The connections between the two events have, in my view, not been explored in sufficient depth, despite the rivers that have been written on each event separately, usually as part of reflections or discussions on Indian secularism. Ramesh Thakur has an excellent essay, "Ayodhya and the Politics of India's Secularism: A Double-Standards Discourse," (Asian Survey Jul 1993, Vol. 33, No. 7: 645–664), which analyzes this relationship with great insight, even if briefly.
Salil Tripathi has written a characteristically brilliant and important essay on the controversy, "Disease of Intolerance" in the current issue of Index on Censorship. The issue has a a special section on the 20th anniversary of the Rushdie fatwa. The entire issue is not online, but is worth getting, based on the list of contributors. (I generally don't find most of what Bernard-Henri Levy has to say of much value, but other than that it is a stellar list).
As Salil clarifies, the exact date of the fatwa was February 14 and the novel was burned in public in Bradford on January 14, but the decision to burn the novel was made in December 1988. And so it has been twenty years since this drama began, a drama that is still playing out in India and elsewhere across the globe.
Here are some extracts from Salil's piece.
India has the dubious honour of being the first country in the world to have banned The Satanic Verses. Without any sense of irony, the officials who banned the book helpfully suggested that the ban did not in any way reflect on Rushdie's talents or stature as a writer. (Rushdie, with a sardonic sense of humour, thanked the bureaucrat for a kind review).
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A roll-call of those who blinked, then: In India, Khushwant Singh, himself never one to shun controversy, told Penguin India, as its editorial advisor, not to publish the book, because doing so would invite violent repercussions. In Britain, Germaine Greer refused to sign the petition supporting The Satanic Verses, because it was 'about his own troubles,' adding that Rushdie was 'a megalomaniac, an Englishman with a dark skin.' While not condoning Rushdie's persecution, John Le Carre called the novel an affront to Muslim sensibilities. He then added there was 'no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity.' Edward de Bono, the lateral thinking guru, suggested that if Rushdie had the right to speak – and in the process offend some – then the reader had the right to feel offended. Roald Dahl, John Berger, Paul Johnson, and Hugh Trevor-Roper too thought writing the book was somehow Rushdie's mistake and he had invited trouble.
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Iqbal Sacranie, who later headed the Muslim Council of Britain, was to say: 'Death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him… his mind must be tormented for the rest of his life unless he asks for forgiveness to Almighty Allah.' To its shame, the Labour Government knighted Sacranie before knighting Rushdie, indicating a peculiar sense of priorities.
As the extracts from Salil's essay suggest, India played no small role in contributing to the controversy.
Syed Shahabuddin played a key role in getting Rajiv Gandhi's government to ban the book. (It boggles the mind that Shahabuddin continues to pass for a "secular" voice in India.) Mushirul Hasan, Pro Vice Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia, was assaulted and his family threatened for his statement that the ban on the book should be lifted (See this article, including footnote 4). As the article records, Hasan, however, condemned Rushdie for offending "Muslim sensibilities" commenting, "Mr. Rushdie has not just offended the men of faith but has hurt the sensibilities of most Muslims, including the liberal intelligentsia in India and elsewhere."
While Hasan defended Rushdie's right to freedom of expression under the Indian constitution, his argument that Rushdie offended the sensibilities of most Muslims raises all sorts of troubling questions. On what basis does anyone - a Mushirul Hasan or a Syed Shahabuddin - speak for all or most Indian Muslims? Or for people of faith? The attack on Hasan also raised other questions, which, too, have not been addressed sufficiently. What does it mean when some students hold an institution like Jamia Millia hostage in the name of Islam and do not allow a particular individual to enter that institution? Is Jamia Millia a 'Muslim' or 'Islamic' space? What does it mean for spaces to be vested with religious significance? Especially in a state that professes to be secular? What about the fact that the institution may receive financial support from the government in one form or another -- support that is drawn from money collected through citizens' taxes? What are the mechanisms that may allow a taxpayer to demand accountability for serious administrative failures at the institution?
Asghar Ali Engineer wrote a deeply problematic piece in the March 11, 1989 issue of the Economic and Political Weekly (available here through JSTOR), criticizing Rushdie for mocking the Prophet, but also seeking to explain Muslim reactions in terms of the historical humiliation they had suffered at the hands of the West as a result of colonialism and imperialism. Engineer, if I remember what I have read correctly, also supported the ban on Rushdie -- an untenable and contradictory position for someone who has been fighting for the right to express his own views about reform within the Bohra community to which he belongs. More recently, Ashis Nandy in his conversation with Ramin Ramin Jahanbegloo made the remark that Rushdie hurt the sentiments of millions with his book. What happens to Nandy's idea of traditional notions of civility, or the idea of convevencia (which he takes from Jose Casanova), when it comes to Rushdie? Does Rushdie forfeit that right because of his views?
It is also worth remembering that the fatwa against Rushdie itself was not protested by most Indian Muslims, including liberal Muslims and intellectuals, with anywhere near the same fervor as The Satanic Verses itself.
All of these responses point to the fact that the crisis in Indian secularism (the title, incidentally, of a recent collection of essays on secularism in India) has been longer in the making than the conventional narrative will have us believe. The anti-modern, anti-Nehruvian critiques of Indian secularism, such as those offered by the likes of Ashis Nandy or T.N. Madan or Partha Chatterjee, often argue that this secularism has marginalized religious communities in the name of a blindly imitative Western modernity by that coercive agglomeration of power, the modern state.
As Ramesh Thakur argues in the essay cited above, the Indian state's reaction to the Rushdie controversy introduced a logic of blaming the victim as a form of political reason in India that would later come back to haunt India's Muslims in the form of the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Thakur is NOT saying, of course, that the Muslims 'deserved' it. An important question raised by Thakur's reflection on the event is whether the Rushdie event created a new, immensely problematic, form of engagement between state and community in India or whether it exposed this logic of engagement that was already latent in Indian secularism from its inception. A genealogy of Indian secularism that addresses these issues and looks at the Rushdie question and the Babri Masjid demolition in the same framework could shed light on this question.
Indeed, the Indian Muslim reaction to Rushdie's book and the reaction of the Indian state might cause us to think along radically different lines. Indian secularism, one could argue, caters too much to religious communities and the self-appointed representatives and spokespersons of those communities. What does it do for non-religious individuals or communities? Does it even recognize communities that do not gather under the sign of religion? Does it allow a citizen of India to speak to the state as such (even if that state may be an imitation, good or bad, of a Western liberal democracy?) Does it allow a Muslim to be critical of Hinduism without being accused of being communal or anti-Hindu? Does it allow a Hindu to be critical of Islam without being accused of being communal or Islamophobic? Does it enable individuals to criticize faiths as as citizens without the threat of 'hurting sentiments' perennially hanging over their heads?
On another note, it is also appropriate twenty years later to salute Rushdie's immense courage. When the Iranian state raised the price of the fatwa bounty on his head, Rushdie deadpanned that it was just a rise in the cost of living. Rushdie continues to write, thrive, and live. For that he must be celebrated. And we must also thank Salil Tripathi for reminding us of the importance of Rushdie and the values that he stands for.
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