Legal proceedings have been filed against four authors that read aloud from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic verses. Salil Tripathi explains how outdated Colonial-era legislation is being used to curtail free expression. 

The saga refuses to end.

The Jaipur story has now taken a new turn, on Monday (6 February) two courts in the city began legal proceedings after complaints were filed by among others, members of an organisation that campaigned against Salman Rushdie’s participation in the Jaipur Literature Festival. They allege that the festival organisers and four authors who read from Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, hurt the religious sentiments of Muslims.

The four authors — Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzru, Ruchir Joshi, and Jeet Thayil — read from the novel to express solidarity with the absent Rushdie, and as a mark of protest. Rushdie did not go to Jaipur after he received plausible information that security forces had evidence of death threats against him. Now the festival’s organisers are also being charged under provisions of India’s criminal laws, which date back to the colonial era.

The complainants main contention is that the authors and the festival organisers conspired “to promote enmity on grounds of religion.” One magistrate has recorded the complaint to decide if the case has any merit before it is sent to the police to register a First Information Report. That case will now be heard on 8 March. Another magistrate will record a complainant’s statement today. When such complaints are filed, the court can either ask the police to register a report and launch an investigation, or examine the complaint on its own, before deciding if the matter deserves to be sent to the police for further action. The courts have decided to examine the matter first, before sending it to the police.

The relevant sections under the Indian law are:

295-A (which deals with deliberate and malicious act intended to outrage religious feelings)

298 (uttering words with deliberate intent to wound religious feelings),

153-A (promoting enmity between groups on religious grounds),

153-B (imputations prejudicial to national integration)

120-B (criminal conspiracy).

Preserving communal harmony is a serious matter in India. These laws empower the state to prosecute anyone whose intends to and acts in a way that outrages religious feelings or promotes “enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language,” and the all-important, all-inclusive “etc.”

Now think again about what happened in Jaipur: the four authors read extracts from The Satanic Verses, whose import is banned in India. Note, its import is banned in India; lawyers have pointed out that the government did not ban its printing or publishing — rather, Penguin, which had the rights to publish it in India, chose not to do so after the import ban was imposed, and its consulting editor recommended that it would be unwise to publish the novel. Leading Indian lawyers say that bane does not extend to reading the novel, or reading from it. In fact, in the years after the ban, several lawyers and writers read from it in public, as a mark of protest. They weren’t charged at any time. At the Jaipur Festival, parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor, author and former diplomat, said he has read from, or cited the novel, without any problem.

And yet, now the four authors and the festival’s organisers — William Dalrymple, Namita Gokhale, and Sanjoy Roy — face the prospect of being charged under colonial-era laws. Such a prosecution mocks India’s fine judicial traditions and runs counter to its constitutional guarantees of free speech (which are, it must be said, limited). It means if you say anything that someone considers controversial or offensive, then either that individual or the state can begin proceedings that could lead to prosecution. This isn’t a theoretical proposition, nor is this the first such complaint. Many film-makers, authors, and artists have been scarred by threats of such prosecutions. Many have sued for peace by dropping contentious material before publication; some have been prosecuted. Higher courts have usually dismissed the charges, but not before a long process that’s costly and stressful. (There is also the other threat of vigilantes doling out justice in the form of ransacked galleries or theatres, or attacks on artists, with the police doing little to stop such violence). This is preposterous — but such is the state of affairs.

Neither the authors nor the festival organisers incited any community, nor did they intend to insult any religious group. The festival organisers have said they were not aware that the authors intended to protest. After the four read from the novel, the organisers even issued a statement saying the authors had acted on their own. But none of that seems to matter to the complainants.

The charge is even more confusing since there has been no violence. Nobody went on a rampage; there was no riot. The four had never intended to incite anybody, and nobody got incited. However, some Muslim fundamentalist groups had offered rewards to throw shoes at Rushdie, or spit on Rushdie. Others had said that even a video appearance by Rushdie could have repercussions, irrespective of what he might say. Many might regard these statements as threats, but as of now, no police officer has pressed charges against any of those individuals, who were at least implying that matters might get out of hand for which, of course, they would presumably claim no responsibility.

