“How could Ashis Nandy call us the most corrupt in India?” the politician in the black cap shouted at the growing crowd of festival organizers and writers. A few hours earlier, Nandy had been on a panel discussion called “The Republic of Ideas” with Urvashi Butalia, a writer and publisher; Tarun Tejpal, a magazine editor and novelist; and a few others. The conversation had turned to the endemic corruption in India. Nandy, a small, bespectacled seventy-five-year-old man with a balding head, a wispy beard, and a ready laugh, had, as usual, an unorthodox take on corruption, “I do wish there remains some degree of corruption in India because I would also suggest that it humanizes our society.”
Nandy spoke about lower-caste politicians, and argued that because they have only recently gained access to the spoils of power, they didn’t yet have the sophisticated social networks that allow India’s upper-caste élite to hide their corruption. Indicating his fellow panelist Richard Sorabji, an Oxford scholar, Nandy said, “If I do a good turn to Richard Sorabji, he can return the favor by accommodating my nephew at Oxford; if it were in the United States, it would be a substantial fellowship.” He mentioned Mayawati, a Dalit (formerly called Untouchable) politician who is president of Bahujan Samaj Party, the largest lower-caste political party, and was the chief minister of Utter Pradesh until last year. Like a vast number of Indian politicians, she has faced charges of corruption (which have since been dismissed). “If she has to oblige somebody or have somebody in the family absorb the money, she will probably have to take the bribe of having a hundred petrol pumps, and that is very conspicuous, very corrupt indeed. Our corruption doesn’t look that corrupt, their’s does.”
Tejpal, the magazine editor from Delhi, followed Nandy’s thought and described corruption in India being a class equalizer, as the only chance for the people on the “wrong side of the tracks” to make it in a highly stratified and unequal society. Nandy responded, “It will be a very undignified and—how should I put it—almost vulgar statement on my part. It is a fact that most of the corrupt come from the O.B.C.s and the scheduled caste and now increasingly the scheduled tribes. And as long as this is the case, the Indian republic will survive.” Dalits, the former Untouchables, and others on the lowest rung of the Hindu caste system are described as Scheduled Castes in Indian legalese; India’s poor and marginalized tribal communities are known as Scheduled Tribes. The Indian Constitution initially guaranteed affirmative action for these two groups, but over the years other castes on the lower and middle rungs of the caste ladder have been included—often after political agitations—as “Other Backward Castes” (O.B.C.s).
A populist television journalist, who was also on the panel, promptly called Nandy’s remarks a casteist slur and demanded an apology. Within moments, Nandy’s remark about most corrupt Indians being from traditionally oppressed and marginalized lower castes and tribes was tweeted without its context. Television channels and wire services ran the headline: “SC/ST/OBCs most corrupt: Ashis Nandy.” His words divorced of the complexity of his argument and their context spread quickly—an allegation against a multitude, provoking anger and offense.
And that was what brought Kirori Lal Meena, a lower-caste member of Parliament with a formidable constituency in the state of Rajasthan, to the writers’ lounge at Diggi Palace. Meena’s supporters were already agitating outside the festival gates. Meena sat cross-legged on a bench, his hands interlocked and his body language stiff and unrelenting. He demanded that Nandy be produced. He was accompanied by police officers, who took seats around him, their faces tense. The festival organizers moved about frantically, speaking to Meena in polite, supplicating voices, urging some sort of reconciliation. He seemed keen on legal action against Nandy.
Tejpal, the co-panelist, joined in and began describing Nandy’s career. Nandy had for decades supported and written about equal citizenship for the religious minorities, the lower castes, and the poor in India—even putting himself at risk.
In one of the gravest moments of crisis in Indian polity, after the mass sectarian violence in the state of Gujarat, in 2002, when more than a thousand Muslims including pregnant women and children were killed by extremist Hindu mobs—with the alleged complicity of the government led by Hindu nationalist chief minister Narendra Modi (who is now positioning himself as a candidate for Prime Minister and the future leader of India)—Nandy wrote an essay describing Modi as a “classic, clinical case of a fascist,” with “clear paranoid and obsessive personality traits.” The essay appeared in one of India’s much respected intellectual forums, Seminar magazine.
Six years later, after Modi was reëlected in Gujarat, Nandy published an article in the Times of India commenting on the dire state of civil liberties and institutionalized prejudice against minorities in Gujarat. Article Nineteen of the Indian Constitution guarantees free speech, but it is a right limited by five exceptions: the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India; the security of the state; friendly relations with foreign states; public order, decency or morality; and in relation to contempt of court, defamation, or incitement to an offense. All these can be interpreted rather broadly, and potentially encompass almost any critical writing, political statement, or cultural expression. In this case, Modi’s police registered a criminal case against Nandy, charging him with promoting communal disharmony—making assertions prejudicial to national integration.
Nandy fought the case for several years and Indian intellectuals and liberal journalists rallied behind him. “ The case against me in Gujarat has not been closed, but the Supreme Court of India stayed my arrest,” Nandy told me.
