Penguin India is now in the business of banning books, in an
action that has shocked writers and free speech campaigners inside and outside
the country. The publisher is recalling all copies of The Hindus: An Alternative History, will
pulp them and ensure their withdrawal “from the Bharat” (Indian territory)
within a period “not exceeding six (6) months”.
That pledge is revealed in an extract
from the minutes of an agreement between Penguin and an 84-year-old school
principal, Dinanath Batra. Penguin’s capitulation before Batra’s offensive is
shocking. Batra has denounced Wendy Doniger’s book as “malicious”, “dirty” and
“perverse”.
He is a cat’s paw for the Save Education Movement (Shiksha Andolan
Bachao), a Hindu fundamentalist group. It wants to purge India’s education and
bookshops of all texts that it believes threaten Hindu culture. There is a
wider political context as India prepares for general elections in three months
time. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is expected to score
a major victory over the secular Congress Party.
The ban and pulping has aroused a torrent of anger and
protest from scores of Indian writers, film makers, journalists, historians,
novelist Arundhati Roy and many in the Hindu
press. Roy has challenging the Indian state over many issues, including its
repression in Kashmir and has courageously denounced BJP leader Narendra Modi.
Business interests have succeeded in suppressing
investigative books and art. One of India’s most celebrated painters, the late
Maqbool Fida Husain, was forced to flee the country in 2006 after attacks on
his paintings.
Mukul Kesavan, a distinguished historian and cricket writer,
has documented the retreat before the nationalists not only by Penguin India,
but other publishers including Bloomsbury India and Oxford University Press which
have recently withdrawn titles.
Kesavan writes: “Penguin’s response to
intimidation-by-litigation is even more dismaying. First, the case against the
book seems borderline farcical. Doniger’s sins of commission include allegedly
erroneous dates, inaccurate maps, her use of psychoanalytic categories and offensive
metaphors as well as ‘Christian missionary zeal’. Wendy Doniger is Jewish. If
there ever was a test case that a publisher stood to win, it was this one.”
The assault on writers runs far deeper than an attack on
freedom of speech in India. It is an expression of a deep and growing political
and cultural crisis as globalisation has failed to deliver for the mass of
Indians. The long-term inability of the Congress Party to fulfil the
aspirations of its supporters as it seeks to cling on to power is self-evident.
As the DNA
website notes: “The best that can be
said for the [Indian] state is that it is equal opportunity in its cravenness,
willing to back obscurantists of all stripes. If it quailed at the prospect of
angering hard line Muslim elements with Rushdie, Nasreen and R V Bhasin, it has
accommodated Christian outrage when it comes to the Da Vinci Code and the self-appointed guardians of Hinduism who took
outrage at Ramanujan and Doniger.”
India is part of the “Fragile Five”, as the market economies
of Brazil, South Africa, Turkey and Indonesia
have become known. Their rampant growth rates have slowed down. The
modernisation wrought by India’s entry into the global economy has been
accompanied by a shocking crisis amongst its small farmers, once the country’s
economic backbone.
In the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, for example, more
than 290,000 farmers have committed suicide since 1995. In India, as in the
other Fragile Fives and Brics, like Russia, China, Brazil and Turkey – not to
mention Ukraine - the heavy hand of
censorship and repression of journalist countries poses the question of who
holds power.
In India, “no one in
the country or outside it quite knows how the country is run”, according to one
political commentator, Annika Neujahr. This does indeed raise fundamental constitutional
and philosophical questions in a country that claims to be the world’s largest
democracy.
Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary
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