And so it is that the one who claims offence and threatens to take the law in his hands, or suggests others might do so, remains free; the ones who read from a book are being charged under laws meant to prevent violence.

The Indian Penal Code, from which these sections are derived, was drafted in 1860, and much of that law has stayed fossilised, even though India gained Independence in 1947. It is important to remember the circumstances under which that law was drafted. In 1857, many princely states in India rebelled against the rule of the East India Company, and what followed was what India calls the first war of independence, and what Britain remembers as the Sepoy Mutiny. Soldiers of the East India Company rebelled against the company, and united with various princely states in a vain attempt to overpower the colonial rule. The war ended in 1858, with the Indian states surrendering, and soon thereafter, company rule ended, and Queen Victoria became the Empress of India.

There were many reasons for the uprising, but the immediate spark was religious. Indian troops in the East India Company’s army were alarmed by rumours that the new British cartridges were greased with cow or pig fat. Hindu and Muslim soldiers alike were offended, unwilling to handle ammunition contaminated by animal fat which the respective faiths shunned.

Realising the combustible power of religion, the British decided to make maintenance of religious harmony their priority, and to do that, they took advantage of mutual suspicion among the communities. So anyone who disrupted harmony would be prosecuted, and people had the right to complain against anyone who disrupted such harmony, turning the “subjects” into informers. Colonial rulers had good reason to maintain such laws — to keep communities suspicious of one another and divided just short of fighting.

Free India is supposed to be democratic; its adult citizens vote their governments, and they argue with each other in a spirited manner. But these laws, relics of the raj, treat Indians as subjects, not citizens. They allow troublemakers to file spurious complaints under the provisions of these laws and restrict free expression, as had happened to the great painter, the late M.F. Husain, who was driven out of India, and died in exile in London last year. The same provisions are now being used against the novelists and organisers of a festival of literature.

This has gone on too long. Before it gets any worse, India needs adult supervision; it needs to repeal these laws, stop proceedings against the authors and festival organisers, and keep a stern eye on rabble-rousers who cry offence and threaten violence because they don’t like other people reading a book they haven’t read and which they are told they must dislike.

You can dislike a book; nothing is sacred. But if you don’t like a book, Rushdie had said in India in 2010, all you have to do is to shut it.

Instead, they want to shut conversations across the country through intimidation.

Salil Tripathi is a journalist and author and the chair of English PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee

The post India: How to silence a nation appeared first on Index on Censorship.

For almost 20 years, artist MF Husain was threatened and his work abused. Salil Tripathi says goodbye to a controversial and spell-binding master

Maqbul Fida Husain, who died in London today, was an involuntary exile. He loved London, but his heart belonged to India. Many Indians, including the government, celebrated him, but vigilantes in India did not like some of his paintings, and succeeded in hounding him out of India. He was a worthy recipient of an Index on Censorship award earlier this year; he could not attend the event itself. He divided his time between the Middle East during the winter and London during summer, unable to return to India because he would not have been allowed to paint there in peace.

In the mid-1990s, a magazine in India found an old sketch of a nude Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of learning, which Husain had painted. The sketch is elegant and clean; and while it does not “resemble” Saraswati (for who knows what she really looked like?), it was his interpretation of Saraswati. But many Hindus felt offended because she was painted without any clothes. Then, they searched through his paintings and found many other paintings which also showed Hindu divinities without clothes. None of that was gratuitous, nor was it surprising: Hindus have painted their gods and goddesses without clothes for more than a thousand years. There is a concept, of nirakara, or formless, which lies at the heart of this: that you imagine what your deity might look like, giving the formless some shape.

That was too profound for the fundamentalists, and they began campaigning against him, in India and abroad. In 2006, the Asia House in central London had to cancel an exhibition of his works after unknown assailants damaged paintings. An art gallery showing his work in India was attacked.  A television studio was attacked after a programme it produced asked viewers whether  whether Husain should be given India’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna.

