The news from India these days
is rarely cheery. The country’s long-overdue winning streak in the
international press, which saw old clichés upgraded to shiny new high-tech
models, ended around 2010. Since then, the headlines have been relentlessly
grim: corruption, poverty, political dysfunction, violence against women,
mistreatment of maids, and the criminalization of homosexuality. On Thursday
morning, the big story was a brawl inside the Indian Parliament, during which a
lawmaker used a can of pepper spray against his colleagues.
This week the picture dimmed a
little further, with the news that “The Hindus: An Alternative History,” an
eight-hundred-page book by Wendy Doniger, an eminent professor of religion at
the University of Chicago, would be removed from Indian book shops. Penguin
Books India, which first published the book, in 2009, signed an out-of-court
settlement with an advocacy group, the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti (“Movement
to Save Education”), who claim to be defending “the sentiments of Hindus all
over the world.” The group had filed a civil suit and multiple criminal
complaints against Doniger and her publisher; under the terms of the agreement,
which includes a bizarre clause requiring Penguin to affirm “that it respects
all religions worldwide,” the publisher will cease to sell “The Hindus” in
India, and pulp its remaining inventory.
The original legal notice in
the case, sent to Penguin in 2010, alleged that the book “is a shallow,
distorted, and non-serious presentation of Hinduism … written with a Christian
Missionary Zeal and hidden agenda to denigrate Hindus and show their religion
in a poor light … The intent is clearly to ridicule, humiliate, and defame the
Hindus and denigrate the Hindu traditions.” Citing a passage in which Doniger
refers to Sanskrit texts written “at a time of glorious sexual openness and
insight,” the complaint declares that her “approach is of a woman hungry of
sex.”
Conservative Hindu groups have
been campaigning against Doniger for more than a decade, contending that she
misunderstands and deliberately misrepresents Hindu texts and practices,
insults Hindu gods in her readings of myth, and crudely focusses, through a
psychoanalytic lens and above all else, on sex. To her detractors, what look at
first like impressive scholarly credentials—the long list of publications, the
endowed chair at Chicago, past presidencies of the American Academy of Religion
and the Association for Asian Studies—are, in fact, evidence of a sinister
colonialist conspiracy dominating the study of Hinduism in the West.
Rajiv Malhotra, an
Indian-American businessman and philanthropist, has been Doniger’s most
persistent and vocal antagonist. “India is now newly resurgent in business,
geopolitics, and culture,” he has written. “However, a powerful counterforce
within the American academy is systematically undermining core icons and ideals
of Indic culture and thought.” Many of Malhotra’s arguments are risible, but he
has deftly turned the rhetoric of post-colonialist academia back against the
academy: his essays read like right-wing parodies of Michel Foucault and Edward
Said. (“The Eurocentric superiority complex, so blatant among many aggressive
[academics], is a reaction and Freudian cover for their deeply-rooted
inferiority complexes and insecurities.”)
These disputes—about the
quality of Doniger’s scholarship and the biases of Western scholars of
Hinduism—should not be summarily dismissed, but they are irrelevant to the
legal case against the book. To debate them is to concede that only meritorious
works are deserving of the right to publication. (And who shall determine their
merit?) The underlying problem for free speech in India today is not simply religious
intolerance but weak institutions that are incapable of upholding liberal
values. Doniger’s book is the third in as many months to be effectively
censored through private means, by using legal threats. The other two cases are
no less appalling for lacking any element of religious or cultural offense.
In January, Bloomsbury India
announced that it would voluntarily withdraw copies of “The Descent of Air
India,” a book about the failing state-owned airline, written by Jitender
Bhargava, who is one of its former executive directors. The cause was a
criminal-defamation suit filed by Praful Patel, a minister in the current
Congress Party-led government, who is widely blamed for wrecking the national
carrier during his earlier tenure as India’s aviation minister. Bloomsbury
declined to fight the case, and instead tendered an apology to Patel. Their
surrender was lamentable, but, if they concluded that their chances of
prevailing against a powerful minister in a trial court were minimal, they were
surely not wrong.
