Slippery slope of our illiberal future

Some years ago, Fareed Zakaria, the Indian-American political scientist and commentator, coined the term, “illiberal democracy”. The expression was designed to capture a class of states that did hold free and fair elections and saw an alternation of political parties but lacked many of the other attributes of liberalism— most importantly a healthy respect for civil and political rights. There is no imminent danger of India joining the ranks of that category of states.

However, the recent decision of Salman Rushdie to skip the Jaipur Literary Festival because of a putative threat to his life underscores the danger that is hovering over the country. Of course, this episode is hardly an isolated incident. As far as Rushdie is concerned, Indian authorities had chosen to ban his book, The Satanic Verses, even before the retrograde regime of Ayatollah Khomeini had issued its infamous fatwa. As many astute commentators highlighted at the time it is doubtful that those who issued the ban had even bothered to so much as have read the book let alone understood its contents.
Alas, this propensity to stifle artistic expression whenever it runs afoul the proclivities of some segment of the citizenry is quickly becoming a hallmark of India’s political authorities. Indeed, in the not-so-distant past a series of other similar incidents have also raised questions about the country’s commitment to cultural and intellectual pluralism.
In this context it needs to be recalled that the noted Indian painter M.F. Husain fled to Qatar and was granted citizenship after some self-appointed guardians of morality and taste threatened his life and work. Ostensibly, Husain’s crime was a depiction of Goddess Saraswati in the nude. Even after a court dismissed the charges, the baying of these professed caretakers of India’s religious heritage led him to abandon the country of his birth. Husain, as is well known, spent his last days in that emirate, a place hardly known as a bastion of liberal values.
Attacking artistic expression whether on the canvas or the printed page seems to have become the stock in trade of these apparent protectors of India’s pristine cultural inheritance. The well-known, feminist Bangladeshi writer, Taslima Nasreen, had fled her native land in the wake of a fatwa and the prospect of death at the hands of zealots and had sought refuge in Kolkata, a city long known for its celebration of cultural and artistic expression. Sadly, after attracting the ire of a highly organised band of zealots in the state and elsewhere in the country, she was initially asked to cease and desist from making any public statement that might offend their tender sentiments. Alas, that injunction was not enough. Shortly thereafter, the avowedly secular government of Communist West Bengal found her stay in the city to be untenable and she was moved to an undisclosed location in New Delhi. Intimidated, muzzled and in a state of virtual house arrest, and much against her own inclinations, she moved to the US when offered a fellowship at a major cosmopolitan university. She is now, to use an inimitable phrase from the great American playwright, Edward Albee, “a permanent transient”, as she can ill-afford to return to her homeland or her hoped-for solace, Kolkata.
Artists and writers alone have not borne the brunt of this rising tide of intolerance, bigotry and political opportunism in the country. It should also be recalled that historians as well as journalists have faced the intransigence of these anti-intellectual mobs. The American historian James Laine’s book on Shivaji, the great Maratha leader, abruptly became the object of India’s purist brigade’s attack because of some discussion of his lineage. Those who attacked the famous Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, and called for the arrest of the author, knew next to nothing and cared even less about the canons of historical scholarship. Instead they simply resorted to threats and mayhem because it served a useful political purpose. It solidified a political base, diverted attention from a host of pressing public policy issues besieging the state and enabled them to cow political opponents. The government in Maharashtra, confronted with this thuggery, cravenly banned the book. Fortunately, both a local court and the Supreme Court of India eventually lifted the ban.
This form of zealotry and political cupidity is now in danger of becoming standard practice. Last year, Joseph Lelyveld’s book on the Mahatma attracted the wrath of the cultural purity brigade. What invoked their indignation was a dubious suggestion that the great man’s relationship with a German acolyte may have had homoerotic overtones. It is especially tragic that the life and legacy of the world’s greatest advocate of non-violence had to be defended through a campaign of personal vilification and peril on the part of those without historical knowledge or intellectual credibility.
In these increasingly troubled times, one can only hope that other elements in India’s vibrant civil society and its free press will not hesitate to take up the cudgel to stave off what is a wave of assaults, both literal and figurative, on the country’s hallowed tradition of argumentation and civil discourse. Failing to do so may actually send the country down the pathway towards an illiberal future.

The writer is a professor of political science at Indiana University, Bloomington, and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, US