By Gautam Adhikari

Rs 399

One of the worrying trends of public discourse in India is the regularity with which the political class and various governments — in the states and at the Centre — seem to hand over a veto to street mobs. Which books, films and ideas are kosher and which need to be banned is often decided by ugly, and sometimes violent, protests and political blackmail.

The authorities use the argument of public sentiment to prohibit or otherwise censor the offending text or movie and end up promoting illiberalism for short-term political gain. They also create a precedent that me-too activists and allegedly aggrieved parties exploit only too easily.
For a democracy, India has a remarkably poor record when it comes to censorship and bans. As far back as the Nehru years, an intellectual Prime Minister, otherwise alive to the currents and cross-currents of global conversations, acceded to the ban of books such as Nine Hours to Rama, Stanley Wolpert’s assessment of the murder of the Mahatma.
Even so, all that is ancient history and in a sense unconnected to the deluge of intolerance, often state-backed intolerance, we face today. In a contemporary context, the original sin as it were was the banning of Satanic Verses by Rajiv Gandhi’s government in the winter of 1988. India became the first country to attack Salman Rushdie’s book.
As Gautam Adhikari writes in The Intolerant Indian, this set off an avalanche: “On the heels of the success of Indian Muslim leaders to get the book banned in India… some men of Indian origin, who worked for the Saudi-funded Islamic Foundation of Leicester, suggested a campaign to have the book banned in the UK. The Jamaat-e-Islami, the party founded by Maulana Maududi, which had a significant political profile in Pakistan, organised the campaign. It was, however, a Saudi body, the United Kingdom Action Committee on Islamic Affairs, which built up pressure in Britain against the book. Saudi clerics began planning a trial of Rushdie in absentia”.
“Iran had not yet banned the book. Noticing the protests in India and the UK, a group of clerics from the holy city of Qom read out a section of the book to Ayatollah Khomeini, including the part featuring a mad imam in exile, which was an obvious caricature of Khomeini… Thereupon the Ayatollah delivered his infamous fatwa.”
Adhikari calls the Rushdie episode “a starting point for the globalisation of radical Islam”. His book’s chief concern, however, is limited to India and growing intolerance of alternative, dissenting narratives — or of creativity presumed to give offence. Part of his focus is on religious intolerance — fundamentalist Islam as well extreme manifestations of Hindutva, leading to the exile of M.F. Husain from India and to a point where any exhibition of any painting by perhaps India’s greatest post-Independence artist is at risk. Yet that is not all.
Adhikari actually expands the definition of intolerance by looking at, for instance, the Emergency-era constitutional amendments that added the words “socialist” and “secular” to the Preamble. “The words taken together”, Adhikari argues, “perhaps achieved a political need at the time — on the advice of Communist Party of India Leftists, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi wanted to appear as socialist as possible, besides wanting to secure Muslim support by making the Constitution formally secular”.
Critiquing these amendments from the position of classical liberalism, he writes: “Relevant to our concern about illiberal tendencies and intolerance are the words ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’... did the insertion of ‘socialist’ alter the fundamentally liberal democratic character of the republic as envisioned in the original Constitution? Also, despite the assertion of the Preamble after the 42nd Amendment, is the Indian state really secular in the conventionally accepted sense of the term or is Indian secularism an amorphous concept that we can only treat as a special case?”
Not surprisingly and only logically Adhikari also examines the role of religion in Indian society. In a country of such faith and observance, is religion an inhibitor or a promoter of intolerance: “Is religion our only source of morality and ethics?” Adhikari puts his trust elsewhere: “Secular humanism and its appropriate vehicle, liberal democracy, on the other hand, open up routes to free inquiry… Scientific inquiry would not have been possible without this revolution in reason, which occurred with the separation of religious authority from political power”.
He goes on to pre-empt his critics by stressing, “The argument that secular reason has no internal coherence… is little more than academic sophistry... While religion can and does provide a system of ethics and morality, the secular sphere can and does generate a parallel code of ethics to make liberal democracy work. The founding basis for that code is the Constitution, which lays out dos and don’ts for a democratic citizenry”.
To the atheist or agnostic liberal democrat — one dare say, even to the believing one — the Constitution is as important as a religious text. It is a default antidote to intolerance. To Adhikari’s mind, it is also the cornerstone of the “kind of tolerant, accommodative society for which India’s founding fathers laid the groundwork”. Some day we need to achieve it.

Ashok Malik can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com