The Indian legal system is not
only favorable to plaintiffs alleging offense or defamation; it also grants
powerful litigants the ability to suppress books before they are even
published. In December, the Indian finance conglomerate Sahara—whose founder,
Subrata Roy, is barred from leaving the country while courts resolve a series
of legal and regulatory challenges against his firm—obtained an order from the
Calcutta High Court blocking the publication of a book about the company.
Sahara had filed a thirty-million-dollar defamation suit against the book’s
author, Tamal Bandyopadhyay, the deputy managing editor of Mint, India’s most
respected business newspaper.
None of these cases involve the
“banning” of a book by government action. Instead, they represent a kind of
private censorship, in which interested parties find it easy to manipulate a
rotten system and silence inconvenient opinions. Governments at the state and
national level have never hesitated to ban books—and there is little practical
distinction between the major political parties in this regard—but these days
there is no need for them to do so.
Free speech has innumerable
enemies in India, and comparably few principled defenders—against whom vast
legal, political, and social obstacles are arrayed. A writer, publisher, or
newspaper editor can fight a case in court, provided he has the patience to
endure the interminable delays of the legal system. In the end, he may even
win, though the relevant laws have been interpreted, over the decades, to carve
out larger and larger exceptions to the right of free expression enshrined in
India’s Constitution. No political leader will dare speak in defense of a text
under attack unless the book in question targets his enemies; supporting the
freedom of unpopular speech only costs votes and never wins them. And the state
does not offer much protection from physical harm. When death threats are
phoned to your home, or a mob comes to vandalize your office, you’re on your
own.
Assigning blame for this deplorable
state of affairs, as with so much else in India, is an exhausting exercise in
circularity. In Doniger’s case, it would seem reasonable to start with the man
who filed the suit, Dinanath Batra, who has waged a series of legal battles to
cleanse Indian textbooks of what he deems “objectionable passages.” But Batra,
who is associated with the family of Hindu nationalist organizations connected
to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (R.S.S.), has many defenders, who maintain
that he has simply sought recourse to which he is entitled by Indian law. (This
defense has frequently been accompanied by the disingenuous claim that free
speech is not at issue in this case, because the settlement was a voluntary
one.)
So perhaps the law is to blame?
This was the crux of Doniger’s own statement, released on Tuesday: the “true
villain,” she wrote, was the section of the Indian Penal Code that
criminalizes, in its words, “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage
religious feelings of any class.” The Indian Constitution lists “freedom of
speech and expression” among the fundamental rights it guarantees, but the text
also specifies a series of exceptions—later expanded by India’s much maligned
First Amendment—that allow the government to impose “reasonable restrictions”
on this freedom. Compared to those of the United States, these terms are indeed
restrictive, but constitutional scholars point out that, in adopting them,
India was largely taking its cue from the exceptions to absolute free speech
contained in many other modern constitutions. What differed in the Indian case
was the subsequent judicial interpretation, which steadily widened the state’s
power to limit free expression. On this view, the fault lies with the courts.
In the present instance,
however, the trial court had not yet delivered its decision in the case.
Penguin, which initially declined any comment on the settlement, may have
concluded that it was unlikely to prevail in court. But it is hard to see its
decision as anything but a puzzling capitulation. Had the verdict in the trial
court gone against Penguin, the company could have appealed the ruling to two
higher courts. And so, as many have observed in the past two days, the
publishers must bear considerable blame. If they do not defend their own books,
then who else will do it?
In the Indian media, a flawed
consensus has settled on Penguin India as the sole culprit in this case, as if
its decision, however cowardly, was not set in motion by a dubious lawsuit that
a judge should have swiftly dismissed. When I spoke to Doniger, on Thursday
morning, she reiterated the defense of Penguin India that she had made in her
original statement. “They fought the case in court for four years,” she said.
“They wanted to keep the book in print as long as possible.” Doniger, like her
publishers, would not divulge the logic behind the decision to drop the case.
But, she added, “it is unfair to blame Penguin India, because this was beyond
their control.”
On Friday, Penguin India
finally released a statement, which suggested that the relevant Indian law
“will make it increasingly difficult for any Indian publisher to uphold
international standards of free expression.” This may be true, but it is a
claim that should have been tested by seeing the case through to its conclusion.
