The Hindu Business Line : The Taslima issue

Should Taslima be allowed to stay on in India? Of course, yes. But when the larger debate is on “freedom of expression”, selective protection to artists, writers, etc becomes untenable.

Rasheeda Bhagat

All the hullabaloo over granting refuge in India to Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen — the challenges and counterchallenges posed, mainly by the Sangh Parivar outfits — may die down a bit, with the External Affairs Minister, Mr Pranab Mukherjee, making a categorical statement in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday.

He said the UPA government would continue to give shelter to Ms Nasreen in the long tradition of India never refusing anyone who seeks “our protection”. But the rider, meant obviously for that small but vociferous section of Indian Muslims who want her out of India, was that “guests must desist from actions that may hurt our people’s sentiments”.

This should answer assertions and challenges by the Sangh Parivar, ranging from the RSS chief, Mr K. Sudarshan’s dignified statement that India should allow Ms Nasreen to stay, to the Gujarat Chief Minister, Mr Narendra Modi’s shrill challenges to Congress chief, Ms Sonia Gandhi.

Why Sonia Gandhi, one may ask. But, of course, the BJP’s resentment against Ms Gandhi is understandable. Whether one likes it or not, she was the one leader in the Congress who was instrumental in throwing out the NDA government; both through clever strategising on the coalition front and personal charisma, much of it borrowed from the Nehru-Gandhi name-tag. It is difficult to name one single leader in the Congress today who could have caused such a huge upset in the 2004 general elections. Of course, anti-incumbency helped, but the extra mile required to install a non-BJP led coalition in power was ploughed by her.

Anyway, let us look at Mr Modi’s challenge to Ms Gandhi on the Taslima front. Addressing an election rally in Gujarat he thundered: “I challenge Soniaben to protect Taslima. If you don’t have the strength to do so, send her to me, I will protect her.”

Fine rhetoric, which got him plenty of applause; as for votes that’s a no-brainer. There is a kind of general consensus that Mr Modi will ride back to power in Gujarat, despite dissidence, despite his autocratic ways alienating many Gujarat BJP leaders, most notably former Chief Minister Keshubhai Patel.

Good to know Mr Modi has such abundant reserves of “strength” to protect a Muslim woman on the run from unreasonable Muslim fundamentalists baying for her blood.

What about M.F.Husain?

One wishes he would enlarge his circle of generosity and strength and also offer sanctuary, not just to a foreign Muslim, but an Indian Muslim, a man called M.F. Husain, who has been hounded out of India and forced to lead a miserable and lonely existence in Dubai. All because the saffron brigade could not stomach his depiction of Hindu deities sans clothes and have vowed to kill him if he returns to India.

When the larger debate is on “freedom of expression”, selective protection to selected artists — painters, writers, etc — becomes untenable.

Should Taslima be allowed to stay on in India? Of course, yes. One may or may not agree that she is a literary genius — remember Time magazine carrying a translated excerpt from her novel Lajja, for which she got into trouble in Bangladesh, with the headline: ‘Do you call this literature?’

But the quality of her writing is beside the point. So also the charge that she deliberately vilifies Islam and all things Islamic in order to provoke and get attention. The bottomline is that a person cannot be hanged for any of these issues.

By the same logic, that section that wants to oppose her residence in India also has the “freedom” to do so, but with a rider. Their protests cannot take the violent form they did in Kolkata recently and in Hyderabad earlier. Those incidents were shameful and deserve condemnation.

Of course, in Kolkata, the fury had another angle too — the atrocities in Nandigram, where the minority community paid a heavy price.

What is painful is that when such violence is unleashed in the name of religion, it leaves a black spot on the religion in question, and raises uncomfortable questions about its practitioners. Is one’s religion so small and so fragile that criticism of it, or its depiction through an artist’s lens, undermines it?

Granted, emotions run high when it is a matter of faith, or else history would not be dotted with wars fought in the name of religion. That is why deliberate attempts to tarnish one faith or the other are reprehensible because, in the madness that follows, innocent people lose their lives or properties and collective wealth is destroyed when buses and other public or private property are torched.

Yet another dimension of the Taslima affair is the unleashing of the pent-up fury against Islam, in general, and Indian Muslims, in particular, not to mention pot-shots at the Left parties, by the ultra-Right section of the media.

Media gets in too

But And so we have opinion and analysis pieces, and even news reports, bashing both the CPI-M government in West Bengal and the UPA government at the Centre for “pandering” to and “appeasing Islamists”; capitulating to “members of the cult of victimisation”; placing a “premium on the sensibilities of the perpetually outraged”; “blood-thirsty jihadis”; and the the Left’s “one-dimensional secularism”.

The accusation is that the CPI(M) government of West Bengal quickly got rid of Ms Nasreen to “pander” to Muslim votes. Well, the question is which party is free of this charge? Doesn’t the BJP “pander” to the majority community for its votes? And the Congress? The Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party— don’t they all “pander” to the socially under-privileged classes for votes?

At the end of the day, what is anguishing is that with each such episode, when those in power selectively decide who to protect and who to crucify, the communal polarisation in the country only widens. Politicians will play politics; their aim is to come to power and cling to it at any cost. But the tragedy is that we are all-too-ready or willing victims of their power games.

(Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in)