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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: MF Hussain

This is an Indian Democracy, Kaul*!

20 Sat Feb 2016

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, Opinion and Response, South Asia

≈ Comments Off on This is an Indian Democracy, Kaul*!

Tags

Avadhnama, Dadri, democracy, EU, Europe, European Union, freedom of expression, India, Jawaharlal Nehru University, JNU, Jyllandsposten, liberalism, Malda, MF Hussain, multiculturalism, Sri Ram Sene, Sudheendra Kulkarni, United States, Vishwaroopam, Wendy Doniger

Every few months, India gets into a tizzy about freedom of expression. The recent drama on Jawaharlal Nehru University’s campus, the pulping of Wendy Doniger’s book on Hinduism, the mob violence at Dadri, the smearing of black paint on Sudheendra Kulkarni, a writer, the antics of fringe groups like the Sri Ram Sene, and other events have occupied the headlines and television studio airtime in their turn. Less honoured have been the riots in Malda, the shuttering of Bombay’s Avadhnama, the censorship of Vishwaroopam, and a long list of other incidents.

As anyone following the freedom of expression debate in India knows by now, Article 19(2) of the Indian constitution introduces seven criteria which may limit expression. One factor that complicates the debate further is that the implementation of these laws have not been uniform over the years – an MF Hussain is met with sympathy while a reprint of the Danish Jyllandsposten cartoons is met with riots and media outcry. Despite this hypocrisy, a precious few free speech advocates are of the opinion that all restrictions should be done away with and India should adopt a Brandenburg v. Ohio standard of free expression, referring, of course, to the landmark 1969 case in the United States Supreme Court.

In principle, this sounds excellent. In practice, however, India is a far more complicated beast to govern. The evolution of the Brandenburg benchmark occurred over centuries of not just juridical but also political and social evolution. The values enshrined in that decision not only reflected those held by the American people but also were capable of being enforced by the American state. The United States was aided in part also by circumstance: they had the luxury of starting tabula rasa, without any historical baggage, the distance and strict immigration laws ensured a certain homogeneity pace the melting point myth, and the participatory nature of their democracy was allowed to increase only gradually.

India’s leaders at independence, however, chose to rush headlong into democracy with universal adult suffrage. Its leaders at the founding – at least those who held sway – preferred abstract theories to the exhausting reality of the new republic. The price of this decision would be borne by future generations of Indians every day of their lives. This is not to say that India should abandon democracy – it is too late for that now. Once the masses have tasted power, they are loathe to give it back. However, it does mean that Indians approach the implementation of other ideals concomitant with democracy with more caution as the country inches forward towards prosperity, liberty, security, and stability.

But first, what is democracy? Etymologically and historically, it has come to mean a system of government in which rulers are chosen by the people for fixed intervals. There is no commitment to Liberalism, even implicitly, in such a system. The checks and balances that have evolved in most democracies to protect minorities from the excesses of the majority came from cultural values over time and were institutionalised via other non-electoral avenues. Universal suffrage has had no role in the creation of a system of civil liberties. India’s leaders did not understand that a liberal democracy – and, by implication, free speech – cannot take root in a society that has not first become free and liberal-minded; only those who have drawn poorly from history can suppose otherwise.

A stable liberal democracy presupposes a people assured of their identity as a society as well as individuals within that society. People divided by opinions on public policy may equally find themselves in the majority or minority but are not so  in perpetuity. Yet those who see divisions based on ethnic or religious markers do not experience similar fluctuations. This dynamic explains the formation of democratically-minded nation-states along rather singular ethnic, religious, and even linguistic lines.

Liberty and MisesIndia’s continued governance by Anglicised elites after independence brought to power a group who had no sense of their own history and hence their own strengths and limitations. Adding a democracy based on universal suffrage to the mix when India’s national identity was inchoate at best, as the politics surrounding Partition amply demonstrated, was a recipe for disaster. This was compounded by separate law codes and reservations in education and employment for certain communities. Over time, aided by changing demographics, demands from these special communities have become more economic and political in their nature. No longer were the provisions seen as catalysts towards equality but as permanent and rightful dispensations. It should be no surprise, then, that the natural core majority resents this situation because it militates against their sense of fairness.

