Defending liberalism

A new book ban controversy stokes an old debate

The tragic irony of the latest controversy pertaining to the ban on the sale of a book in India is that no one has actually either explicitly demanded it nor has there been any violence in seeking that demand. Imagine if the book in question (a biography of Mahatma Gandhi by Joseph Lelyveld) was in fact about a leader like Ambedkar or Annadurai, or some religious leader, or just about any sectional political leader. Just imagine. Buses would have been stoned, books burnt, the media attacked, and so on and so forth. Mercifully, criticism of or irreverent comment on the Father of the Nation does not ignite such rage. That is the greatness of the Mahatma and his true followers. But this is just one silver lining to the large dark cloud of shame that hangs over India’s head every time a book is sought to be banned.

 

For a people who have never been civilisationally ‘of the book’, and whose Gods and Godesses have been portrayed as human and superhuman at once, most Indians ought to be culturally attuned to the idea of intellectual irreverence. But in the heat and dust of identity politics and grievance-mongering, it has become commonplace for some section or faction to demand a ban on some book or the other in the name of self-respect and pride.

Gandhiji himself would never have objected to a book speculating about his sexual preferences, however puerile the methods used by the author to speculate. Be it Union Minister Veerappa Moily or state Chief Minister Narendra Modi, can one government functionary arrogate to himself the right to decide what book will be banned? Is there no due process?

But political and legal objections apart, there is a deeper issue at stake — the defence of the liberal space. Gandhiji himself, and almost every one of India’s freedom fighters, including Ambedkar and Jinnah, believed in the liberal dictum attributed to Voltaire: “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

India’s many sectional leaders have used their political power at the margin, or just their ability to make a public nuisance of themselves, to object to the public expression of ideas and images that they do not like. The victims of such fascist pressure tactics have been many, big and small, famous and not so famous, writers, poets, artists, film makers and so on.

In a new book on the theme, entitled The Intolerant Indian: Why we must rediscover a liberal space (Harper Collins, 2011), journalist Gautam Adhikari has bemoaned the loss of the liberal, plural space and written a manifesto for our times. As Adhikari says, India’s greatness is not that it is a democracy, but that it claims to be a plural, secular and liberal democracy. There’s hard work to be done to stay that course.

Ironically, Adhikari quotes Gandhiji and Rabindranath Tagore to make the case for liberalism and pluralism and the ideas of “live and let live” and “unity in diversity”. It was Tagore, after all, who urged Indians to enter that world, “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high/ Where knowledge is free/ Where the world has not been broken up into fragments/ By narrow domestic walls.”