Editorial, The Telegraph on the incident at MS University in Baroda

The Telegraph
May 13, 2007
Editorial

AGE OF SENSIBILITY

It is a gross injustice to say that the police in India are not prompt. They whipped into action the moment a complainant led them into an internal assessment session in the fine arts department of Vadodara’s M.S. University, and plucked out a student who had represented Hindu deities and Jesus Christ in the nude in his installations. The fact that the police are not supposed to enter an academic institution unless asked by the authorities did not deter them, just as the fact that the complainant was a local Bharatiya Janata Party heavyweight surely could not have influenced them. It is only when a woman is raped, or paraded naked, or a girl beaten to pulp by her employer, that they are preoccupied with more important duties.

The young man, Chandra Mohan, is in custody, the dean of the faculty, S. Panikkar, has been suspended by the university authorities for having refused to apologize for whatever was “wrong” with the pictures, the pious citizens who disrupted university work and beat up the student are triumphant in their control over the law, and all freedoms — academic, intellectual, imaginative, aesthetic, expressive — and all democratic sanctities are in a state of near-terminal decline.

There could have been some hope for freedom if Gujarat could be seen as an isolated example. But this madness has overtaken the whole country: an artist was threatened with the attachment of his property, actors threatened for a fun-filled kiss, books banned because the histories or narratives they contain do not suit ruling orthodoxies, films are banned left, right and centre when they try to show the other side of accepted pieties, or even because they dare to show that idols and icons are human, and may love and doubt like everyone else. From West Bengal to Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu or Gujarat, the attitude is the same, whether it is sex, or religion, or clothes, or politics or just a sense of humour that is the favoured cause for offence.

India has entered the new age of sensibility. Now one must live in perpetual fear of giving offence — to fanatics and thugs of all colours, to the police and the law and the administration. And excess of sensibility, remarkably enough, means an excess of violence. Answers to two questions might help in making this existence easier. What is obscenity? In the incredibly circumlocutory definition of the law, it is anything that is lascivious, or appeals to the prurient interest or might corrupt or deprave a person in its effect. Whose lasciviousness is then the standard, and who is to be protected from its effects? There is another question. Who is a criminal? One who destroys, bullies, hurts and brings foolish cases to court, or one who kisses or paints or dresses or tells a story as he wishes? The man who rapes or the man who struggles to make a film? The answers to these have become bewilderingly elusive in a mad world where it is religious to worship a naked goddess but criminal to paint one.