HindustanTimes: Karan Thapar - TV: a Mea Culpa

TV: a Mea Culpa Karan Thapar February 09, 2013

Are television discussions guilty of  "controversy-manufacturing … (where) a sentence in a complex argument has been picked up to be thrashed out into a controversy … (where) we turn our back on irony, nuance and complexity and, instead, opt for angry bashing … (where) every night someone must be made to burn in the Fourth Circle of Hell …. (in) a 'grab-the-eyeballs' game", as an article by Harish Khare in The Hindu (February 6) suggests? In many cases, I believe, the answer is an unequivocal yes. And, sadly, that does not exclude my own programmes.

 

Khare's article raises deeply disturbing questions about how discussions on television handled the Ashis Nandy affair. But it goes further. It also raises concerns about what such discussions, whether on Nandy, cross-LoC killings, politics or anything else, seek to do. And, beyond that, it focuses on the new kind of "fundamentalism" they have created. We need to acknowledge these concerns, debate them and, finally, try and find answers to them.

In the Ashis Nandy case it's undeniable that a couple of, admittedly poorly-phrased, sentences were plucked out of a complex argument, which many, including anchors, did not fully understand but, nonetheless, deemed controversial, and put forward for criticism and attack by studio guests who were ignorant of the context and also unaware of Nandy's deeper arguments. It's hard to doubt this was a conscious attempt to generate anger and then convert it into popular outrage.

This example leads directly to the second issue: what is the sort of television discussion we ought to have and what should its purpose be? Surely the idea is to further understanding through analysis or by providing a platform to different opinions? What it can't be is an attempt to bludgeon one man or one viewpoint, whether understood or misunderstood, into conformity. Yet this is what Khare believes our discussions end up doing. I think he is largely right.

It's no consolation that politicians, anxious to please, or academics, eager to be seen and heard, play along. Khare believes they are "overawed by TV studio warriors". Possibly. But that's not an excuse.
As a result, what we produce each night, to use Khare's phrase, is "a new kind of fundamentalism - that of what is touted as the 'media-enabled middle classes'." We saw this when anchors fumed over the beheading of Indian soldiers allegedly by Pakistani troops on the LoC, omitting to mention we had done the same in the recent past. It happened again with L'affaire Nandy. In fact, it's happened many times in the past.

Frankly, this amounts to television reinforcing prejudice or, even, misleading on the basis of ignorance. If you don't want your comfortable convictions to be disturbed this might be satisfying. But it's not enlightening and it's certainly not journalism.

Yet this will only change when anchors and channel heads accept that current affairs discussions are not mass audience programmes and must not be thought of as entertainment. They are for those who care and want to know. And this group will always be a minority.

Now, if this comes up against the imperatives of commercial survival that is a conundrum our television producers must address and solve. I accept it won't be easy. In fact, it could be expensive, both in terms of money and audience. But if it doesn't happen television discussions will soon cease to matter - except in a negative sense.

The future of television debates could be at stake.

Views expressed by the author are personal

Economic Times: Editorial - Ideas can be debunked but not outlawed

Ideas can be debunked but not outlawed EDITORIAL, 8 FEB 2013

"Democracy in India," said Ambedkar, "is only a top dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic." Constitutional morality, he added, is to be cultivated, since Indians have yet to learn it. Decades after that statement, it would seem that the process of learning is, at best, still a work in progress or, at worst, an impossible task. And when the highest court in the land, meant to uphold and protect the democratic spirit, censures an academic for his utterances, it only buttresses that pessimistic outlook.

The Supreme Court might have spared Ashis Nandy from being arrested — after an FIR was lodged against him for remarks alleged to be anti-Dalit — but in its admonishing the sociologist for his comments, it seems to have, even by default, veered dangerously close to approving the notion that ideas cannot be expressed freely. "We are not at all happy," the SC bench reportedly said, and also told Mr Nandy's lawyer that his client "has no licence to make such comments". The Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, of course, within logically permissible limits.

