[Reader-list] The Great Indian Love Affair With Censorship - by - Ashis Nandy

[Britta Ohm]

Well well, I rather find it quite remarkable how Nandy, even if with the right intentions, tries to now sail with those he has attacked for so long, because he suddenly realises that his own freedom of speech might be in danger. The middle class he has routinely made the focus of his criticism in the name of religion and people's authenticity used to be precisely the 'settled middle class' he now wishes to side with, namely the traditional secular middle class. The new middle class and its emergent nationalism is what has not only escaped his analysis for too long but what has in many respects fueled his arguments. His recent piece 'Closing the Debate on Secularism: A Personal Statement?' in Dingwaney Needham/Sunder Rajan's book reads like the exact opposite of what he is propounding here. It would be interesting if he made the effort to theorise the contradictions in his own analysis, but just swinging between positions in the probable hope that nobody will notice in the face of his 'important voice' smells too much of opportunism to be convincing.
best -- Britta   

Am 30.10.2010 um 19:02 schrieb shuddha at sarai.net:

> Dear All, 
> 
> Here is an excellent piece by Ashis Nandy in Outlook on the current 'sedition'
> question that is exercising a lot of people on this list. You will find in it,
> an astute portrait of the patriotic hot-heads who hyperventilate on this list
> and display their intolerance with depressing regularity. 
> 
> best
> 
> Shuddha
> -----------
> 
> The Great Indian Love Affair With Censorship
> Ashis Nandy, in Outlook
> http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?267719
> 
> "Patriotism,” Samuel Johnson said nearly 250 years ago, “is the last refuge
> of a scoundrel.” These days in India, the adage can be safely applied to
> nationalism. There is no other explanation of the threat to arrest and try
> Arundhati Roy on charges of sedition for what she said at a public meeting on
> Kashmir, where Syed Ali Geelani too spoke. I was not there at the meeting, but
> I have read her moving statement defending herself afterwards. I feel both
> proud and humbled by it. I am a psychologist and political analyst, handicapped
> by my vocation; I could not have put the case against censorship so starkly and
> elegantly. What she has said is simultaneously a plea for a more democratic
> India and a more humane future for Indians.
> 
> I faced a similar situation a couple of years ago, when I wrote a column in the
> Times of India on the long-term cultural consequences of the anti-Muslim pogrom
> in 2002. It was a sharp attack on Gujarat’s changing middle-class culture. I
> was served summons for inciting communal hatred. I had to take anticipatory
> bail from the Supreme Court and get the police summons quashed. The case,
> however, goes on, even though the Supreme Court, while granting me anticipatory
> bail, said it found nothing objectionable in the article. The editor of the
> Ahmedabad edition of the Times of India was less fortunate. He was charged with
> sedition.
> 
> I shall be surprised if the charges of sedition against Arundhati are taken to
> their logical conclusion. Geelani is already facing more than a hundred cases
> of sedition, so one more probably won’t make a difference to him. Indeed, the
> government may fall back on time-tested traditions and negotiate with
> recalcitrant opponents through income-tax laws. People never fully trusted the
> income-tax officials; now they will distrust them the way they distrust the
> cbi.
> 
> In the meanwhile, we have made fools of ourselves in front of the whole world.
> All this because some protesters demonstrated at the meeting that Arundhati and
> Geelani addressed! Yet, I hear from those who were present at the meeting that
> Geelani did not once utter the word “secession”, and even went so far as to
> give a soft definition of azadi. By all accounts, he put forward a rather
> moderate agenda. Was it his way of sending a message to the government of
> India? How much of it was cold-blooded public relations, how much a clever play
> with political possibilities in Kashmir?
> 
> We shall never know, just because most of those who pass as politicians today
> and our knowledge-proof babus have proved themselves incapable of understanding
> the subtleties of public communication. They are not literate enough to know
> what role free speech and free press play in an open society, not only in
> keeping the society open but also in serious statecraft. In the meanwhile, it
> has become dangerous to demand a more compassionate and humane society, for
> that has come to mean a serious criticism of contemporary India and those who
> run it. Such criticism is being redefined as anti-national and divisive. In the
> case of Arundhati, it is of course the BJP that is setting the pace of public
> debate and pleading for censorship. But I must hasten to add that the Congress
> looks unwilling to lose the race. It seems keen to prove that it is more
> nationalist than the BJP.
> 
> It is the hearts and minds of the new middle class—those who have come up in
> the last two decades from almost nowhere and are middle class by virtue of
> having money rather than middle-class values—that both parties are after.
> This new middle class wants to give meaning to their hollow life through a
> violent, nineteenth-century version of European-style ‘nationalism’. They
> want to prove—to others as well as to themselves—that they have a stake in
> the system, that they have arrived. They are afraid that the slightest erosion
> in the legitimacy of their particularly nasty version of nationalism will
> jeopardise their new-found social status and political clout. They are willing
> to fight to the last Indian for the glory of Mother India as long as they