His history and biography failed to check the anger at the Diggi Palace. Meena refused to relent; his hands continued their dismissive, unrelenting interlock.
A few minutes later, Nandy appeared. He was sombre. He faced Meena and spoke slowly, explaining his comments, insisting that his remarks weren’t a casteist slur. Namita Gokhale, a co-director of the festival, appeared with a tea-tray, offering the first cup to the enraged politician.
Meena seemed to demand a written explanation. Nandy began to write. One of the sheets of paper was torn as he wrote. He copied his explanation onto another sheet. I stood by his shoulder, watching him slowly pen his words. Nandy repeated his earlier arguments about the entrenched social networks of the élites facilitating their corruption and added,
But when Dalits, tribals and the O.B.C.s are corrupt, it looks very corrupt indeed.
However, this second corruption equalizes. It gives them access to their entitlements. And so, as long as this equation persists, I have hope for the Republic.
I hope this will be the end of the matter. I am sorry if some have misunderstood me. Though there was no reason to do so. As should be clear from this statement, there was neither any intention nor any attempt to hurt any community. If anyone is genuinely hurt, even if through misunderstanding, I am sorry about that, too.
When Meena left the lounge, television crews had been waiting for him; he was unyielding as he faced the cameras. In a few hours, news came that Mayawati, the former Uttar Pradesh chief minister, had demanded Nandy’s arrest for his remarks. Nandy’s family sought to get him back home to Delhi. A few policemen and the organizers took him out of the festival venue through a back door. The embattled, aging scholar walked briskly through the crowds as the sun set on Jaipur. He stepped into a car and drove six hours through the night to Delhi.
Politicians from all communities in India are among the first to take offense, partly with an eye on political profit and increased visibility. And yet one of the foremost Dalit intellectuals, Kancha Ilaiah, who teaches at a university in Hyderabad, was in Jaipur. Ilaiah’s best-known book, “Why I am Not a Hindu?”—a searing critique of the Hindu caste system—is required reading on the subject. Several years back, attempts were made to censor Ilaiah’s essays on caste by the authorities of his university. A letter from the registrar of his university directed him to write “within the canons of conduct of our profession” and accused him of “accentuated social tensions” through his writing. It was the Indian equivalent of Princeton trying to stop Cornel West from writing about race.
Ilaiah, the polemicist, is a slight, soft-spoken man with wisps of grey hair. At Jaipur, he wore a navy-blue suit, rimless glasses, and carried a bag full of books. Ilaiah was troubled by Nandy’s statement but opposed calls for his arrest. “His statement was not intended to hurt, but it is an assertion that encompasses the ethical life of eight-hundred million people. Are our laborers corrupt? Are our tribals who live and toil in the forests corrupt? Nobody ever said that the slaves were corrupt,” Ilaiah told me. “Ashis Nandy intended to support the cause of an oppressed people but he deployed the wrong concept and made an incorrect assertion. It is a very emotive issue. You are calling a people corrupt, a people whose life in this country is harsh.” It was not as if their marginalization was entirely in the past: “Even at a conference like this, not even one per cent of the participants are from Dalit or other lower-caste communities.”
The Jaipur police proceeded to register a criminal case against Nandy and sought the video recording of the discussion to check if the scholar’s comments constituted an offense under the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Act of India. (The law is aimed at preventing untouchability, which includes denial of access to certain places to an S.C. or S.T. person; preventing him or her from getting water from any spring, reservoir or any other source; or making a comment in order to insult or intimidate with intent to humiliate a S.C. or S.T. person in any place within public view.) The police also ordered the organizers of the literary festival not to leave the city until they were questioned by the police about, among other things, whether they had breached the terms of an undertaking they had signed to “not hurt the sentiments of any community or religion during the literary festival.” A court order helped them return home after two days, but the police summoned Nandy to appear in Jaipur for a probe against his remarks.
The undertaking the organizers had signed was a condition that the Rajasthan government had imposed after opposition from Muslim groups and death threats forced Salman Rushdie to cancel his visit to the festival last year. (David Remnick wrote about it at the time.) Even before the Nandy affair, there was a certain jitteriness around open speech, nationalism, and religion at the festival. India’s most powerful Hindu supremacist group, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or National Volunteers Association, had issued a warning that the participation of Pakistani authors was “not in the country’s interests at the moment.”
Younger officials of the R.S.S.’s political wing and India’s opposition Bharatiya Janata Party threatened to stop Pakistani authors from entering the venue. Like their brethren on the Hindu right, a little-known Islamist group called for banning from the festival four writers—Jeet Thayil, Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, and Ruchir Joshi—who had read extracts from Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” during the previous festival.
