Author:
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: February 4, 2012
URL: http://www.dailypioneer.com/pioneer-news/top-story/40139-upas-shah-bano-moment.html

The 2G scam is haunting the Congress the way Bofors did two decades ago. And the party is committing the same mistakes — communal and otherwise — that Rajiv Gandhi did. Utpal Kumar wonders if we are going back to the tumultuous ’80s

 Ace painter MF Husain once observed in an interview that he could perhaps return to India only if the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — oh, the same party that is often charged with fascism of the worst kind — came back to power. More than the late maestro’s knack for sarcasm, it exposes rather succinctly the Congress’s duplicitous, pseudo-secular politics of the day. Today Salman Rushdie, too, might be in agreement with him, particularly after the way he was stopped from visiting the Jaipur Literary Festival. Rushdie may have another reason to second Husain: It was Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA Government that ensured his visit to India for the first time in 1998 after the Iranian fatwa called for his head in the late 1980s. He soon got his PIO card made and visited the country almost half-a-dozen times without any clamour in any part of the country.

 So, why is Rushdie suddenly inviting so much of attention and scorn? On the literary front, not much has changed. Rushdie appears to be the pale shadow of his past. Over the years, he has become bigger than his writings. And, when a writer overshadows his work, what he achieves is instant stardom, but the path of artistic perfection becomes elusive. No wonder, one hasn’t seen anything remarkable coming out of his pen except the page-3 gossips surrounding his next would-be wife, fifth to be precise.

 What, then, has changed between Rushdie’s last visit to India and now? Incidentally, he had also visited the Jaipur Literary festival way back in 2007. No one talked about him then. He came and went silently. The issue this time is political, not literary. It’s just that his decision to visit Jaipur coincided with the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections and the Congress, determined to woo Muslim votes by pandering to the crassest form of minorityism, found this to be an opportunity to first create an issue and then concede to it. Indeed, an easy way out to win — or at least be a kingmaker in — the State where Muslims make up the largest single community of voters in 173 of the 405 constituencies. An almost monolithic Muslim vote-bank of 18 per cent matters, isn’t it?

 In the past few weeks, there have been talks of a Muslim OBC quota. A beginning has been made with a 4.5 per cent quota, and an assurance has been made of 9 per cent. This has brought to the fore competitive communalism in the State, prompting the Samajwadi Party to almost commit an 18 per cent quota for the Muslim community as a whole.

 Rushdie’s absence from Jaipur and the political factors behind it, particularly those being played out in Uttar Pradesh, remind us of the regressive 1980s. Go back to the era and you find besieged Rajiv Gandhi, his image dented by the Bofors kickback charges, banning The Satanic Verses merely nine days after its release in Britain — the first by any Government anywhere in the world. It preceded and, some would argue, even provoked the 1989 Iranian fatwa sentencing Rushdie to death.

 If it was Bofors that paralysed the Rajiv Gandhi regime in the 1980s, the 2G scam has had a similar impact on the UPA-II — the Supreme Court in a historic decision early this week cancelled 122 licences issued by then Telecom Minister A Raja under the very nose of Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram. If Bofors dented Rajiv Gandhi’s ‘Mr Clean’ image, 2G has crushed Manmohan Singh’s carefully-crafted aura of honesty and personal integrity.

 Like 1989, this too has been a big election year, with Uttar Pradesh set for vote. For more than two decades, the Congress has been steadily decimated from India’s most populous State. Now, with Rahul Gandhi at the helm, the party has been hoping to make a comeback. Rushdie’s planned arrival in Jaipur and the baffling Deoband fatwa provided the opportunity the party desperately needed — the link between the two incidents is hardly surprising as the Congress and Deoband have historically shared an amicable relationship. In 2012, the party seems to have come a full circle — today Rahul is awaiting to let loose the same genie that not only destroyed the Rajiv brand but also annihilated the party in the Hindi heartland.

  THE REGRESSIVE EIGHTIES

 It all began with an elderly Muslim woman called Shah Bano. It so happened that she got divorced from her husband in 1978. She had no means to support herself and her five children, and she appealed to the court to get alimony. After seven years of struggle, Shah Bano succeeded in winning a judgement from the Supreme Court. However, under intense pressure from Muslim fundamentalists, the Rajiv Gandhi Government passed the 1986 Muslim Women’s Bill, reversing the verdict and ceding greater power to clerics. The move was widely seen as a political stunt by the Congress to win over Muslim support.

 This made Hindus angry. To negate the galvanising Hindu fury, Rajiv Gandhi opened the locks of a contested Ramlalla shrine in Ayodhya. One communal pandering led to another and, thus, began the Congress’s downward spiral. A policy of appeasement is a vicious cycle which gets difficult to break. The Satanic Verses ban was the next landmark.

