Apoorvanand - The real problem with Jaipur Lit Fest is not the participation of RSS ideologues – it's the sponsor
It's time for writers
and intellectuals to be reminded about Zee's recent campaigns against people
they have branded 'anti-national'.
Perhaps some of the finest minds from India and abroad who are attending the event should be reminded that they will avail of hospitality paid for by people who were instrumental in vehemently mobilising and instigating lynch mobs against some of their peers
Should we criticise
the organisers of the Jaipur Literature Festival for inviting two functionaries
of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to this year’s edition of the annual
festival? Murmurs in the literary circles seem to suggest that the organisers
of JLF succumbed to pressure from the Right Wing. A glance at the list of
speakers and programmes makes it clear that there are a fair number of liberal
and Left-leaning people among the speakers. Even the general secretary of the
Communist Party of India (Marxist), Sita Ram Yechuri, is in that list. So a
balance appears to have been struck.
Journalist Shekhar
Gupta was right when he lambasted those who oppose the idea of giving Right
Wingers space. By doing so, he argued, it is the liberal space that gets
shrunk. That idea was even upheld by the man who is much hated by the Right
Wing, Jawaharlal Nehru. When he was prime minister, he rejected a suggestion by
the editor of the weekly Blitz, RK Karanjia, to proscribe the RSS
as it was opposed to the constitutional values of India. Banning ideological
groups would only drive them underground where they could assume a dangerously
subversive power, Nehru said. Even a majoritarian ideology like that of the RSS
needs to be fought out in the open.
Moreover, in
present-day India, it is not the prerogative of Liberals or the Left to decide
whether to have a dialogue with the Right. It is the Right Wing, now in the
ascendant, that is in the position to choose whether Liberals should be allowed
access to prestigious forums. Keeping in mind the sensitivity of the Right-Wing
masters of the day, even people who previously championed liberal democratic
values have started to examine what they say.
We see it being done
in the universities where positions should actually depend on the recognition
of an individual’s work by their peers in academia. But increasingly, heads of
academic institutions are creating occasions to give platform to the so-called
intellectuals of the RSS. So one should not be surprised or upset that the JLF
is inviting intellectuals belonging to the RSS.
Of course, Right Wing
voices need to be made part of a civil dialogue or conversation. One is only
struck by the timing of this realisation by the organisers of the JLF. The RSS
has been around for a long time, but it has only recently qualified as a
potential participant of the JLF. The real problem with this festival is not
the presence of the RSS ideologues but the main sponsor of the JLF, whose name
is prefixed to that of the festival. Perhaps some of the finest minds from
India and abroad who are attending the event should be reminded that they will
avail of hospitality paid for by people who were instrumental in vehemently
mobilising and instigating lynch mobs against some of their peers.
Concerted campaigns: Let us not forget the
concerted campaign last January against young student activists at the
Jawaharlal Nehru University. So effective was the vilification that Kanhaiya
Kumar, who was president of the university students union, was brutally
assaulted by a group of lawyers in Delhi. In fact, so pervasive were the hate-campaigns,
led by the very television news channel whose name is prefixed to the JLF, that
they have made Kanhaiya Kumar and other student leaders permanently vulnerable
to attack by people who have been persuaded by the propaganda that these young
students are “anti-national”.
It didn’t stop there.
Nivedita Menon, a respected professor and feminist writer, was targeted by the
same news channel, inciting
violence against her. Gauhar Raza, an Urdu poet and scientist at the
government-funded Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, was declared a
member of the “Afzal-lover
gang”, a reference to Afzal Guru, the convict hanged for his role in the
2001 Parliament attacks. These were not isolated attacks. The tirade against
these writers and scholars continued on the channel for many days .
People who have not
been targeted in this way would perhaps say that such attacks need not be taken
seriously. They fail to realise that for those whose faces have been displayed
prominently on television for days, and described as friends of terrorists or
anti-nationals, it is matter of life and death. They are under mortal threat.
It is nobody’s
argument that merely attending the event will turn visitors into advocates of
hate-ideology. But they do legitimise their efforts. The channel has also
been at the forefront of a propaganda war against Muslims. Its blatantly false
reporting about Kairana in
Western Utter Pradesh is only one such example. It has portrayed Muslims as a threatening
presence for Hindus in Kairana and in Dhulagargh in
West Bengal.
Or consider how this
channel handled the 2015 case in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, when 50-year-old
Mohammed Akhlaq was lynched by a mob because it was rumoured that his family
had been eating beef. Writers, artists and scientists protested the killing and
the rise of intolerance, which embarrassed the government and the party in
power. But these very writers were attacked as being anti-national by the
channel, which is the patron of the celebration of creativity in Jaipur.
Unfreedom and fear: It has been reported
that JLF’s organisers did try to look for other sponsors but failed. It is
being argued that the JLF, having evolved into a unique institution, could not
have afforded any discontinuity. This school of opinion says that it is vital
to understand the compulsions of the organisers who, it is claimed, want to
build a literary culture in this country where literature is rarely celebrated
publicly. But do we need such a
massive celebration? It is the gigantic scale that necessitates the participation
of corporations, the head of one of India’s top management institutions told
this writer. The ethical universe of these corporations, he said, is defined by
a very old and simple word: profit. They cannot be expected to be proponents of
freedom and democracy.
The last two and half
years have been difficult for many of India’s minorities. We, in universities
and elsewhere, too have lived with a feeling of unfreedom and fear. This
feeling has brought us closer to understanding what minorities face. We are being
made part of a zombie culture. Therefore, it is difficult to miss the strategic
mind behind the theme of the JLF: Bhakti. Bhakti sounds sublime. The selection
of the theme brings to mind something Bertolt Brecht wrote: “Times of extreme
oppression are usually times when there is much talk about high and lofty
matters. At such times it takes courage to write of low and ignoble matters.” In India 2017, we need
this courage as badly as oxygen.