In the absence of further
clarification from Penguin, we are left with the dispiriting sight of the
world’s largest trade publisher—the recently merged Penguin Random
House—surrendering to a spurious legal threat from a minor advocacy group. Seen
from this perspective, it seems certain that the decision to withdraw the book
was not made in Delhi. It is all too easy to imagine that Bertelsmann and
Pearson, the European conglomerates that share ownership of the company,
concluded that a long legal struggle to defend free speech in India was not
worth even a minor cost to the bottom line. It is a decision that they may come
to regret. The outrage at Penguin, particularly among writers, continues to
grow. The Booker Prize-winning novelist and essayist Arundhati Roy, who is
published by Penguin, wrote an open letter to the company that appeared in the
Times of India, among other venues, on Thursday. “Even though there was no
fatwa, no ban, not even a court order, you have not only caved in, you have
humiliated yourself abjectly before a fly-by-night outfit,” Roy wrote. “You
must tell us what happened. What was it that terrified you? You owe us, your
writers an explanation at the very least.”
Many commentators have noted,
ruefully, that Penguin was the original publisher of “The Satanic Verses,” and
that it refused to back down even after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa
calling for Salman Rushdie’s murder, which was issued exactly twenty-five years
ago this week. What is noted less frequently, at least outside of India, is
that the first country to outlaw the book was not Iran but Rushdie’s native
land. India prohibited the book’s import and sale in October of 1988, only nine
days after its publication in England. Muslim political leaders approached the
Indian government—led by the third-generation Indian National Congress dynast
Rajiv Gandhi—and urged a preëmptive ban.
Khomeini is long dead, but
India’s ban on “The Satanic Verses” has never been lifted; the precedent it set
remains very much in place. In 2012, Rushdie’s scheduled appearance at the
Jaipur Literature Festival was scuttled by threats of violence from local
Muslim leaders, after police in the state of Rajasthan, then under a Congress
government, essentially signalled that they would refuse to protect the
festival if Rushdie showed up. It was a depressing but instructive episode: the
religious passions ranged against Rushdie were all too real, but the deciding
issue was the transparent cynicism of the political response. Elections in
Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, were about to begin, and the
Congress Party, which had once commanded the overwhelming support of the
state’s sizable minority of Muslim voters, hoped to woo them back by keeping
Rushdie away from Jaipur.
The Congress Party is almost
certain to be defeated in this year’s general elections, but there may be
reason to believe, as some reports on the Doniger case have suggested, that the
likely victory of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party will further
chill free speech in India. Narendra Modi, the autocratic chief minister of the
western state of Gujarat and the B.J.P.’s prime-ministerial candidate, is no
friend to free expression: in 2011, Gujarat banned “Great Soul,” a biographical
study of Gandhi by the former New York Times executive editor Joseph Lelyveld,
allegedly on the basis of misleading newspaper reports suggesting that it
depicted the Mahatma as a homosexual. Modi urged the central government to ban
the book nationwide, and demanded an apology from Lelyveld.
Modi’s most fervent admirers
have cheered the victory against Doniger. Subramanian Swamy, an outspoken
B.J.P. leader who resembles a Hindu-nationalist hybrid of Larry Klayman and
Glenn Beck—a legal gadfly who files endless cases against the government of
India and circulates outlandish conspiracy theories—gloated on Twitter, “Wendy
Doniger buckles before the coming Saffron wave.” Batra, who filed the case
against “The Hindus,” announced that his next target would be Doniger’s most
recent book, “On Hinduism,” a massive collection of essays published, in 2013,
by Aleph, a smaller Indian firm. “The good times are coming,” Batra told a
reporter for Mint, ominously. “Believe me.”
Indian liberals, who are
already greeting the prospect of Modi’s victory with declarations of panic,
believe his influence has already silenced dissenting voices in the media. The
withdrawal of Doniger’s book, according to this view, is another unhappy omen
of what the ascendant Hindu right has in store. But the evidence for these
claims is circumstantial: the history of the Indian media is the history of
attempts at its manipulation, a dirty game always played best by whichever
party holds office. The suppression of free speech and the suborning of
journalists are trusted means to demonstrate and wield political power in
India, and there is little reason to hope that might soon change.
No comments:
Post a Comment