At one time, hundreds of cases were filed against him. India has peculiar laws dating from colonial times, introduced by Britain soon after the rebellion of 1857 to keep communities separate and segregated. India kept them on the books, allowing bullies to terrorise artists and writers: the laws allow anyone who feels offended to lodge a complaint, which is then initiated by the state.  Husain was prosecuted under Section 295 of the Indian Penal Code, which outlaws insulting religions, and section 153A, which deals with promoting enmity between groups.

Courts, which are supposed to judge if such cases have merit, would often accept the cases nonetheless, and had Husain lived in India and wanted to be a law-abiding citizen, he’d have spent the better part of his life criss-crossing across the vast country, appearing in different courts. There was no guarantee that fresh charges would not be brought against him — his presence in a town could be considered likely to cause violence, and so new, criminal charges could easily be imposed on him, with no certainty that he’d get bail.

In the end, higher courts threw out the cases, and, in a more polite tone, told his critics to get a life. But in India, that does not end the matter. And the kind of people who had ransacked galleries or attacked the TV studios made violent threats against him.

Against his wishes, and in a decision that must have broken his heart, Husain left India. In 2010, he accepted Qatari citizenship. Since 1995, when the troubles started, Husain saw his canvases defaced in India, his family harassed, his property attached, his personality ridiculed, his art physically attacked and his work deliberately and disingenuously misinterpreted. His art has captured India’s ethos. He was India’s chronicler, portraying the stark agony of a cyclone; a court jester, painting Indira Gandhi as Durga astride a tiger after she declared Emergency; a cheerleader, celebrating the centuries of Sunil Gavaskar; an inventive exhibitionist, painting as Bhimsen Joshi sang, painting with Shah Rukh Khan, painting on the body of a woman.

When he left India, some nationalists claimed betrayal. The more important question is: did Husain betray India, or did India betray its own ethos? My book, Offence: The Hindu Case, began with a long anecdote about Husain’s absence from the opening of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bombay’s exhibition of the Progressive Artists’ Group, which came into being soon after Independence. Husain could not attend because of threats against him. Towards the end of my book, I had hoped for a happy ending.

Salil Tripathi, a writer in London, is chair of English PEN’s Writers-in-Prison Committee. He first met Husain in 1982, and instead of writing an interview, he wrote a poem about him. His book, Offence: The Hindu Case, can be ordered here.

The post MF Husain: Farewell to a nation’s chronicler appeared first on Index on Censorship.

On 4 January, bodyguard Mumtaz Qadri turned on the politician he was supposed to protect and shot him more than 20 times. Other guards at the scene appear to have waited for the assassin to finish, after which they arrested him. In court appearances since, Qadri has been showered with rose petals. Pakistani religious scholars, described as moderates, have warned people not to mourn Taseer, because doing so would be considered blasphemous. TV commentators are only willing to say that this is a sensitive matter, and that Taseer should have watched his words and not spoken carelessly.

Taseer did not in fact say anything critical of Islam’s prophet. He criticised the blasphemy law and called for its reform, requesting the pardon of Aasia Bibi, a poor Christian woman in rural Pakistan, who currently faces the death penalty. Serious questions have been raised about the fairness of the trial, the credibility of the allegation itself, and the proportionality of the punishment. Most cases prosecuted under this law target religious minorities or the poor, and it is often invoked to settle personal scores. Last year, former minister Sherry Rehman submitted a private member’s bill to the National Assembly Secretariat, seeking to reform the law.

While Pakistan was founded in 1947 to provide a home for the subcontinent’s Muslims, it was not meant to be an Islamic state based on sharia law. The vision of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founding father, was to create a Muslim-majority state that was inclusive and would not discriminate against minorities. Indeed, the Objectives Resolution of 1949 clearly stated Pakistan would make adequate provision “for the minorities freely to profess and practise their religions and develop their cultures”. The Objectives Resolution was made the preamble in the 1973 constitution, but the word “freely” was removed.

