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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: Wendy Doniger

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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Baltipuram In Flames

28 Tue Apr 2015

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Satire, Society, United States

≈ Comments Off on Baltipuram In Flames

Tags

Baltimore, New York Times, race, religion, riots, Romila Thapar, satire, Teesta Setalvad, United States, Wendy Doniger

Mayhem descended upon Baltipuram after Firdous Ghani died last week of injuries sustained during his arrest. Protestors gathered in the streets to pelt police stations with bricks and bottles and several objects were hurled at law enforcement officials as well. The state has cracked down heavily, using teargas and pepper balls; hundreds of arrests over the week and a few injuries. However, passersby and reporters were also injured in the police retaliation; one policeman was seen throwing bricks back at the protestors. Curfew has been announced and over 2,000 National Guardsmen and a thousand police officers have been deployed to quell the disturbance though looting and arson has been limited so far.

Founded in 1729, Baltipuram is a large urban centre in eastern Shvetadesam. Once upon a time, its port and location close to markets inland made it a leading centre of manufacturing and immigration to the country. Baltipuram was historically a vibrant centre of culture with writers, jazz musicians, singers, and sport stars all contributing to the city’s charm at one time or another. With such wealth and fame came the usual vices and by the late 19th century, Baltipuram earned the sobriquet of ‘Mobtown.’ With the decline of manufacturing, industrialisation, and railways in the early 1950s, Baltipuram has turned into a collection of depressed neighbourhoods where inequality and crime have been on the rise. Nonetheless, the city remains a centre of health and science research owing to several institutions of research and higher learning based in the area.

BaltipuramThe latest riots in the city began on the 5th of Vaishaka in response to the death of a young man of 25 years from an underprivileged community a week earlier, on the 29th of Chaitra. Ghani had been in a coma since 22nd Chaitra due to injuries to his spine and larynx sustained during his arrest after a long chase by police officers for “catching their eye.” Such arbitrary profiling is a common law enforcement technique in Shvetadesam, one anybody passing through any form of security barrier in the country might be subjected to. Civil rights advocates have decried this discriminatory practice but the government argues that it is a vital tool in the mission to protect its citizens.

Analysts have questioned whether the violence and the heavy-handedness have anything to do with the religious beliefs of the various groups in a country that hyphenates its identities. The majority of Shwetadeshans follow a complicated and centuries-old belief system wherein the universe is controlled by an all-powerful family…well, at least a father and a son. It is believed that unquestioned obedience to this family will result in salvation in the afterlife. Furthermore, the myth continues, that the son was born some 2,000 years ago in the Middle East and was put to death prematurely by the government of those times. As a result, one of the key rituals includes weekly cannibalism by way of transubstantiation. The several variations to this story have spawned a multitude of cults that have oftentimes found themselves at war with each other.

Though this is a plausible scenario, Tina Selvaggio, the executive director of Shvetadesam operations at For the People, an international NGO, argues that religion has nothing to do with the events over the past couple of weeks. “It is true,” she says, “that the founder of Baltipuram was of a sect that is now in the minority in Shvetadesam, a sect that has been targeted several times in the past; it is also true that immigration from across Shvetadesam’s southern borders has affected the demographic composition of the various groups in the country. But the victims of state brutality in Baltipuram are not discriminated against based on those divisions.” Shvetadesam also has segregation and stratification based on race, Selvaggio explained, “that goes back hundreds of years.” Although relations have greatly improved between different races over the past four or five decades, there is a “strong undercurrent of suspicion, hatred, and parochialism if you know where to look.”

Race is a concept brought over from Europe to Shvetadesam in the 18th century. According to this idea, the moral, intellectual, and social superiority of a person is directly proportional to the paleness of his skin. The fairer one was, the more claim one had to property, rights, wealth, and status. Shvetadesamologists believe that the first migration of white people that resulted in permanent settlement in Shvetadesam depended heavily on agriculture, particularly of tobacco and cotton. As these were labour intensive crops, black people were also brought over as slaves to work in the plantations. Interestingly, there was another group of people in Shvetadesam when the white people arrived. Renowned historian of early Shvetadesam Ramona Tapper, of White Invasion Theory fame, has argued that the arrival of Europeans – white people – to Shvetadesam saw a large-scale culling and dislocation of the original inhabitants of the land. A few descendents of these original people still remain but have been completely marginalised by the dominant group. Though the original inhabitants were also darker than the invaders, they were not enslaved as black people were.

Slavery is an inherent part of Shvetadesam culture. As late as the mid-19th century, the northern half of the country – which had no slaves – went to war with the southern half – which had all the slaves – over the issue. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were huge demonstrations demanding equality, desegregation, and voter registration. While Shvetadesam has now fulfilled most of the legal obligations for equality among its people, there are still horrific crimes against “darker coloured” people. In the early 1990s, the beating of a black taxi driver in western Shvetadesam set off major riots across the country; in 1998, a gruesome assault saw a black man chained to the back of a jeep and dragged until his death. The state penitentiary system holds a disproportionate number of darker complexioned people and the judiciary routinely hands down harsher sentences to people of a displeasing coloration. “Accidental” police shootings inexplicably occur more when people of African descent are present – names like Timotheus Tomas, Mickaël Brunn, and Travitz Märkt are seared into the collective narrative of “African-Shvetadesans.”

The incident in Baltipuram is just the latest in a series of state brutality against its oppressed and underprivileged class. Witnesses claim that Ghani was dragged into a police van while screaming in pain and despite a broken leg. According to records, Ghani was not provided with medical attention despite repeated pleas and he was handcuffed though not secured by seatbelt. Past prisoners have described this as a deliberate tactic on the part of the state officials to injure passengers “accidentally” by driving erratically.

With the primaries for the presidential elections in 2016 about to start, a couple of Shvetadesam’s likely political candidates have appealed for calm and the safety of all in Baltipuram. In response to a question during the ongoing IBSA summit, Prime Minister Modi urged the Shvetadeshans to find equitable solutions to their internal difference in a peaceful manner. “We are confident,” Modi said, “that the spirit of the Shvetadesam’s founding fathers lives on and its people will learn to live as brothers.” However, the Ministry of External Affairs has announced that the prime minister’s trip to Shvetadesam, scheduled for June this year, has now been pushed back indefinitely.

Authoress Vimala Devgan, whose recent and controversial book, Shvetadesam: An Alternative History, caused much unrest and was temporarily pulled from print, is not as hopeful as the prime minister. Devgan’s thesis, which has earned the ire of several far-right nationalists, is that Shvetadesans partake in a national erotica of violence and blood – purification of the soul occurs through aggression that reinforces tropes of white exceptionalism and superiority. “There are several regressive groups still prevalent in the country,” she replied to us by email, “that see the weak enforcement of the law by the state in such cases as countenance. It is shameful that they have not been cleared of such beliefs. If Shvetadesam wants to join a progressive comity of nations, it must learn that such flagrant violations of the rights of minorities, children, and those already in detention are unacceptable.”

With inputs from Mara Karga from Shvetadesam.

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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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