The weakness of Indian liberal democracy, then, stems from the failure of the nation-building project that has left large sections of society uncertain about their identities and rights. As Karl Marx had argued that socialism would develop as the high point of industrialisation and capitalism, pluralism and multicultural stability can arise only as the high point of core majority stability. It is folly to assume that the demonisation of the majority is the way to achieve this.

Another weakness of Indian liberal democracy comes from the failure of its institutions. For decades after independence, they were ravaged by the Congress for political reasons and have lost the trust of the citizens. Traditionally, liberalism has been closely related to democracy because both aimed at restricting the power of the absolute state. This went hand in hand with the increasing rule of law and social trust. Seen closely, however, modern democracy increased only political liberty but not social liberty. This, it can be argued, is the contribution of a robust judiciary that took both the constitution and contemporary community standards into account. Attorney-General v De Keyser’s Royal Hotel Limited, Fagan v Metropolitan Police Commissioner, A and Others v Secretary of State for the Home Department, Eweida v British Airways plc, Roe v Wade, Donato Casagrande v. Landeshauptstadt München, and other cases have defined the scope of civil liberties and pushed against more restrictive executive and legislative practices. In contrast, Indian courts have generally served the narrow political interests of the governing elite and done little to gradually expand civil liberties in India. To be fair to the judiciary, other factors prohibited such a role too.

Democracy and FDRWhy was the spread of universal suffrage so slow? There were two reasons: one was that the overwhelming majority was illiterate, ignorant, and incapable of forming an informed opinion on state matters. The second was the belief that only those with property were sufficiently vested in the community to truly consider its best interests. The expansion of democratic rights, therefore, coincided with the expansion of secondary education. With the changing nature of the economy, intellectual contribution and conscription joined property as criteria by which investment in the nation-state was measured. India’s early governments deserve some blame for failing to raise functional literacy rates quickly but it is also true that the education of hundreds of millions of people was going to take some time. Despite lacking the prerequisites for a democracy, let alone a liberal democracy, Indian leaders of the day rushed headlong into a bold yet ultimately ill-timed social experiment. Had successive governments governed wisely and without favouritism between various social groups, the impact on the country’s liberal evolution might yet have been mitigated.

In the age of globalisation, European multiculturalism has come under threat; unable to assimilate newcomers into the European ideal, the Union is facing a crisis as the continent’s core majority opposes the influx of refugees and even increased economic aid to the financially weaker members of the Union at the expense of the more prosperous member states. This is a tension India has lived with since its inception and watching the reaction of a mature polity such as Europe over the past few years only dampens hope in the Nehruvian idea of India even further.

[DIVERSION] The internet has also produced pressures nation-states were not designed to handle. With the rise of multinational activism and communications, ever more people are participating in political processes without necessarily any stakes in local communities. Democracy presumes civic participation in its institutions; that is the price of membership for receiving the economic and social goods of the state. Instead, contemporary democracy has lost all tethering to any sense of obligation or duty and is merely a one-way relationship for the redistribution of wealth and favours. In many cases, these disproportionately benefit those who have made no contribution to the prosperity of the whole.

This might also be an argument for the return to a certain elitism in democracy as the number and complexity of issues before a government increase dramatically in the 21st century, allowing those with greater knowledge, experience, and skin in the game to contribute more meaningfully to national and global discussions. [/DIVERSION]

Above all, governance must be about stability and order. Activists have the luxury of preaching a one-point agenda, however noble, but the state machinery must consider the overall picture before implementing policy. Let us, for example, consider the ramifications of implementing a Brandenburg standard free speech law overnight in India: the very next cartoon about Islam’s prophet will give rise to angry mobs visiting havoc upon cities and towns. If the plight of the Rohingyas in Burma could inspire the Azad Maidan riots in Bombay in 2012 for no fault of the Indian state, there is no reason to expect more sanity from the community now.

