Nandy spoke about lower-caste politicians, and argued that because they
have only recently gained access to the spoils of power, they didn’t yet
have the sophisticated social networks that allow India’s upper-caste
élite to hide their corruption. Indicating his fellow panelist Richard
Sorabji, an Oxford scholar, Nandy said, “If I do a good turn to Richard
Sorabji, he can return the favor by accommodating my nephew at Oxford;
if it were in the United States, it would be a substantial fellowship.”
He mentioned Mayawati, a Dalit (formerly called Untouchable) politician
who is president of Bahujan Samaj Party, the largest lower-caste
political party, and was the chief minister of Utter Pradesh until last
year. Like a vast number of Indian politicians, she has faced charges of
corruption (which have
since been dismissed).
“If she has to oblige somebody or have somebody in the family absorb
the money, she will probably have to take the bribe of having a hundred
petrol pumps, and that is very conspicuous, very corrupt indeed. Our
corruption doesn’t look that corrupt, their’s does.”
Tejpal, the magazine editor from Delhi, followed Nandy’s thought and
described corruption in India being a class equalizer, as the only
chance for the people on the “wrong side of the tracks” to make it in a
highly stratified and unequal society. Nandy responded, “It will be a
very undignified and—how should I put it—almost vulgar statement on my
part. It is a fact that most of the corrupt come from the O.B.C.s and
the scheduled caste and now increasingly the scheduled tribes. And as
long as this is the case, the Indian republic will survive.” Dalits, the
former Untouchables, and others on the lowest rung of the Hindu caste
system are described as Scheduled Castes in Indian legalese; India’s
poor and marginalized tribal communities are known as Scheduled Tribes.
The Indian Constitution initially guaranteed affirmative action for
these two groups, but over the years other castes on the lower and
middle rungs of the caste ladder have been included—often after
political agitations—as “Other Backward Castes” (O.B.C.s).
A populist television journalist, who was also on the panel, promptly called Nandy’s remarks a casteist slur and
demanded an apology.
Within moments, Nandy’s remark about most corrupt Indians being from
traditionally oppressed and marginalized lower castes and tribes was
tweeted without its context. Television channels and wire services ran
the headline: “SC/ST/OBCs most corrupt: Ashis Nandy.” His words divorced
of the complexity of his argument and their context spread quickly—an
allegation against a multitude, provoking anger and offense.
And that was what brought Kirori Lal Meena, a lower-caste member of
Parliament with a formidable constituency in the state of Rajasthan, to
the writers’ lounge at Diggi Palace. Meena’s supporters were already
agitating outside the festival gates. Meena sat cross-legged on a bench,
his hands interlocked and his body language stiff and unrelenting. He
demanded that Nandy be produced. He was accompanied by police officers,
who took seats around him, their faces tense. The festival organizers
moved about frantically, speaking to Meena in polite, supplicating
voices, urging some sort of reconciliation. He seemed keen on legal
action against Nandy.
Tejpal, the co-panelist, joined in and began describing Nandy’s career.
Nandy had for decades supported and written about equal citizenship for
the religious minorities, the lower castes, and the poor in India—even
putting himself at risk.
In one of the gravest moments of crisis in Indian polity, after the mass
sectarian violence in the state of Gujarat, in 2002, when more than a
thousand Muslims including pregnant women and children were killed by
extremist Hindu mobs—with the alleged complicity of the government led
by Hindu nationalist chief minister Narendra Modi (who is now
positioning himself as a candidate for Prime Minister and the future
leader of India)—Nandy wrote an essay describing Modi as a “classic,
clinical case of a fascist,” with “clear paranoid and obsessive
personality traits.” The essay appeared in one of India’s much respected
intellectual forums,
Seminar magazine.
Six years later, after Modi was reëlected in Gujarat, Nandy published an article in the
Times of India commenting on the
dire state of civil liberties and institutionalized prejudice against minorities in Gujarat.
Article Nineteen of the Indian Constitution guarantees free speech, but
it is a right limited by five exceptions: the interests of the
sovereignty and integrity of India; the security of the state; friendly
relations with foreign states; public order, decency or morality; and in
relation to contempt of court, defamation, or incitement to an offense.
All these can be interpreted rather broadly, and potentially encompass
almost any critical writing, political statement, or cultural
expression. In this case, Modi’s police registered a criminal case
against Nandy, charging him with promoting communal disharmony—making
assertions prejudicial to national integration.
Nandy fought the case for several years and Indian intellectuals and liberal journalists
rallied behind him. “ The case against me in Gujarat has not been closed, but the Supreme Court of India stayed my arrest,” Nandy told me.
His history and biography failed to check the anger at the Diggi Palace.
Meena refused to relent; his hands continued their dismissive,
unrelenting interlock.
A few minutes later, Nandy appeared. He was sombre. He faced Meena and
spoke slowly, explaining his comments, insisting that his remarks
weren’t a casteist slur. Namita Gokhale, a co-director of the festival,
appeared with a tea-tray, offering the first cup to the enraged
politician.
