From: International Herald Tribune
January 25, 2012, 9:51 am
India’s political blasphemy
By DAN MORRISON
VARANASI, India — The current storm of censorship and intimidation over Salman Rushdie at the Jaipur Literature Festival is nothing more than a dodge by India’s politicians and Muslim leaders to cover their failure to improve the dreadful conditions in which many Indian Muslims live.
The flap is an election season farce — a coproduction of India’s governing party, a controversy-hungry media, and a handful of mullahs who have let their communities stagnate while the country has advanced economically.
The circus started after Rushdie canceled a planned appearance at the festival last weekend in the face of reported threats to his life. The state police had said they would not protect him.
Then on Tuesday, organizers of the festival, the biggest in Asia, were forced to drop a video-linked interview with the Indian-born author after a crowd of protesters massed outside the venue.
The purported source of this anti-Rushdie outrage is the writer’s 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses.” Rushdie spent years living underground after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran called it blasphemous and ordered the author killed. A translator of the book was later murdered, and 37 people were massacred in 1993 in Turkey by a mob targeting another translator.
The Indian government, wary of offending the country’s large Muslim community, was comparatively moderate in its reaction to the publication of “The Satanic Verses”: It banned the book. It remains banned to this day.
I’ve never read “The Satanic Verses,” something I share with most of the 1.2 billion Indians on earth. This includes, I would bet, Abul Qasim Nomani, vice chancellor of the Darul Uloom Deoband, India’s premier Islamic seminary, who was among those who cried for Rushdie to be denied entry to India for the festival, and Salim Engineer, a member of the Jamaat-e-Islami organization in Jaipur.
“We are all for freedom of expression but it has to come with responsibility,” Engineer told The New York Times on Tuesday, in the familiar refrain of censors everywhere. “We have a problem with the video conference because we are sure he would say something provocative … What if he reads something from ‘The Satanic Verses’?”
I’m curious whether Nomani or Engineer has ever called for a protest against the terrible state in which many Indian Muslims live.
In 2005, the government commissioned a panel to examine the social and economic status of India’s Muslims. Its findings were shocking.
According to the Sachar Committee’s 2006 report, in Rajasthan state, of which Jaipur is the capital, 41 percent of urban Muslims live below the poverty line, compared with 27 percent of Hindus. In the state of Uttar Pradesh, where Darul Uloom is located, 44 percent of urban Muslims live in poverty, compared with 24 percent of Hindus.
Also from the report: 25 percent of Muslim children aged 6 to 14 had never attended school or had dropped out. Muslim-majority villages are less likely to be served by government schools, paved roads and bus stops. Muslims hold a tiny proportion of civil service jobs that are an important route to the middle class here.
More recently, a November 2011 report by Gallup found that 32 percent of India’s Muslims consider themselves to be “suffering,” compared with 23 percent of Hindus, who make up India’s majority.
Last month Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said major steps had been taken to boost recruitment of Muslims into government jobs. Since the Sachar report was issued, he said, more than 4 million scholarships had been awarded to Muslim students.
The leaders of Singh’s Congress Party apparently feel these steps won’t be enough to attract Muslim voters during state elections next month. In Uttar Pradesh, India’s biggest state, Congress needs to peel Muslim voters away from other parties if it is to play kingmaker in the state assembly.
By declining to protect Rushdie, and bowing to a small, television-amplified mob, Congress hopes to again become relevant in a state where its influence has been weak for decades.
In a television interview, Rushdie on Tuesday lamented “an India in which religious extremists can prevent free expression of ideas at a literary festival, in which the politicians are too, let’s say, in bed with those groups.”
“This is a distraction,” Muniza Rafiq Khan, a senior fellow at the Gandhian Institute in Varanasi, told me. “As a matter of fact, the [Muslim] community has no leaders. Nobody is serious about their problems. They only care about the vote.”
Dan Morrison is a journalist and the author of “The Black Nile.”
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