Successive governments have since undermined that protection. The first culprit was Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the civilian who took power from the military after the war of 1971 which saw Bangladesh separated from Pakistan. Bhutto was never popular with the army, and lacking a mandate from the electorate, he decided to boost his credentials by playing the Islamic card. The outwardly leftist Bhutto declared Pakistan an Islamic state by amending the constitution, changed the weekly holiday from Sunday to Friday, and took measures that undermined the rights of the minority Muslim Ahmadi community.

General Zia overthrew Bhutto (and subsequently had him executed) and passed a series of laws, which undermined minority rights further and strengthened the blasphemy laws. Amnesty International has called these laws “vaguely formulated and arbitrarily enforced” and “typically employed to harass and persecute religious minorities”. Christians, who number two per cent of Pakistan’s population, account for more than half the cases filed under blasphemy laws.

Until 1982, only nine blasphemy prosecutions were launched. Since then, more than a thousand individuals are reported to have been persecuted, prosecuted, harassed and murdered. In 1980, the Martial Law Ordinance made it an offence to criticise early Islamic leaders. Further laws have outlawed disrespecting the Quran. A constitutional amendment passed in 1980 created the sharia court. A decade later, the sharia court recommended the death penalty for blasphemy. Often higher courts have overturned punishments, but in several instances mobs or individual assassins have killed defendants following their release.

Over the years, there have been many instances of the law’s misuse, according to human rights activists monitoring the situation in Pakistan. Accusations are sometimes flimsy, emanating over disputes of property and debt. Aasia Bibi was accused of blasphemy following an argument with a Muslim woman in her village. Amnesty International has said in a report published in 1997: “Most of these cases are motivated not by the blasphemous actions of the accused, but by hostility toward members of minority communities, compounded by personal enmity, professional jealousy or economic rivalry.”

Akbar Ahmed, who teaches at the American University in Washington, wrote about many of these cases in the Washington Post in 2002, where he candidly said: “Several Pakistani friends have warned me to say nothing about this out of concern for my safety. Anyone who questions the blasphemy law’s power may be seen as challenging Islam — and therefore suspect under the very law he or she questions…. Over the years I began to see the blasphemy law used more and more for cases of political vendetta, land disputes or political rivalry. The law became a way to challenge someone’s identity, a powerful tool to intimidate anyone, Muslim or non-Muslim. The targets of this law have largely been minorities, such as members of the Ahmadi sect (who consider themselves Muslims) and Christians, though the latest anecdotal evidence suggests that the pendulum is now swinging toward Muslims.”

Pakistan is part of a global move, spearheaded by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, to outlaw religious defamation internationally. Islamic countries have tabled resolutions at the UN General Assembly in New York and the Human Rights Council in Geneva, in an attempt to capitalise on concerns over Islamophobia after the attacks in the United States in 2001 on one hand, and the uproar over the cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. While the resolutions have been passed, they are not binding, and support for the resolutions has diminished over the past year. But that hasn’t stopped Pakistan and others from trying. As Taseer’s assassination shows, bringing Pakistan back from the brink will be a dangerous task.

Salil Tripathi is a journalist and author and the chair of English PEN’s Writers in Prison Committe

The post Pakistan: The death of free speech appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The nation’s prominent art gallery displays a video, which shows a religious icon with ants crawling all over it. Religious groups protest. The curator takes note of the objection and removes that work of art.

We’ve been through that in Britain, where angry Sikh groups have succeeded in closing a play in Birmingham, and newspapers have avoided publishing cartoons from Jyllands-Posten because they showed images of the Muslim prophet, and in India, where many art galleries avoid displaying the works of Maqbul Fida Husain for fear of offending Hindu nationalists who don’t like how he paints Hindu goddesses.

