Barkha Dutt is a rising star in the Indian media — one of the journalists that makes the Indian news channel NDTV worth watching. Though she gets stuck doing silly stuff sometimes (I saw her interview Brad Pitt a few months ago; oy), Dutt is one of the few journalists that I’ve seen on Indian news channels who isn’t just a glorified “news reader.”
She’s also a very sharp columnist. This week Dutt notes a double-standard in the way Indian secularists have responded to the recent physical attack against Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, in which a number of elected officials actively participated. Nasreen, for those who don’t know, is a controversial author — she’s from a Muslim background, but has essentially renounced Islam. She’s in exile from Bangladesh after getting hit with a Fatwa; for the past several years, she’s lived in India, though the government has refused to issue her a permanent residency visa.
In a recent column in the Hindustan Times, Dutt compares the assault on Nasreen to an event that took place in Vadodara, Gujarat, just a few months ago, where politicians from the Hindu right sacked an art exhibit at the University of Baroda:
At the heart of the matter is a larger debate on whether political correctness has twisted our response to the principle of individual liberty. Have our politicians in particular been shaped by a kind of hypocrisy that makes their utterances on creative freedom just humbug and little else?
To compare the difference, think back to how the secular and liberal establishment reacted when goons from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal attacked the faculty of arts in Vadodara. A young student was arrested for painting Jesus Christ and Lord Vishnu in a style that employed sexually explicit visual metaphors. The dean of the school was suspended, but no action was taken against those who trespassed the university, infiltrated a private exhibition and used brute force to gag artistic expression. The opposition and outcry at that time was spontaneous, vocal and unrelenting. Most of us protested against the idea of fettering imagination with do’s and don’ts. We didn’t really care or even know whether the art in question was of a commendable quality. It’s the principle we stood up for.
Yes, fear and repression may be permanent citizens in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat. But the fact is that this attack on Taslima Nasreen doesn’t get to be played by different rules just because it took place on Congress turf or because the mob was led by Muslims instead of Hindus. The two incidents are inarguably mirror images of each other. (link)
On the basic point that the attack on Nasreen in Hyderabad is the mirror image of what happened in Vadodara, I find it hard to argue. Indeed, the story is the same in both cases: members of the political arm of a religious community decide, arbitrarily, that a creative work is offensive, and persecute the artist responsible. In one case, the political goons were Hindus, while in the second the political goons are Muslims — and in neither case are any of the political goons likely to be punished.
On the question of whether there is a double standard at play here, I’m not sure — it’s seemed to me that the outrage over the attacks on Nasreen amongst the secular left has been nearly as strong as it was after the incident in Vadodara. SACW, for instance, has had several incensed postings on the Nasreen incident (indeed, I found Dutt’s column through the SACW listserv). Granted, there haven’t been protests on the street in support of Nasreen, but the event in question just happened a couple of days ago. So I don’t see the double standard… yet.
Incidentally, Barkha Dutt had another razor-sharp column a few weeks ago, on another double standard — this one involving terrorists, civil liberties, and Mohammed Haneef.