But it is in drawing the boundaries of those limits that a polity can display whether the democratic spirit is a mere top dressing or a lived reality. A truly democratic society is one where ideas, particularly contentious ones, can be debated — whether accepted, celebrated or debunked — in a free exchange. Short of deliberately and actively promoting hatred or violence, little else by way of words need be censured.

And, unfortunately, even though perhaps unintentionally, the SC might appear to be adding to the unsavoury clamour for restrictions on ideas and expression. That is quite avoidable.

Giving in to various sections claiming offence at the drop of a hat can only make for a republic of hurt sentiments. A statement or an idea, whether obnoxious, nuanced or contentious, is matter for a rational, even if heated, debate. Logically, freedom of speech should imply even a right to offend, given the many holy cows and shibboleths that retard the progressive development of our society. Intolerance needs to be binned.

ABC Radio Australia - Intolerance growing as India's intellectuals fight for free speech

Intolerance growing as India's intellectuals fight for free speech Updated 6 February 2013, 15:14 AEST

In recent weeks, writers, academics, actors and artists have come under attack from India's political class and fringe parties for criticizing the established order.

Intellectuals feel intolerance is growing in India and freedoms are being curtailed

Reporter: Murali Krishnan
Speakers : Ritu Menon, publisher and writer; Makarand Paranjape, Indian poet and professor; Santosh Desai, social commentator; Kamal Hassan, south Indian actor

KRISHNAN: It has become increasingly easy these days to offend the Indian government, and to incur the wrath of the censor or even the threat of legal action. Actor Kamal Hassan learnt it the hard way and was forced to reach a settlement with Muslim organizations in southern India, agreeing finally to delete seven scenes from his latest spy thriller.

Earlier the actor had threatened to leave his state and was pained by the response of the authorities to his mega production "Vishwaroopam" or The Gigantic Guardian Figure that revolves around an Indian intelligence agent thwarting a "terrorist" attack by fighters from Afghanistan in New York.

KAMAL: I think I will have to seek a secular state for me to stay in. I have lost what I have done. I have nothing to lose, so I might as well choose. And that choice could be a secular state from Kashmir to Kerala excluding Tamil Nadu.

KRISHNAN: Artistic expression is being increasingly given a political and communal color. And over the weeks this has set off protests on the streets, court battles and loud debates on artistic freedom across the country. Ritu Menon, a publisher and writer who has been active in the South Asian women's movement for over 20 years explains this disturbing phenomenon.

MENON: It is actually an indication of two things. One the prevalence of what we call street censorship or laissez faire censorship… which is to say no one can be held responsible …the mob forms and dissolves so no one can actually be criminialized. The second one is that it is happening much more often as we know - the more regressive the state, the more aggressive the mob. The state is simply withdrawing from the public sphere.

KRISHNAN: At the just concluded Jaipur Literature Festival hundreds of people staged a protest demonstration outside the venue demanding the immediate arrest of eminent sociologist Ashis Nandy for his reported remarks against members of the backward classes, scheduled castes and tribes. Though Nandy said he was misunderstood, the clamor for his arrest grew. Makarand Paranjape is a poet and English professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

PARANJAPE: It seems to me the state which is the guarantor of rights which are enshrined in the constitution is extremely amenable to pressure groups, all kinds of minority and fringe elements who have nuisance value And essentially since the state is run by, I mean they are worried about maintaining their power, they kowtow to these interests.

KRISHNAN: The unpleasant events over the last few weeks also saw writer Salman Rushdie being denied entry into Kolkata to promote Deepa Mehta's film Midnight's Children, based on his book by the same name. He was not allowed to enter the city and the reason cited for stopping him was that some Muslims felt the author was anti-Islam.

Last year amid death threats to the organizers and fears of violent riots by Muslim groups, Rushdie was prevented from making an appearance or even addressing the Jaipur Literature Festival through a video link.

Ms Menon again.

MENON: Civil society is becoming much more vocal as a group and individuals are voicing their dissent through the arts. Through cinema, books, film theatre and so on. It is becoming extremely uncomfortable for the state to address this. And in order not to address this, they are allowing a mob which really has nobody's interests at heart to do their dirty work for them. Mr Paranjape agrees.