The threats seemed mere bluster when I first arrived in Jaipur, although visitors entered the venue through metal detectors, and scores of policemen and private-security men were present at the gates. Diggi Palace’s lawns held a boisterous crowd of writers and readers, a cacophony of voices debating the global economy, religious landscapes in India, and arguing about the Jewish novel. I saw the Pakistani novelist Nadeem Aslam signing copies of his new novel, “The Blind Man’s Garden.” Aslam was excited about the end papers: “Aren’t they gorgeous?” A little later, I saw the Indian novelist Jeet Thayil, one of the authors that the Islamic fringe tried to ban (and whose novel “Narcopolis” was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize last year). He had been assigned a policeman who followed him throughout the festival. “He has been with me at all my talks and at all the parties,” Thayil said. “After we attended several talks, he was bored and asked, ‘Is this what you do? You talk all day about books?’ Yes, I said. He was quiet after that, but his amusement and disbelief at our vocation was evident.” Thayil went on to read a section from his novel where the word “cunt” and its variations appeared several times. Four charges of obscenity were filed against him at a Jaipur police station.
My own panel had been, appropriately enough, about censorship. In it, I’d dwelled on the image of a tall, gangly man with a luxurious mustache in an ill-fitting leather jacket and baggy trousers, walking about the newspaper offices in Srinagar, the main city in the Indian-controlled Kashmir, a decade ago. I was a novice reporter travelling between sites of atrocity, visiting the drab offices of pro-India or pro-Kashmiri independence politicians for press conferences. The man always stood in a corner, listening intently, scribbling intensely. Occasionally, I would bump into him and he would ask about my family, or bring up an event he had missed. “I had to take my son to a hospital. Please tell me what was said? Who asked the questions?” It could feel like a fellow reporter seeking help, but I had learned by then about his vocation: he was the policeman whose job was to report on the press. The colder, faceless sign of surveillance and censorship was a faint noise, a crackle over the phone, a slight echo of your own voice that reminded one of the policemen listening to our words. The regime of censorship in conflict zones like Kashmir extended to unknown callers making intimidating threats to writers and journalists--and in the worst cases, assassinations.
But Kashmir has for decades been a state of exception, a gray zone where democratic imperatives are subservient. Recently, the Indian government has been showing greater intolerance of dissent and critique beyond the borderlands, too. Apart from censorship and surveillance by the government, an insidious trend of political, ethnic, and religious groups threatening artists, writers, and scholars with violence and legal action has been gathering strength across India.
In September, Aseem Trivedi, a Mumbai-based cartoonist, who mocked politicians facing a litany of corruption charges by redrawing the seal of India—replacing the lions with wolves—was arrested on charges of sedition in Mumbai. After intense criticism by the courts and civil society, the charges were dropped and Trivedi was released.
On November 18th, Mumbai was shut down following the death of its most powerful and controversial Hindu politician, Bal Thackeray—a divisive figure who, as the leader of Shiv Sena party, had a record of inciting xenophobic and sectarian violence. Fears of violence by his grieving party-members kept vehicles off the roads and shops closed. A twenty-one-year-old woman in a Mumbai suburb remarked critically on Thackeray’s death on her Facebook page, “People like Thackeray are born and die daily and one should not observe a ‘bandh’ [shutdown] for that.” A friend of hers liked the comment. The police arrested both girls and charged them under a section of India’s Information Technology Act, which governs cyber offenses. The girls were eventually released on bail after appearing in a local court.
Shiv Sena, the political party that Thackeray headed till his death, and whose members lobbied for the arrests of the two Mumbai girls, has, in fact, performed the role of a vigilante censor in India. The great painter Maqbool Fida Husain, known as the Picasso of India, was in his nineties when he became the target of the Hindu right for a series of nude paintings of Hindu goddesses that he had made in the nineteen-seventies. His exhibitions were vandalized, his house attacked, and criminal cases were filed against him.
Threatened with arrest, Husain had to leave India and live in exile in London and Dubai, before he accepted citizenship in Qatar in 2010. “He kept calling us from London, from New York, pleading that he must absolutely come back to India, ‘not die in a foreign land,’” his friend N. Ram, the publisher of The Hindu newspaper wrote after Husain’s death in June, 2011, in a London hospital.
And just a few weeks back, Muslim groups in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu protested against a thriller that they believed depicted Muslims as terrorists; the release of the movie was delayed by a local court. It was about these stifling trends that my colleagues and I spoke.
By Wednesday morning, another case has been registered against Nandy under the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Act in Jodhpur, Rajasthan. Fearing arrest, Nandy appealed to the Supreme Court of India, which has the authority to stop his arrest and quash the case against him. On Friday, Justice Altamas Kabir, the Chief Justice of India, along with two other judges, heard his appeal. Nandy’s lawyer invoked free speech, but the judges reprimanded him: “Tell your client he has no license to make such comments.”
The court said it would reserve judgment until seeing the government’s response to the motions. “In the meantime, the petitioner will not be arrested in FIR filed in connection with the statement made by him at the JLF, on January 26,” the Court ordered—so Nandy would not have to wait in jail. After the decision, the scholar spoke to the press, expressing his gratitude to the court. Nandy added, “I will have to be careful now.”
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Basharat Peer
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