The activist argument would be to crack down on the rioters and arrest and prosecute those responsible for violence. However, when India is over 500,000 policemen short and over 90 per cent of the police force works over eight hours a day, law and order is bound to suffer. Furthermore, many of these policemen may stand by in sympathy. The training and sufficient arming of the force is also necessary. While the government works to improve the police force, not to mention the jails and judiciary, countless crores  and lives would have been lost in damages. Will free speech activists compensate for the losses incurred?

All systems have prerequisites and boundary conditions. The digital age already poses sufficient challenges to nation-states that blind adherence to shibboleths need not compound. Indians have never discussed whether they prefer a Singaporean or even Japanese style democracy to a Western democracy and perhaps that should be first on the agenda before a model is copy-pasted from elsewhere. Either way, India would still need to substantially upgrade its state capacity and reforms would have to keep those limitations in mind. India certainly has problems with its democracy as well as its free speech provisions – unequal application, state capacity, unprepared citizenry – but to demand a swift imposition of a standard radically alien to the cultural context is simply myopic and an invitation to unrest.


*: The title of this post is a reference to Yes, Prime Minister, Series 2, Episode 5: Power to the People, in which Sir Humphrey Appleby chastises Bernard Woolley for suggesting that every person has a right to power in a democracy. SK Kaul is the prime minister’s private secretary in Ji, Mantriji, a Hindi re-make of the BBC original.

This post appeared on FirstPost on February 22, 2016.

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The Wild Wild East

12 Wed Feb 2014

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Opinion and Response

≈ Comments Off on The Wild Wild East

Tags

Bloomsbury, Brandenburg v. Ohio, freedom of expression, history, India, Jaimes Laine, Jaipur Literature Festival, Jitender Bhargava, Johann Hari, Kurt Westergaard, Majlis-e Ittehadul Muslimeen, MF Hussain, Penguin Books, Praful Patel, Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses, Shiksha Bachao Andolan, Shiv Sena, Shivaji: A Hindu King in Islamic India, Taslima Nasreen, The Da Vinci Code, The Descent of Air India, The Hindus: An Alternative History, Vishwaroopam, Wendy Doniger

Last week, Penguin Books India concluded an out-of-court settlement with Dinanath Batra of the Shiksha Bachao Andolan to withdraw and destroy all paper copies of University of Chicago Indologist Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History. The book, according to the plaintiffs, was derogatory to Hinduism and offensive to the religious sentiments of Hindus. To be clear, the book has not been banned but voluntarily recalled to be pulped by Penguin – it is still easily available in electronic format in India.

The news was greeting by the usual theatrics on Twitter – several ’eminent public figures’ decried censorship in India and voiced their support for freedom of expression. Hartosh Singh Bal even suggested that he would never publish with Penguin again. Others – ‘Internet Hindus’ as they have been christened – attacked Wendy Doniger’s scholarship, questioning her command over Sanskrit and the framework and context of Hindu scriptures. Doniger also responded to the hue and cry by expressing gratitude to her supporters, defending the publisher who has remained quiet so far, and condemning Indian laws that muzzle unpopular opinion.

India’s legal structure is, at best, paternalistic towards notions of freedom of expression. Article 19(2) of the constitution, amended by the First Amendment in 1951, allows the state to place “reasonable restrictions…in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.” The Indian Penal Code also has several sections that forbid the sale of “obscene” books (Sec. 292), acts prejudicial to the maintenance of religious harmony (Sec. 153A), and malicious acts intended to outrage religious sentiments (Sec 295A).

No wonder, then, that India has banned its share of books, journals, and pamphlets in several of its languages including English since the early days of the republic. In addition, the Central Board of Film Certification must certify all films produced in the country before their release.

