The ongoing Sahitya Akademi renunciations are farcical. While certain crimes by fanatic lunatics must make civil society sit up and take notice, these cannot be used to wrongly condemn a Government
I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical”, wrote Thomas Jefferson, author of America’s Declaration of Independence, way back in 1782. Urging lawmakers to be mild in their punishment of rebellions he noted that “it (rebellion) is a medicine necessary for the sound health of Government”, outlining how it “prevents the degeneracy of Government and nourishes a general attention to public affairs”. He divided societies under three categories — those without Governments, those with a Government that allows free will of the people, and finally those with Governments of force, that is, absolutist regimes, “a Government of wolves over sheep”. While locating America in the second category, Jefferson spoke of a healthy and admittedly necessary debate between civil society and the Government of the day.
This preamble on rebellion helps put in perspective the ongoing renunciation circus by Indian writers that is parading as protest. To the extent that debate and dissent are legitimate tools of argument in a democracy, any expression of freedom, thought, or approach, ought to be respected and upheld. However, when a battle of the fringes competes for public attention and media focus, ignoring the country’s mainstream political climate and public sentiment, there is reason to be circumspect. Arguably, no right-thinking person can possibly condone the recent spate of murderous assaults on our rationalists or even the mindless lynching of an allegedly beef-eating Muslim by a Hindu mob. Unfortunately, in a pathetic display of secular fakery, some senior citizens of India’s literary world have employed these instances of lunatic aggression to lament the loss of tolerance in our society. However, this conversation, at best, is between two fringes of society, one not representative of the dominant public sentiment, the other not symptomatic of Government policy.
Indeed, world history is replete with instances of social and political protests that have shaken Governments, established new ones and, most significantly, occasioned incisive and creative critiques of oppressive social, political or religious orders. From Europe’s Renaissance, America’s anti-slavery movement, the Cuban Revolution, French Realism, German Romanticism, to South Africa’s Black Consciousness counter to apartheid, India’s freedom struggle against the British, and the contemporary Arab Spring, public rage against a prevailing political establishment or social mores has been skillfully channelised by writers, artists, and thinkers to posit an alternative world view, powered by an overwhelming desire for greater freedom of social, cultural, religious and political thought.
Avant-garde movements in art and literature across the world have been marked by rebellion — from anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-war and anti-capitalist movements, to human rights, gay and lesbian rights, civil liberty and environmental protection. In every such critique there is a well-defined structure, a malaise identified and an alternative suggested. Thomas Paine, Martin luther King, Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Charles Dickens, George Orwell, Upton Sinclair, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Aldous Huxley, Simone de Beauvoir, Ray Bradley, are only a few of the many torchbearers of such protest literature. While critiquing his or her contemporary socio-cultural and political realities, each has had a lasting creative impact. An Animal Farm or 1984, A Tale of Two Cities or a Jungle, are eternal treatises that can be easily applied to another age, another place, if the contributing factors of oppression and persecution are replayed by an establishment wishing to control the everyday life and thought of its citizens. Closer home, Asia in the 21st century has seen some stellar examples of creative protest, from Iran to Afghanistan, Pakistan to Bangladesh, writers and film-maker who have fled their domicile states to escape religious and political persecution and seek refuge in more liberal societies like India.
Juxtaposed against this spectacular history of battles between the establishment and its dissenters, the ongoing Sahitya Akademi renunciations appear farcical, to say the least. While the murder of rationalists by fanatic lunatics, or the lynching of a Muslim by an equally fanatic Hindu mob must make civil society sit up and take note, these instances cannot be used to rave and rant against a Government that has obviously not sanctioned those murderous assaults. With their misplaced lament on how their idea of India clashes with that of the Government, these writers can at best generate ridicule and must be dealt with the contempt they deserve. Mainstream Indian politics and society, clearly, have no place for either these protesting writers or the deviants they are protesting against.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while terming these incidents “sad and undesirable”, has rightly asked what the role of the Union Government is in all of this. He is presiding over a Government that has been given a historic mandate by the people of this country in a free and fair democratic process. One can, therefore, safely assume that people have voted in a Government which can deliver on their collective idea of India. Against this backdrop, the laboured secular rant by our writers rings hollow, their protest failing to find the resonance they desire. Had the Government proactively engaged in the recent murderous insanity, the protests could be deemed legitimate. Absolutist Governments by dictators or despots, monarchies drenched in the blood of the masses, have no place in civilised society and must be contested.
However, when a vibrant democracy like India and its elected Government are questioned, the motive appears suspect. The President and the Prime Minister have asserted that Hindus and Muslims must cohabit peacefully, and the matter must rest at that. A conversation between the fringes does not merit official clarification.
In fact, what emerges from the recent spate of so-called intellectual protests is a curiously selective allergy to the present Government’s ideology, exposing that thin line dividing freedom of expression from its abuse. A similar allergy had erupted when India decided to go nuclear in 1998. Represented by no less than Booker winner Arundhati Roy, this band of protesters mounted a virulent attack on the Vajpayee Government’s ‘Hindu’ bomb. “If protesting against having a nuclear bomb...is anti-Hindu and anti-national, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent mobile republic. I am a citizen of the earth”, Roy wrote. This, while completely ignoring India’s political and strategic necessity to go nuclear at that point in time.
However, India has travelled a great distance from Pokhran and its attendant global opprobrium. India-bashing, and indeed BJP-bashing, is no longer a valid international currency. Arundhati Roy’s diatribe came at a time when it was eminently rewarding to bash India in front of an attentive global audience. Today, the India story and its writer, Mr Modi, are being feted the world over. This is a time when disgruntled asides by the likes of Nayantara Sahgal must only draw sniggers.