South Asia Citizens Web

In Islamabad, a cleric who unleashed forces from his Lal Masjid to attack and capture government buildings to press for his demand that the constitution of the state be overthrown and replaced with Islamic law, triggering the infamous showdown of July 2007, is once again addressing press conferences.

Twenty five years ago on February 14, the Ayotollah Khomeini issued his fatwa on Salman Rushdie, for the “blasphemies” of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses. It is perhaps disturbingly apposite that this should also be the week in which Penguin, the publishers of The Satanic Verses, should so abjectly surrender to hardline Hindu groups over Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History, agreeing to withdraw it from publication in India. The contrast between the attitude of the old Penguin and that of the new Penguin tells us much about how much the Rushdie affair itself has transformed the landscape of free speech.

It is an abject shame that Penguin will pulp Prof. Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History. That this decision was reached in a deal with the petitioners, with no consultation with the author compounds the folly.

So, whenever a politician justifies their activities by terming them as cultural institutions rooted in the past, s/he gives them a new lease of life. What was a dying institution a decade ago, has been revived and given some legitimacy by vote bank politics to enable it to emerge in a retrograde avatar. Now, Mr. Kejriwal too has a hand in this endeavour.

I am deeply troubled by what it foretells for free speech in India in the present, and steadily worsening, political climate.