In the zeal to vilify the other side, both Doniger’s detractors and her supporters have missed that this has nothing to do with free speech or Doniger’s scholarship but is a commentary on the sad state of law and order in India. It is a reasonable assumption that Penguin, a commercial venture, wishes to make profits for its owners. Why would it withdraw and destroy all the copies of a book it had invested in at its own cost? The likely answer is that Penguin wished to avoid its offices or outlets selling its books being vandalised by unruly mobs. Shops would not carry Doniger’s book for fear of attracting the ire of the “offended Hindus.”

The Doniger case is not an exception to India – just last month, Bloomsbury apologised to ex-Civil Aviation minister Praful Patel and withdrew Jitender Bhargava’s The Descent of Air India; Bloomsbury was probably afraid of political retribution or violence from “overzealous readers” just as Penguin is today. Interestingly, this episode did not receive the same widespread condemnation witnessed over the Doniger incident. India’s state and central governments have repeatedly ceded power to thugs acting in the name of religion, ethnicity, or a political party because of electoral calculations. Law enforcement machinery is not used to dissipate unrest and legal proceedings against the thugs, if ever attempted, are likely to be stalled in India’s infamous judicial backlog.

A quick survey of India’s free speech landscape reveals the government’s failure to stop Hindu vigilantes from attacking art galleries carrying MF Husain’s paintings; the government caved in to demands by Muslim groups to redact the film Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities; a government minister from Uttar Pradesh, Mohammad Yaqoob Qureishi, offered a $11 million bounty on Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist who depicted Sunni Islam’s final prophet as a terrorist; in 2006, the Majlis-e Ittehadul Muslimeen, a political party, attacked Bangladeshi authress Taslima Nasreen’s book tour for writing a book that portrayed the treatment of women in Islam and Hindus in Bangladesh in a negative light; India became the first country to ban Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and the author was recently deterred from attending the Jaipur Literature Festival; in Bombay, the Shiv Sena threatened to disrupt the screening of Shah Rukh Khan’s film My Name is Khan; in 2003, another mob ransacked Pune’s Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute over dissatisfaction with James Laine’s Shivaji: A Hindu King in Islamic India; in 2009, Ravindra Kumar and Anand Sinha of The Statesman were charged for merely reprinting Johann Hari’s article, Why Should I Respect Oppressive Religions?; and most recently, Muslim groups demanded a ban on Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam.

The selective paeans in defence of free speech and the failure of the central and state governments against groups – and even ministers – acting in the name of religion, ethnicity, or political parties has brought India to this juncture when corporations no longer have faith that their premises and employees will be safe after the publication of a controversial book. In contrast, despite a loud campaign by the Church against Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Doubleday kept the book on shop shelves and actually benefitted from a large bump in sales.

The brouhaha over Penguin’s withdrawal of The Hindus has, as much as some quarters would like it to be so, nothing to do with saffron radicalism or Doniger’s scholarship. It is a symptom of the development of a Wild East in India wherein policy is decided by groups with the most muscle power. The alleged intelligentsia’s double standards on criticism of threats to freedom of expression encourages more people to take matters into their own hands. Unless there is a genuine class of loud public figures who are willing to stand for principle rather than against their pet hatreds, no pressure will be brought to bear on the courts and law and order machinery to enforce the aforementioned principle.

I hope a saccharine declaration in support of freedom of expression is not required; the Brandenburg v Ohio case remains the pole star of free speech advocacy.


This post appeared on Daily News & Analysis on February 12, 2014.

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The Sociological Narendra Modi

12 Thu Apr 2012

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, South Asia

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

capuchin monkeys, Godhra, Gulberg Society, India, inequity aversion, MF Hussain, Muslims, Narendra Modi, Salman Rushdie, secularism, Shah Bano, SIT, Taslima Nasrin

On April 10, 2012, the Ahmedabad Metropolitan Court revealed the findings of the report of the Special Investigation Team (SIT), appointed by the Supreme Court of India. The report stated that the SIT had found no evidence to prosecute Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of the Indian state of Gujarat, for the post-Godhra Gulberg Society massacre in 2002.