Meena seemed to demand a written explanation. Nandy began to write. One
of the sheets of paper was torn as he wrote. He copied his explanation
onto another sheet. I stood by his shoulder, watching him slowly pen his
words. Nandy repeated his earlier arguments about the entrenched social
networks of the élites facilitating their corruption and
added,
But when Dalits, tribals and the O.B.C.s are corrupt, it looks very corrupt indeed.
However, this second corruption equalizes. It gives them access to their
entitlements. And so, as long as this equation persists, I have hope
for the Republic.
I hope this will be the end of the matter. I am sorry if some have
misunderstood me. Though there was no reason to do so. As should be
clear from this statement, there was neither any intention nor any
attempt to hurt any community. If anyone is genuinely hurt, even if
through misunderstanding, I am sorry about that, too.
When Meena left the lounge, television crews had been waiting for him;
he was unyielding as he faced the cameras. In a few hours, news came
that Mayawati, the former Uttar Pradesh chief minister, had demanded
Nandy’s arrest for his remarks. Nandy’s family sought to get him back
home to Delhi. A few policemen and the organizers took him out of the
festival venue through a back door. The embattled, aging scholar walked
briskly through the crowds as the sun set on Jaipur. He stepped into a
car and drove six hours through the night to Delhi.
Politicians from all communities in India are among the first to take
offense, partly with an eye on political profit and increased
visibility. And yet one of the foremost Dalit intellectuals, Kancha
Ilaiah, who teaches at a university in Hyderabad, was in Jaipur.
Ilaiah’s best-known book, “Why I am Not a Hindu?”—a searing critique of
the Hindu caste system—is required reading on the subject. Several years
back, attempts were made to censor Ilaiah’s essays on caste by the
authorities of his university. A letter from the registrar of his
university directed him to write “within the canons of conduct of our
profession” and accused him of “accentuated social tensions” through his
writing. It was the Indian equivalent of Princeton
trying to stop Cornel West from writing about race.
Ilaiah, the polemicist, is a slight, soft-spoken man with wisps of grey
hair. At Jaipur, he wore a navy-blue suit, rimless glasses, and carried a
bag full of books. Ilaiah was troubled by Nandy’s statement but opposed
calls for his arrest. “His statement was not intended to hurt, but it
is an assertion that encompasses the ethical life of eight-hundred
million people. Are our laborers corrupt? Are our tribals who live and
toil in the forests corrupt? Nobody ever said that the slaves were
corrupt,” Ilaiah told me. “Ashis Nandy intended to support the cause of
an oppressed people but he deployed the wrong concept and made an
incorrect assertion. It is a very emotive issue. You are calling a
people corrupt, a people whose life in this country is harsh.” It was
not as if their marginalization was entirely in the past: “Even at a
conference like this, not even one per cent of the participants are from
Dalit or other lower-caste communities.”
The Jaipur police proceeded to register a criminal case against Nandy
and sought the video recording of the discussion to check if the
scholar’s comments constituted an offense under the Scheduled
Castes/Scheduled Tribes Act of India. (The law is aimed at preventing
untouchability, which includes denial of access to certain places to an
S.C. or S.T. person; preventing him or her from getting water from any
spring, reservoir or any other source; or making a comment in order to
insult or intimidate with intent to humiliate a S.C. or S.T. person in
any place within public view.) The police also ordered the organizers of
the literary festival not to leave the city until they were questioned
by the police about, among other things, whether they had breached the
terms of an undertaking they had signed to “not hurt the sentiments of
any community or religion during the literary festival.” A court order
helped them return home after two days, but the police summoned Nandy to
appear in Jaipur for a probe against his remarks.
The undertaking the organizers had signed was a condition that the
Rajasthan government had imposed after opposition from Muslim groups and
death threats forced Salman Rushdie to cancel his visit to the festival
last year. (
David Remnick wrote about it at the time.)
Even before the Nandy affair, there was a certain jitteriness around
open speech, nationalism, and religion at the festival. India’s most
powerful Hindu supremacist group, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or
National Volunteers Association, had issued a warning that the
participation of Pakistani authors was “not in the country’s interests
at the moment.”
Younger officials of the R.S.S.’s political wing and India’s opposition Bharatiya Janata Party
threatened to stop
Pakistani authors from entering the venue. Like their brethren on the
Hindu right, a little-known Islamist group called for banning from the
festival four writers—Jeet Thayil, Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, and
Ruchir Joshi—who had read extracts from Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic
Verses” during the previous festival.
The threats seemed mere bluster when I first arrived in Jaipur, although
visitors entered the venue through metal detectors, and scores of
policemen and private-security men were present at the gates. Diggi
Palace’s lawns held a boisterous crowd of writers and readers, a
cacophony of voices debating the global economy, religious landscapes in
India, and arguing about the Jewish novel. I saw the Pakistani novelist
Nadeem Aslam signing copies of his new novel, “The Blind Man’s Garden.”