PARANJAPE: What is actually happening is that the political class is unable to stand up and finds it easier to appease such elements and what they are doing is they are leaving their jobs to other people like the media that will raise a hullabaloo or to the judiciary where people go when they are in trouble. So my point is what is happening is a failure of governance.

KRISHNAN: Social commentator Santosh Desai is a keen watcher of how India faces new threats to artistic freedom.

DESAI: What we are seeing is almost an idealism of earlier times turned out to be a kind of a thin veneer which has worn out and the newer forces that are coming into power are seeing power in more transactional terms as a force to be exercised. And therefore have much less compunction about using the power to restrict basic freedoms.

KRISHNAN: The big question is whether India will be able to be to find the right balance that leans more towards freedom and less towards repression.

Murali Krishnan, Connect Asia, New Delhi.

New York Times OpEd:Suketu Mehta -India’s Speech Impediments

Op-Ed Contributor  

India’s Speech Impediments By SUKETU MEHTA Published: February 5, 2013

INDIA is in the throes of what Salman Rushdie rightly calls a “cultural emergency.” Writers and artists of all kinds are being harassed, sued and arrested for what they say or write or create. The government either stands by and does nothing to protect freedom of speech, or it actively abets its suppression.

This year, the world’s largest democracy ranked a miserable 140th out of 179 countries in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index — falling nine places from last year. Today, Afghanistan and Qatar have a freer press than India. 

In recent years, the government has cast a watchful eye on the Internet, demanding that companies like Google and Facebook prescreen content and remove items that might be deemed “disparaging” or “inflammatory,” according to technology industry executives there. 

In November, police in Mumbai arrested a 21-year-old woman for complaining on Facebook about the shutdown of the city after the death of the nativist politician Bal K. Thackeray; another Facebook user was arrested for “liking” the first woman’s comment. The grounds for the arrests? “Hurting religious sentiments.” 

Mr. Rushdie, who after the 1988 publication of “The Satanic Verses” became, to his chagrin, a human weather vane for the right to free speech, was to travel to Kolkata last week to attend a literary festival. At the last minute, he says, he was informed that the police in West Bengal would block his arrival. Local politicians chimed in to support the ban. “Rushdie never should have been invited,” an official in the party that rules the state told me. “Thirty percent of Bengali voters are Muslims.”

The organizers of the literary festival had held up Kolkata as the “cultural capital of India.” The notion that any cultural capital would try to silence speech — or punish artists who do speak out — is, of course, preposterous. But then, Kolkata is hardly alone. 

At the other end of the country, at the Jaipur Literature Festival, a similar spectacle was unfolding. With 120,000 visitors in 2012, Jaipur’s bookfest is among the world’s largest, living proof of Indians’ hunger for literary voices. Or some voices. This year, local leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which advocates Hindu nationalism, demanded that Pakistani writers be banned from the festival. (To their credit, festival organizers stood their ground, and several Pakistani authors did speak.)

Then, just after the festival leaders navigated this controversy, another sprang up. On a panel titled “Republic of Ideas,” the sociologist Ashis Nandy, perhaps the country’s most prominent public intellectual, offered a nuanced argument about the prevalence of corruption among the lower castes. The remarks, arguably, were no more provocative than an American professor’s saying that some early Irish and Italian immigrants joined corrupt political machines like Tammany Hall to climb the socioeconomic ladder. 

And in any free society, it would be fair to debate the point. But in Jaipur, Mr. Nandy was charged with a crime under the Prevention of Atrocities Act. 

In India today, it seems, free speech is itself an atrocity. 

A film, for example, might pass the Censor Board, but then be summarily banned by a state government. That’s what happened with “Vishwaroopam,” a Tamil spy thriller released worldwide — but not in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where officials prevented its screening, fearing that it might anger Muslims. 

Next door, in Bangalore, the police demanded that an art gallery remove partially nude pictures of Hindu deities lest they hurt Hindu sentiments and cause mob violence. 

