In the former, where India claims its place, the ban is an anachronism. And yet, a series of governments of diverse political persuasions have been happy to keep it in force. Chidambaram has spoken his mind on The Satanic Verses when his party is in the opposition. His statement may have been inconvenient when it was in power, because Indian bans tend to be durable.
And now, in addition to them, there are unofficial, unstated, fuzzy bans like the circumstances which led the Tamil author Perumal Murugan to announce his own death as a writer. PC Mody. Covid Cases in India. Bhupesh Baghel. Salman Khurshid New Book. Ashok Gehlot. Covaxin vaccine. Covid vaccine registration. This story is from January 25, Support Scroll.
Share your perspective on this article with a post on ScrollStack, and send it to your followers. Contribute Now. The novel had outraged conservative Muslim opinion when it was published. Chidambaram remembered his liberal playbook neatly when his party is out of power. Ayatollah Khomeini saw the protest on TV and asked what it was about. He was told it was about a book that attacked the Prophet which The Satanic Verses emphatically did not and declared, in his magisterial way, that well, in that case, they should put the author to death.
And so the famous fatwa was issued and Salman Rushdie went into hiding, a phase he describes in his memoir Joseph Anton. Well, first of all: people - and politicians and clerics in particular - are ignorant.
Few, if any, of those who protested had even read the book. They were not offended. They were looking for offence. This had some comical consequences, The Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid, who supported the ban, is supposed to have said that he was not surprised that Salman had written such a book.
He knew all about him. He had been corrupted by a Western education. So what if his father was a minister? At this stage, somebody took the old boy aside and explained that while he was quite welcome to rail against Salman Khurshid, the book had been written by another man called Salman, not by Khurshid. Secondly, the net effect of the agitation was to cement the caricature of the fundamentalist Muslim nutcase.
What kind of people got so agitated about a book they had never read or were likely to read that murder and mayhem ensued? All over the world, the agitations, the protests and finally the fatwa, reinforced the image of the Muslim as fanatic. The best you could say was that all Muslims were not fundamentalist lunatics but that the silent majority was content to let the lunatics speak for it. It cannot be an accident that it was during this period that the BJP went from two seats in the Lok Sabha to becoming a major force, nationally.
They had no real commitment to artistic expression. They were not arguing for freedom. They were arguing against Muslims.
But once secularists had gone along with the Satanic Verses ban they could easily be accused of double standards when they objected to Hindu protests.
0コメント