Pratik Kanjilal - Ban on Satanic Verses: We now have a global culture of complaint which justifies violent responses
Twenty-seven years after the event, P Chidambaram, former
cabinet minister of the Congress party,
has admitted that the ban imposed on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic
Verses by the government of Rajiv Gandhi was ill-conceived. Indeed, it
must number among the least palatable actions of that government but since it
only limited access to one book, and since the Internet now allows the embargo
to be run very easily by those who want to read it, it seems to have faded from
public memory.
In the Rajiv Gadhi era, the politically sanctioned 1984
violence against Sikhs in Delhi set a precedent whose shadow now falls across
the country. Bofors set the keynote for gigantic scams to come. The Shah Bano
case was a shameful infringement of the legislature on the turf of the
judiciary. In comparison, the banning of a book seems trivial, but it was the
first shot across the bows in a global war on culture which continues to intensify.
The timeline of the Satanic Verses controversy
shows India in a rather poor light. The government banned imports of the novel
on October 5, 1988, on the plea of Syed Shahabuddin. It was the first ban which
the book faced, two weeks before Muslims in Britain petitioned their government
for curbs. Downing Street rejected the idea, preferring to commit itself to a
long-drawn protection programme which became controversial because it was
publicly funded.
A month and a half after India banned The Satanic Verses,
a domino effect was seen in countries across half the world, from South Africa
to Indonesia. The climate of opinion had gathered momentum to the extent that a
global fatwa could be heeded, and Ayatollah Khomeini was at hand in February
1989 to issue one.
Since that time, the politics of hurts sentiments has
progressively divided the world into nations, cultures and groups which support
free speech, and those which are quick to take offence. In the former, where
India claims its place, the ban is an anachronism. And yet, a series of
governments of diverse political persuasions have been happy to keep it in
force.
Chidambaram has spoken his mind on The Satanic
Verses when his party is in the opposition. His statement may have
been inconvenient when it was in power, because Indian bans tend to be durable.
And now, in addition to them, there are unofficial, unstated, fuzzy bans like
the circumstances which led the Tamil author Perumal Murugan to announce his
own death as a writer. The illiberal trend which started with the government’s
ban on The Satanic Verses and the fatwa which followed has
created a global culture of complaint which justifies violent responses to
imagined cultural slights.
http://indianexpress.com/article/explained/ban-on-satanic-verses-we-now-have-a-global-culture-of-complaint-which-justifies-violent-responses/