L’affaire Rushdie started with Syed Shahabuddin who, with the support of Congress MP Khurshid Alam Khan, a close confidant of Rajiv Gandhi, requested the Prime Minister to ban The Satanic Verses in October 1988, calling it “a deliberate insult to Islam and the holy Prophet and an intentional device to outrage religious feelings”. Blinded by Muslim vote-bank, Rajiv complied willingly. Ironically, the ‘Hindu communalist’ BJP was the only party to condemn the move!

 Here one needs to clarify that the “ban” on The Satanic Verses is not so much a ban on the book; it was a ban against its import. The book was brought out by a London-based publisher who decided not to publish in India, and given that this was the pre-Internet era the Rajiv Gandhi Government might have thought that it was enough to simply curb imports of the book under the Customs Act. Obtaining an electronic copy of the book wouldn’t violate the ban, and so any action against the four (some say five) authors who sought to register their support for Rushdie by reading aloud from The Satanic Verses at Jaipur won’t stand legally.

 Till the Shah Bano episode happened, Rajiv Gandhi was the best thing to have happened to Indian politics after Indira Gandhi’s death. That he was an outsider in politics was to his advantage. Those disgusted with political corruption saw him as a ray of hope: “He was not associated with any controversial issues, he was not aligned to any caucus and had not yet created any coterie of his own,” says Ramachandra Guha in his book, India After Gandhi. His appeal was further enhanced by his youth, good looks and even open manner. In the first year of his term, Rajiv Gandhi would often go across the country. His “discovery of India” got him enough publicity through the enamoured Press and, of course, the Doordarshan. Does it in any way remind us of anyone in 2012, charting the same path of ‘discovering’ India? History repeats itself.

 THY HAND, GREAT ANARCH

 Rajiv Gandhi’s misdemeanour with Islamists triggered a Hindu backlash. That was the time when one would often hear the slogan: “Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain” (Say proudly that we are Hindu). Only the majority community, it was alleged, was asked to disown its faith in this ‘secular’ country.

 Most Hindus got over their anger by the mid-1990s, but what remained well-entrenched in the country’s democratic, liberal ethos was the setback civil liberties and artistic freedom suffered due to Rajiv Gandhi’s Satanic act. Till The Satanic Verses, book bans in India were relatively few. After 1988, stated and unstated bans became widespread. Victims ranged from Shivaji’s biographer James Laine and fiction writer Rohinton Mistry to Mahatma Gandhi’s biographer Joseph Lelyveld and noted painter MF Husain. State sensitivity towards ‘street reaction’ reached such an absurd level that in 2006 the then Information & Broadcasting Minister held back the release of Tom Hanks’ Da Vinci Code till he had reviewed it in the august company of Catholic priests! And now Kapil Sibal, going a step further, wants to gag the Internet simply because there are a few raucous, unrefined elements who distastefully demean their supreme leader.

 Sibal needs to understand that the social networking sites are never intended to be sophisticated; its very nature is base. People need such platforms where they can vent their anger, frustration. Curb it, and get ready for more potent ways of protest. You find ‘Internet Hindus’ in large numbers because there is not much public space left for them by the Left academia. Where else they would go from here? On the streets, Mr Sibal?

 What is clear from these incidents is that the state has abandoned its citizens. It won’t come to protect you when someone threatens you from writing something he doesn’t like. If you continue, he may turn violent. Ironically, instead of taking action against the rogue, the state asks you to restrain yourself. “Why provoke him by writing,” it would say. Haven’t we heard it before? Yes, when a police officer tells women how they should dress themselves, lest they arouse ‘manly’ passions. It makes the victim responsible for the assault.

 This is what happened at Jaipur recently. This has what happened to Subramanian Swamy some time back. He just wrote with adequate facts and figures, “Muslims of India are being programmed by a slow reactive process to become radical and thus slide into suicide against Hindus.” And, Delhi Police, instead of protecting him from organised — or even paid — protesters, charged him with spreading ‘enmity’ between communities! Incidentally, Swamy has been leading the 2G brigade against the UPA, which has almost got the Government bowled.

 The political class is hardly bothered. Attacking Rushdie makes political sense, so attack him. Targeting Swamy might subdue him — at least those in power thought so — so get the police behind him. This is how the state works in India. What is more ironical is the fact that liberal support for victims differs from people to people: Those who raised hell in favour of Husain are today busy arguing in favour of a ban on Rushdie’s book; those who stood for Wendy Doniger (of The Hindus fame) are silently watching the plight of cartoonists who allegedly lampooned the holy Prophet. Creative freedom cannot — and shouldn’t — be selective.