by vexatious legal notices, mostly from hard-line Hindu organizations
offended by the portrayal of Hinduism in academic works, more and more
publishers are practicing a form of self-censorship by dumping titles from
their catalogs rather than going to the expense of defending them in court. The
situation is grave enough that authors and academics voice fears for the future
of political debate in the country. Since January, more than half a dozen
highly acclaimed books have been withdrawn or placed on hold. Many more
withdrawals may be in the pipeline, insiders say.
“What is the point of printing heaps of books when freedom
of speech is not respected?” asks British author William Dalrymple, whose 2009
work Nine Lives: in Search of the Sacred in Modern India was a masterful survey of Indians and religious thought. The latest casualty is a book titled Communalism and
Sexual Violence: Ahmedabad Since 1969 by Megha Kumar, a young scholar
at Oxford .
Worryingly, no suit has been filed against the book itself, which is a rigorous
look at the role of rape during sectarian troubles in the largest city of Gujarat , newly elected
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state. Instead, its publisher, the academic
press Orient Blackswan, withdrew it from the market because a legal notice it
received, concerning a textbook published a decade ago, caused it to review the
rest of its catalog, including Kumar’s book.
That notice, from Dinanath Batra, convener of the Hindu
group Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, claimed that the textbook From
Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India, by Sekhar Bandyopadhyay,
had portrayed another Hindu-nationalist organization in a bad light. Fearing
that Communalism and Sexual Violence would attract similar
legal action if it remained on sale, and concerned that its staff might suffer violent reprisals, Orient Blackswan told Kumar that her
book would be set aside.
“What is troubling is that the publisher was not served a
notice against Dr. Kumar’s book. The publisher is withdrawing books as a
precautionary measure,” Dalrymple says.
Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti is the same group that came to
an out-of-court settlement with Penguin India
in February to withdraw from sale University of Chicago
professor Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History.
Publisher Penguin pulped all copies of the book in India , sparking global outrage from
free-speech activists. (In April, Aleph Book Co. agreed that it would not
reprint another of Doniger’s books, On Hinduism, until Batra’s
objections to it were entertained by an independent panel of scholars. The book
is currently unavailable.)
Batra has been filing cases under Section 153A and Section
295A of the Indian Penal Code, which deal with hate speech. But the publishers
have nothing to worry about, says Lawrence Liang of the Alternative Law Forum,
who has studied issues around free speech for the past 15 years. “There is
nothing that can go against a publisher who decides to take on a legal battle
on free speech. Fought correctly, they are bound to win,” says Liang. However,
“they are just not willing to fight a legal battle fearing the rising economic
costs involved in it. They find it cheaper to withdraw books.”
Many blame Penguin India for having set a precedent by
conceding to the demands of Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti a few months ago. “It
was an extremely shortsighted decision by Penguin — they saved a few dollars
for the company at the cost of a free society for all,” says Dalrymple. After Penguin withdrew Doniger’s book, two other Penguin
authors, Siddharth Varadarajan and Jyotirmaya Sharma, announced their decision
to withdraw their books in protest. Varadarajan will instead self-publish his
book on the 2002 Gujarat riots.
“Such a scenario raises questions of academic living and
working in India ,”
says Kumar. “What does this mean for the future of fearless debates and
critical thinking in the country?”