But this is America; the museum is the National Portrait Gallery, part of the Smithsonian family; and the art work, a video by the late David Wojnarowicz, who died from an AIDS-related illness in 1992. His four-minute video is from a piece he made in 1987, called A Fire in My Belly, commemorating his former partner Peter Hujar, who also died of an AIDS-related illness that year. The video was being shown as part of an exhibition called Hide/Seek, whose central theme is gay love. In an 11-second clip of that video, you see a crucifix on which ants crawl. You can see it as the helplessness of the fallen Christ, whose suffering continues; or you can see it as an attack on Christianity, family values, and all good things Sarah Palin stands for.

The Catholic League, presumably upholding traditional values, said the work was deliberately designed “to insult and inflict injury and assault the sensibilities of Christians”, even calling it hate speech. L  Brent Bozell, who gained prominence during the Reagan era, also chipped in against “shock art“. As Blake Gopnik, the art critic of the Washington Post, explains, there is a long history of unpleasant images of Jesus on display in various American galleries. He points out that a recent show of Spanish sacred art, which showed 17th- century sculptures, would have also fallen foul of such sensitivities. He wrote: “If every piece of art that offended some person or some group was removed from a museum, our museums might start looking empty — or would contain nothing more than pabulum. Goya’s great nudes? Gone. The Inquisition called them porn.”

Help is at hand. The Transformer Art Gallery in Washington is now showing the video, mocking the National Portrait Gallery. James Bartlett, a commissioner at the National Portrait Gallery,  has resigned in protest. The Andy Warhol Foundation has threatened to withhold funding to the Smithsonian. And so it goes, as it should. (Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art commissioned — and then whitewashed — a
controversial mural by the Italian artist known as Blu. Its director, Jeffrey Deitch would only say that the mural — which showed coffins of American servicemen draped in a giant dollar bill — was insensitive and offensive.)

Nothing excites American politicians more than culture wars. With conservatives strutting around with added pride after the mid-term elections, which saw the Democrats lose control of the House of Representatives, social conservatives see this as the moment to attack what they call  progressive or “liberal” agenda. To be sure, since the Reagan Administration, public institutions have faced regular attacks from conservatives, who do not like certain art and literature in public — or tax-payer funded — spaces. They have attacked Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography, Andres Serrano’s works, and the writing of Kurt Vonnegut and J.D. Salinger, as they attempt to cleanse public libraries and school libraries of works that might offend. It is a serious effort to create a different kind of America — which doesn’t even celebrate Norman Rockwell‘s innocence, but venerates Thomas Kinkade‘s kitsch.
How, indeed, could they celebrate Rockwell, whose great images included the man rising in a townhall to have his say and personifying freedom of speech?

A Republican Congressman said tax-funded museums should uphold “common standards of decency”, but the United States strives for an ideal where such standards of decency are anything but common, and those who dislike something, turn off the radio, switch to another channel, stop reading the book, or step out of the museum. Gopnik says as much:

My decency is your disgust, and one point of museums and of contemporary art in general, is to test where lines get drawn and how we might want to rethink them. A great museum is a laboratory where ideas get tested, not a mausoleum full of dead thoughts and bromides.

What ensures that those museums remain that way is the cornerstone of the American Constitution, the First Amendment, which prevents the state from passing laws that restrict people’s right to worship (or not) who they want — and lets the people say what they want. That means those who wish to worship are free to do so; those who don’t wish to, don’t have to do so. And people can say what they want — and if what you say is about a public figure, not only can you say what you want, but  you don’t have to worry about its accuracy, so long as you’ve shown no malice.

Maybe it is for America to rediscover and get reacquainted with those traditional values.

Salil Tripathi is a journalist and author and the chair of English PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee

The post Shocking America appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Religious fundamentalists, however, are another matter. Last week, the Statesman‘s editor Ravindra Kumar, and its publisher, Anand Sinha, were arrested and detained briefly, before being granted bail, for having hurt the religious feelings of India’s Muslims. Self-proclaimed leaders of the Muslim community were angry after the Statesman published, in its 5 February edition, an article that had appeared originally in the London-based daily, the Independent. There, columnist Johann Hari had written an impassioned piece in which he cited examples of intolerance from various faiths, including Islam, and came down strongly against the notion of respecting faiths. In the statement that is most likely to have offended Muslims, Hari wrote: ‘I don’t respect the idea that we should follow a “prophet” who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year-old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn’t follow him.’

