by HARBANS MUKHIA
If democracy is a shared value among many of the world’s states today, they still differ substantially in the tolerance of civil freedoms often granted to the citizens by their respective Constitutions. Let me pick up three out of numerous instances.
In the late 1970s, M.F. Husain paints the Hindu goddess Saraswati in the nude. Nothing unusual. Twenty years on, some members of the Sangh Parivar get to hear of it, though they have never seen the painting. Some 20-odd lumpen boys vandalise the painter’s house, destroy several of his paintings and threaten to disrupt any exhibition depicting any of his paintings even in a group show. The mighty Indian state crumbles and cannot assure security for such exhibitions. Encouraged, the Sangh Parivar raises the stridency of threats to the legendary artist, extending to his very life.
In 2006, the Union home minister, Mr Shivraj Patil, sends out an advisory to the police commissioners of Delhi and Mumbai cautioning against possible communal tension created by the presence of Husain. Husain, at the end of his tether, goes into exile, never to come back to his beloved country and for ever sad for it. Though, like a true gentleman, he shared the sadness only with a few close friends.
In 2009, some six Muslim men float an outfit and under its banner hold a protest against controversial Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen in Kolkata. The country’s most secular (Left Front) government throws the writer out of the country even as she fervently pleads to be allowed to stay on in what she had begun to consider her “home”. She has not come back either, even as she hopes to, with the change of government.
Some three decades ago, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran had “sentenced” Salman Rushdie to death for writing Satanic Verses. Rushdie found shelter in England where the state spent millions to give him protection even as he remained a vocal critic of the various governments there.
Both India and the UK are democracies — yet they couldn’t be further apart in their respect for civil liberties. Ironically, while India’s Constitution announces it as a “secular” state, the UK is formally an Anglican Christian state.
The crux of the difference is that India, especially its polity, equates its secularism with multi-communalisms in which the equilibrium keeps altering with the stridency of the assertion of self-assumed representation of one or the other community, even if all it takes is to mobilise some half a dozen to two dozen individuals on any occasion to lay such claim, with the media glare inflating their presence manifold.
Deccan Chronicle for more
(Thanks to Mukul Dube)