Predictably, the announcement has been met by gnashing of teeth and hair pulling, by sighs of relief and celebrations. No doubt, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) political strategists are already busy calculating Modi’s acceptability and chances for success as a potential prime ministerial candidate. Simultaneously, the activists have declared that their fight against the Gujarat CM is not over, and dispersed to strategise on whether to sabotage Modi’s chances at the voting booth or drag him back to a court of law all over. Clearly, this is a very emotive issue for many in India (and their supporters abroad).

For a case in which emotions run so deep and for a person who induces such strong antipathy, what does Modi represent to India? Not the politician, or the man, but the idea…what chord resonates with the idea of Modi? The Chief Minister’s advocates point to a glowing report card in terms of economic development and governance in Gujarat, while his detractors froth at the mouth as they describe the communal violence that rocked Gujarat ten years ago. But both miss the deeper point – the defenders must realise that while Gujarat has done well, other states such as Tamil Nadu, Punjab, and Maharashtra have not lagged too far behind, while those against Modi must concede that the Chief Minister is not, despite the activists lavishing their attention on him, the only or most (allegedly) communal man in India. Ayodhya (1992) comes to mind, as does Bombay (1993). What is key about these incidents is not that they are examples of anti-Muslim violence – there are plenty of examples of anti-Hindu and anti-Christian violence too – but that unlike Nazi Germany’s targetted Endlösung or the Kosovo of Slobodan Milošević, these were instances of unorganised mob violence. Whether the violence arises from organised or unorganised action may seem trivial to ideologues (and is irrelevant to victims). However, if the violence is unorganised in nature, it exposes a critical trend in Indian society – of a seething resentment against leaders making a Potemkin attempt at running the country.

Lost in our own passions and social circles, it may seem to us that everyone must have a position on the issues we care about. Yet most people are more concerned with gathering their daily bread; work, transportation, inflation, providing an education for their children, planning for their retirement, and if finances allow it, rest and recreation, necessarily take precedence over politics, philosophy, and sometimes, even principles. What possibly could be the source of so strong a bitterness, rancour, or acrimony that would make common people abandon their necessary duties for the sort of wanton destruction after Godhra?

Modern crowd psychology has moved past theories of deindividuation put forward by late 19th and early 20th century thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Gustave Le Bon, and the present consensus argues that a crowd itself does not generate violence; rather, it amplifies a latent dissatisfaction among the people. In a 2005 publication, “The Madding Crowd Goes to School,” sociologists David Schweingruber and Ronald Wohlstein countered the seven most prominent myths about crowds. arguing that they are not spontaneous, suggestible, irrational, emotional, destructive, unanimous, or anonymous. In other words, not only is crowd behaviour not irrational but it is the surfacing of widely suppressed feelings. Connecting the dots, it does not take superhuman intelligence to realise that the root of antipathy is a seething yet restrained anti-Muslim sentiment.

Much of the anti-Muslim feelings are due to, as common wisdom has it, the decades-long soft and preferential treatment of the Muslim community. As true heirs to the British policy of ‘divide and rule,’ successive Indian governments have, in an effort to cultivate vote banks, created a monstrous edifice of inequality in law, from quotas, subsidies and other payouts to separate jurisdictions. All this is ostensibly to ameliorate Muslim “backwardness.” But no matter how many inquiry reports (such as the Sachar Committee report) conclude that Muslims are a backward community, even were the veracity of the findings to be conceded, the common man is neither interested nor inclined to pore over academic debates conducted in ivory towers and moved by what he sees on the street. The complaints are many and well known, and the issue is not even about whether they are legitimate or not but the perception of repeated slights against the Hindu majority. This view needed a political outlet, which the non-Right parties were unwilling to espouse. Hence, the aggrieved segment of society veered towards the Right, as is evident from the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its non-political satellites. Labelled as hindutva, the BJP has espoused, at least ideologically, the idea of Hindu rights. To the outsider, it would be puzzling to see a political party campaigning on a platform of rights for the majority!