> themselves are not conscripted to do so and they can see, safely and
> comfortably in their drawing rooms, Indian nationalism unfolding the way a
> violent Bombay film unfolds on their television screens. 
> 
> Hence the
> bitterness and intolerance, not only towards Arundhati Roy, but also towards
> all other spoilsports who defy the mainstream imagination of India and its
> nationalism. Even Gandhians fighting for their cause non-violently are not
> spared. Himangshu Kumar’s ashram at Dantewada has been destroyed not by the
> Maoists but by the police. I would have thought that writers and artists would
> be exempt from censorship in an open society. As we well know, they are not.
> The CPI(M) and the Congress ganged up to shut up Taslima Nasreen by saying she
> was not an Indian. As though if you are a non-Indian in India, your rights
> don’t have to be governed by the Constitution of India!
> 
> 
> Democracy has created a middle class, most of whom are not adequately
> socialised to norms vital to creativity and innovativeness in an open society.
> 
>  
> The trend of harassing political dissenters for their “seditious” writings
> and actions started early. It started with the breakdown of consensus on
> national interest in the mid-’70s. Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency and
> introduced serious censorship and surveillance, she claimed, to protect
> national interest, democracy and development. (She had foresight, for though
> she included development in her list, it took another two decades for the
> consensus on development to break down.) The difference between the 1970s and
> the first decade of the 21st century is that millions are now acting out their
> dissent and speaking out of their radical differences with mainstream public
> opinion. The whole tribal movement—wrongly called the Naxal movement, because
> the Naxals have taken advantage of the tribal problem—is an example of this.
> There are times when a national consensus is neither possible nor desirable.
> The best one can do is to contain the violence and negotiate with those who act
> out their dissent. That may not be easy in the case of the Kashmiris because
> their trust in us is now close to zero. Psychologically speaking, the Kashmiris
> are already outside India and will remain there for at least two generations.
> The random killings, rapes, torture and the other innovative atrocities have
> brutalised their society and turned them into a traumatised lot. If you think
> this is too harsh, read between the lines of psychotherapist Shobhna Sonpar’s
> report on Kashmir.
> 
> What is it about the culture of Indian politics today that it allows us to opt
> for a version of nationalism that is so brutal, self-certain and chauvinist?
> Have we been so brutalised ourselves that we have become totally numb to the
> suffering around us? What is this concept of Indian unity that forces us to
> support police atrocities and torture? How can a democratic government, knowing
> fully what its police, paramilitary and army is capable of doing, resist signing
> the international covenant on torture? How can we, sixty years after
> independence, countenance encounter deaths? Could these practices have survived
> so long and become institutionalised if we had a large enough section of
> India’s much-vaunted middle class fully sensitive to the demands of
> democracy?
> 
> The answers to these questions are not pleasant. We know things could not have
> come to this pass if those who are or should be alert to these issues in the
> intelligentsia, media, artistic community had done their job. Here I think the
> changing nature of the Indian middle class has not been a help.
> We are proud of our democracy—the consensus on democracy still survives in
> India—but unaware of a crucial paradox in which we are caught. The democratic
> process has created a new middle class, a large section of which is not
> adequately socialised to democratic norms in sectors not vital to the survival
> of democratic politics but vital to creativity and innovativeness in an open
> society. The thoughtless, non-self-critical ultra-nationalism, intolerant of
> anyone opposed to the mainstream public opinion, is shared neither by the poor
> nor the more settled middle class. Ordinary Indians, accustomed as they are to
> living with mind-boggling diversity, social and cultural, have no problem with
> political diversity. Neither does the settled middle class.
> 
> Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, for instance, wrote an essay savaging the middle
> class in mid-nineteenth century. We had to study this in our school and it has
> remained a prescribed text in Bengal for more than a century. Today you cannot
> introduce such a text in much of India without probably precipitating a
> political controversy and demands for censorship.
> 
> Recently, at a lecture organised by the Information Commission of India, I
> claimed that the future of censorship and surveillance in India was very
> bright. It’s not only the government that loves it but a very large section
> of middle-class India too would like to silence writers, artists, playwrights,
> scholars and thinkers they do not like. In their attempt to become a globalised
> middle class, they are willing to change their dress, food habits and language
> but not their love for censorship. We should thank our stars that there still
> are people in our midst—editors, political activists, NGOs, lawyers and
> judges—to whom freedom of speech is neither a value peripheral to the real
> concerns of Indian democracy nor a bourgeois virtue but a clue to our survival
> as a civilised society.
> 
> 
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_________________________

Dr. Britta Ohm

Institute of Social Anthropology
University of Bern
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