Aslam was excited about the end papers: “Aren’t they gorgeous?” A
little later, I saw the Indian novelist Jeet Thayil, one of the authors
that the Islamic fringe tried to ban (and whose novel “Narcopolis” was
shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize last year). He had been assigned a
policeman who followed him throughout the festival. “He has been with me
at all my talks and at all the parties,” Thayil said. “After we
attended several talks, he was bored and asked, ‘Is this what you do?
You talk all day about books?’ Yes, I said. He was quiet after that, but
his amusement and disbelief at our vocation was evident.” Thayil went
on to read a section from his novel where the word “cunt” and its
variations appeared several times. Four charges of obscenity were filed
against him at a Jaipur police station.
My own panel had been, appropriately enough, about censorship. In it,
I’d dwelled on the image of a tall, gangly man with a luxurious mustache
in an ill-fitting leather jacket and baggy trousers, walking about the
newspaper offices in Srinagar, the main city in the Indian-controlled
Kashmir, a decade ago. I was a novice reporter travelling between sites
of atrocity, visiting the drab offices of pro-India or pro-Kashmiri
independence politicians for press conferences. The man always stood in a
corner, listening intently, scribbling intensely. Occasionally, I would
bump into him and he would ask about my family, or bring up an event he
had missed. “I had to take my son to a hospital. Please tell me what
was said? Who asked the questions?” It could feel like a fellow reporter
seeking help, but I had learned by then about his vocation: he was the
policeman whose job was to report on the press. The colder, faceless
sign of surveillance and censorship was a faint noise, a crackle over
the phone, a slight echo of your own voice that reminded one of the
policemen listening to our words. The regime of censorship in conflict
zones like Kashmir extended to unknown callers making intimidating
threats to writers and journalists--and in the worst cases,
assassinations.
But Kashmir has for decades been a state of exception, a gray zone where
democratic imperatives are subservient. Recently, the Indian
government has been showing greater intolerance of dissent and critique
beyond the borderlands, too. Apart from censorship and surveillance by
the government, an insidious trend of political, ethnic, and religious
groups threatening artists, writers, and scholars with violence and
legal action has been gathering strength across India.
In September, Aseem Trivedi, a Mumbai-based cartoonist, who mocked
politicians facing a litany of corruption charges by redrawing the seal
of India—replacing the lions with wolves—was arrested on charges of
sedition in Mumbai. After intense criticism by the courts and civil
society,
the charges were dropped and Trivedi was released.
On November 18th, Mumbai was shut down following the death of its most
powerful and controversial Hindu politician, Bal Thackeray—a divisive
figure who, as the leader of Shiv Sena party, had a record of inciting
xenophobic and sectarian violence. Fears of violence by his grieving
party-members kept vehicles off the roads and shops closed. A
twenty-one-year-old woman in a Mumbai suburb remarked critically on
Thackeray’s death on her Facebook page, “People like Thackeray are born
and die daily and one should not observe a ‘bandh’ [shutdown] for that.”
A friend of hers liked the comment. The police arrested both girls and
charged them under a section of India’s Information Technology Act,
which governs cyber offenses. The girls were eventually
released on bail after appearing in a local court.
Shiv Sena, the political party that Thackeray headed till his death, and
whose members lobbied for the arrests of the two Mumbai girls, has, in
fact, performed the role of a vigilante censor in India. The great
painter Maqbool Fida Husain, known as the Picasso of India, was in his
nineties when he became the target of the Hindu right for a series of
nude paintings of Hindu goddesses that he had made in the
nineteen-seventies. His exhibitions were vandalized, his house attacked,
and criminal cases were filed against him.
Threatened with arrest,
Husain had to leave India and live in exile in London and Dubai, before
he accepted citizenship in Qatar in 2010. “He kept calling us from
London, from New York, pleading that he must absolutely come back to
India, ‘not die in a foreign land,’” his friend N. Ram, the publisher of
The Hindu newspaper
wrote after Husain’s death in June, 2011, in a London hospital.
And just a few weeks back, Muslim groups in the southern Indian state of
Tamil Nadu protested against a thriller that they believed depicted
Muslims as terrorists; the release of the movie was delayed by a local
court. It was about these stifling trends that my colleagues and I
spoke.
By Wednesday morning,
another case has been registered against Nandy
under the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Act in Jodhpur,
Rajasthan. Fearing arrest, Nandy appealed to the Supreme Court of India,
which has the authority to stop his arrest and quash the case against
him. On Friday, Justice Altamas Kabir, the Chief Justice of India, along
with two other judges, heard his appeal. Nandy’s lawyer
invoked free speech, but the judges reprimanded him: “Tell your client he has no license to make such comments.”
The court said it would reserve judgment until seeing the
government’s response to the motions. “In the meantime, the petitioner
will not be arrested in FIR filed in connection with the statement made
by him at the JLF, on January 26,” the Court ordered—so Nandy would not
have to wait in jail. After the decision, the scholar spoke to the
press, expressing his gratitude to the court. Nandy added, “I will have
to be careful now.”
Photograph by Ramesh Sharma/India Today Group/Getty.
