The Vatican forbade books and Hitler burnt them. I am, in this age of electronic literature, firmly for Hitler’s approach, especially towards books I have written — with the proviso that the burners buy 20,000 copies to make a good conflagration. Should they read them first? I don’t care. Such people are unlikely to be enlightened by deathless prose. Burn, baby, burn!

Long before the Salman Rushdie episode of The Satanic Verses, I wrote a harmless collection of short stories called East End at your Feet. It was being read in British schools. Soon after its publication; it provoked protests by followers of a right-wing party called the National Front. They gathered in a demonstration outside a South London school’s gates with placards demanding that the book be banned. I followed the story at a safe distance and was called to debate the issue on TV. They may have set one copy alight, but that only fetched me the equivalent of 15 rupees.
While not objecting per se to the burning of books, I do object to banning them, to killing their writers and even to preventing these writers from entering Kolkata, or for that matter any other place on this planet. I hasten to qualify this statement: While I am a great follower of the old Brooklyn dictum, which states that “sticks and stones will bust my bones, but woids will never hoit me!” I fully support the banning of books that instigate one section of the population to murder or attack another on the grounds of religion, race, gender, caste or other unifying factors, such as sexual orientation. A ban against such instigation, to riot or kill or maim should be enshrined in the law of any country wanting to be known as civilised and should extend to the written and publicly spoken word. The instigators and hate-mongers should be suitably punished.
Recently Salman Rushdie who was innocently and entertainingly promoting his film Midnight’s Children, directed by Deepa Mehta, was banned from travelling to West Bengal by Mamata Banerjee. The legal position on which she relied was that his presence would cause civil turbulence and as chief minister she was entitled to prevent it.
She didn’t say that Midnight’s Children would stir up the trinamul, the grassroots of Bengal into destructive frenzy. No, it was the threat from some demagogue that Rushdie would instigate a riot.
We all know why. Salman wrote The Satanic Verses and suffered a fatwa, a virtual death sentence (whatever the nit-pickers say about a fatwa being just a cleric’s opinion) pronounced by Ayatollah Khomeini whose appreciation of English literature was not one of his great strengths.
Nevertheless the book was banned in India by Rajiv Gandhi’s government on the grounds that it “insulted” a religion. Or was it that this particular critical criterion was not used but rather that Rajiv was advised Muslim clerics in India would stir up riots on the streets unless the government made some gesture against the book?
Had Rushdie committed any crime? Does the content of his book justify a ban? Would the same criteria of the transgression of sentiment apply to all classes, castes, religions, genders and groups of people and to all books? In which case should Leviticus and other books of the Old Testament be banned on the ground that they offend the sentiments of gay people and of adulteresses? If my recollection serves, the blessed Leviticus says that God has commanded that women taken in adultery be stoned to death.
There are sections of the Hindu puranas which are not very positive about certain castes and about women. Should the Old Testament and the Hindu texts be banned because some adviser of Manmohanji or Soniaji has read them and finds that there are implicit “insults” to sections of the population? Should then the works of Nietzsche or of Richard Dawkins who specifically deny the existence of God, or any book which questions virgin births, be banned because these opinions transgress the teachings of one religion or
another?
Or are these bans and strictures on travel only relevant when some rabble-rouser points them out and gets the rabble inflamed enough to take to the streets and cause mayhem?
Were I, for instance, to gather the adulteresses of Mumbai together and threaten to march down Bandra and Colaba demolishing churches and synagogues because Leviticus is against free sex, would the government intervene and ban the Bible and deny a visa to the Pope? I can very strongly assert that to me and my adulteress followers free sex is a religion.
Rather than ban the Bible or the Pope, the government of India would lock me up together with a few of my leading adulteresses. Not enough of a votebank there to pander to.
The fundamental principle of free speech should extend to free thought. Salman Rushdie, in whatever form he chooses, should be free to say what he likes about a religion which is only a systematised body of belief. If his words stir up hatred against a body of people advocating, for instance, the stoning of all adulteresses and their leaders and mobs of people are stirred up to do it, he should certainly feel the firm hand of the law on his murky collar.
The right to free speech as guaranteed by a Constitution should include, subject to restrictions of slander and libel, the right to insult.
Religions and people who believe them ought to be strong enough in their faith to criticise, argue against, ignore or even burn a book which they find transgresses the sensibilities engendered by that faith. The people who ought to be banned, locked up and stoned (in the American hippy sense, of course) are those who instigate others to mayhem in the name of belief.