In the modern era, humans have become very sensitive to inequality. It is easier to take away their money and even their civil rights than their sense of equality. The famous capuchin monkey experiment conducted in 2003 by Franz de Waals and Sarah Brosnan illustrates this point very well. In the experiment, capuchin monkeys were trained to collect pebbles in exchange for cucumbers. Very quickly, an economic system arose – as they became hungry, the monkeys collected pebbles and turned them in in exchange for cucumbers. Some collected more pebbles and were given more cucumbers. Trouble started when some monkeys were given grapes instead of cucumbers for their effort (a previous experiment had shown that grapes were a higher prized commodity among the capuchins). In response, the monkeys rewarded with cucumbers went on strike; some even started throwing their cucumbers at the scientists, and the vast majority refused to collect any more pebbles. The scientists concluded, “People judge fairness based both on the distribution of gains and on the possible alternatives to a given outcome…They respond negatively to previously acceptable rewards if a partner gets a better deal.” Similarly, in a democratic society, people may “hold emotionally charged expectations about reward distribution and social exchange.” As many have noticed, the problem was not unequal pay for unequal work but differentiated rewards for the same work – it was the arbitrariness and injustice that roused the monkeys. The monkeys’ strike and disruption of work is explained by Ernst Fehr and Klaus Schmidt, who argued in their 1999 paper on inequity aversion that the “willingness to sacrifice potential gain to block another individual from receiving a superior reward” is surprisingly strong.

Critics jump to point out that humans are not the same as monkeys, and while this point may be hesitantly surrendered, we should remember that as children, a common complaint to teachers and parents was, “It’s not fair!” A convincing case is yet to be made that the Godhra carnage required more media attention than the anti-Sikh riots or the eviction of Hindus from Kashmir between 1985 and 1995; a genuine argument is still lacking on why the state can seize control of temple earnings but not of mosques or churches; and no answer has been given on why the Rajiv Gandhi government changed the constitution of the land, despite its adverse effects on women’s rights, to influence the verdict in the Shah Bano case. The Indian government’s pusillanimity over the Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasrin cases was not evident when it came to defending the freedom of expression of MF Hussain, who, by any stretch of imagination, had “hurt the sentiments” of Hindus just as much as the previous two artists had the Muslims. It is such double standards that have served to enhance the resentment against the government and its unwitting Muslim beneficiaries.

So where should the damage control begin? Every community is responsible for its own actions, and it falls to the secular-minded moderates and liberals within the Muslim community to come forward and make their voices heard. Sensible voices should make a sustained and strong argument to the government for better modern educational facilities and opportunities in place of paternalistic government handouts and lip sympathies which have so far only kept the community behind. There is some good news on this front: in the recent Uttar Pradesh state Assembly elections, the Muslim community did not buy the tall promises offered it by some of the contesting parties.

Violence is unfortunate, and must be avoided as much as possible. But when the laws fail to protect, when the system seems to discriminate, people have historically taken to arms. The Modi phenomenon cannot be swept under the carpet as politicians, the media, and the ‘intelligentsia’ have tried. It cannot be pinned onto some imaginary bigotry of the Indian Right or the Indian uneducated, for Buddhists, Jains, Jews, Sikhs, and Zoroastrians have never generated the same anger among Hindus. The Modi case is neither important nor relevant except in the sense that justice must be done; even if Modi is taken to court and convicted, there will be many others waiting to step into the breach as long as Hindus perceive themselves as receiving a step-motherly treatment from the government. If anyone is genuinely interested in tackling communalism in India, perhaps they should stop working themselves into a murderous frenzy at the mention of Modi or the BJP and stop to listen.

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