The article did not generate much controversy in Britain, but in India, Muslims protested, in a pattern similar to the drama surrounding the novel, The Satanic Verses. Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel was first published in London, but the world discovered its controversial nature when the Indian government decided to ban the import of the novel. In February 1989, the Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini declared a death sentence on the author.

That the protest against the Statesman occurred in India, around the 20th anniversary of Khomeini’s fatwa, may not be entirely coincidental. Parliamentary elections are due soon in India, and at such a time, politicians bereft of policies and ideas look for causes around which they can rally supporters. Hari’s article in the Statesman provided that opportunity.

Authorities broke up demonstrations growing widespread in Kolkata. Later, some Muslims sued under the notorious S 295(A) of the Indian Penal Code, under which it is an offence to cause outrage to anyone’s religious sensibilities. The Indian constitution does guarantee freedom of speech, but it also imposes ‘reasonable restrictions’, and one such is not to harm relations between religious groups.

The lawsuit under S 295(A) left Kumar no choice, and he apologised promptly for ‘not anticipating the reaction to the story was an error of judgement and we have regretted that’.

What a contrast this is from the way the newspaper used to handle threats in the past. In June 1975, the Allahabad High Court declared then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s election to Parliament in 1971 void because she had indulged in ‘corrupt practices’. Two weeks later, Gandhi declared a state of internal emergency, arrested major opposition leaders and thousands of their supporters, imposed pre-censorship, and suspended civil rights.

Most newspapers acquiesced with the Emergency, toeing the government line. But the Statesman and the Indian Express stood apart. They challenged the government in various ways. In the early days of the Emergency, both newspapers left the space for the editorial blank. They published subversive letters to the editor. Their editors chose stories from abroad that made allegorical comments on the political situation in India. They would run photographs that made a larger point, and the captions to their photographs carried deeper meaning. Editors like Kuldip Nayar, Ajit Bhattacharjea, and S Moolgaokar at the Indian Express, and S Nihal Singh at the Statesman carried the flag of freedom high. The Statesman‘s publisher, CR Irani, challenged the Government’s decision to suspend advertising to the newspaper. In later years, Irani became an eloquent champion against UNESCO’s ill-advised move to control the media, through its ‘new international information order’ which would have effectively licensed journalists under the guise of offering them protection.

And yet, the newspaper caved in last week. Why?

Two reasons explain this. One is the ridiculous section of the Indian Penal Code S 295 (A) — which allows anyone offended by anything to demand that what offends him should be banned. Under the pretext of that section, and other similar laws, Indian busybodies have sought to control behaviour and expression they disagree with. This includes lawsuits against Richard Gere and Shilpa Shetty for kissing in public; a slum activist called Tateshwar Vishwakarma suing AR Rahman and Anil Kapoor for insulting those who live in slums through the title of the film, Slumdog Millionaire (even if neither Rahman nor Kapoor had anything to do with naming the film); Muslim activists attacking actor Shahrukh Khan over a song in a recent film; and Hindu activists suing the artist MF Husain, for painting Hindu deities in the nude. India is a multi-everything country with a billion people, and the possibility of such disputes is endless.

And that’s where the second reason comes in: the failure of the state to protect rights. Muslims protesting against the Statesman are able to get away with it because of this failure. Anyone who can take umbrage, does; and his hurt feelings take precedence over others’ right to express themselves freely. Instead of protecting the right of free expression, the state defends the offended, thus circumscribing meaningful debate.

When the Statesman fights the government, it knows the enemy, and it knows the rules of the game. When it fights unelected, vigilante groups, it does not know who its enemies are. It deserves the state’s protection. Instead, the state threatens the editor with jail. Result: the world’s largest democracy narrows its discourse, talking about less and less in public, breeding more and more resentment in private. And a newspaper that could once challenge the highest of the land is made to grovel.

The post India’s culture of grievance appeared first on Index on Censorship.