The Telegraph (Calcutta), 3 February 2012
Editorial
PLAY SAFE
There is something irredeemably dreary about the Rushdie affair in Jaipur repeating itself on a lesser scale as the Taslima affair in Calcutta. Fundamentalist bullying, of whatever hue, is a dismal sort of annoyance for a modern democracy to have to reckon with at regular intervals — especially in the realm of creativity. Having to give in to this kind of blackmail also confronts governments and civil society with equally dismal questions regarding the role of the police and other law-keepers in protecting the democratic rights of citizens. Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen are no strangers to the unholy collusion between religious fundamentalism and vote-bank politics. The banning of their books and attempts to restrict their movements within or into the subcontinent have all too often determined their status as writers — sometimes to the detriment of a dispassionate appraisal of the merits of their writing. So, when the launch of Ms Nasreen’s book shrinks to a much quieter affair than it was initially supposed to be, the outrage and alarm felt a few weeks ago in Jaipur must be sounded again.
In this case, however, it is perhaps necessary to hold on to the fact that Ms Nasreen’s book has not been banned under the pressure of bigotry; only its launch was curtailed and relocated by the authorities for the sake of security. So, what is at stake here is not so much the freedom of expression as disconcertingly restrictive considerations of public safety. It is important to make this distinction, since the organizers’ cautiousness does not actually prevent Ms Nasreen’s book from being sold to and read freely by the public. The launch of a book is, after all, a commercial exercise of recent vintage, and having to go through it less ostentatiously than is now the fashion does not inherently harm the reception of the book — if it is a good one. So, thinking about safety in this connection is perhaps not as cowardly and culpable as failing to prevent the restriction of a writer’s freedom of expression — and this could be a somewhat bleak consolation for those who are rightly outraged by such a turn of events. Modern political correctness and hypersensitivity have turned the world into a complicated place. The right thing to do in such circumstances could become, therefore, a tricky affair, which calls for the task of making tenuous distinctions.
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