Under the modern Indian Constitution, freedom of speech is highly qualified, subject to what the government deems “reasonable” restrictions. The state can silence its citizens for any number of reasons, including “public order,” “decency or morality” and “friendly relations with foreign states.”

India’s courts, meanwhile, do little to rein in government authorities. The country’s Supreme Court, in the end, did stay Mr. Nandy’s arrest, but it also reinforced the state’s position that he had “no license” to make such statements: “An idea can always hurt people,” the chief justice opined. “An idea can certainly be punished under the law.” 

But India cannot hope to be a true cultural capital of the world — let alone a truly free society — until it firmly protects the right to speech. Without an unqualified constitutional amendment that guarantees this freedom, as the American Constitution’s First Amendment does, the country cannot fairly claim to be the “world’s largest democracy.” 

Indians must understand that free speech — the right to think and exchange ideas freely — is at the core of the democracy they cherish. If the former is weak, the latter cannot help but be as well.

Suketu Mehta, an associate professor of journalism at New York University, is the author of “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.”

The Indian Express: Shail Mayaram- Misunderstanding Nandy

Misunderstanding Nandy Shail Mayaram : Feb 04 2013    

His remarks must be read along with his critique of modernity and the middle class

It is troubling that the public debate in the aftermath of the Jaipur Literature Festival is assuming a Dalits versus others dimension. That this is clearly not the case is obvious from the support Ashis Nandy has received from prominent intellectuals, including Chandra Bhan Prasad, Badri Narayan and Kancha Ilaiah. Had D.R. Nagaraj been around, he would have castigated this framing. In the last decade of his life, Nagaraj was one of Nandy's closest friends. As he put it, "Nandy is at his best when he explores the comic, violent, wicked and absurd relationships that come into play in the lives of communities when they try to represent themselves as nation-states".

The question we must ask is if Nandy is anti-Dalit, anti-tribal and anti-backward castes, as has been suggested. I have known Nandy for a quarter-century now, and in various capacities. He was supervisor of my doctoral dissertation and we went on to become colleagues and friends. Over the years, his support has been invaluable for my exploration of what are, in statist terms, the "backward castes", including the Mewatis, Gujjars and Meenas. He has been particularly happy about a film Rahul Roy and I are making on the Mirasis, a Dalit community of largely illiterate bards/ musicians, but whose literary universes intimate linkages with Sanskrit, Farsi and Braj bhasha.

One way of being pro-Dalit is to support affirmative action. But there is a deeper way, which is to take the cultural inheritance of the Dalits and shudras seriously. Much of Nandy's theorising rests upon an argument about history. Historical consciousness was exported from the West and has deeply affected non-Western cultures, he maintains. Hitherto these cultures lived with open-ended conceptions of the past articulated in their myths and epics. Millions still live outside "history" and have been described as ahistorical (read pre-historical, primitive and pre-scientific). History fears subjectivities, Nandy argues. The idea of history has led to new forms of exploitation and violence in our times, and the freezing of civilisational, cultural and national boundaries. Instead of history, he emphasises constructions that are more creative, ambiguous and arise from marginality and self-doubt.

He also argues that Nehruvian India, despite its brahminic patronising socialism along with a democratic polity and statist affirmative action, had released much creative energy at the bottom and peripheries of India. Nandy points out that Dalits have a rich repertoire of cultures and memories manifest in their knowledge systems, technologies, gods and goddesses. "They comprise another set of analytic categories, forms of ingenuity and creativity, a robust imaginary that includes the record of their suffering and humiliation, their constructions of the past, even what might be called the 'algorithms' of their resistance." Unknowingly, these explore a dialogue of cultures within India. Nandy views the mythic as constitutive of personhood, forming a bridge between literature and life, and refers to epic cultures of the global South that have maintained some continuity with their past. He suggests that Southern intellectuals must develop a critique of ideology itself and refers to Nagaraj's politics of acknowledgement that the diverse, rich cultures of Dalit communities possessed both self-esteem and dignity, which centuries of structural violence and humiliation had not deprived them of. But they must move beyond self-pity. Nandy affirms Prithvi Datta, who points out that in these essays, Nagaraj moves from an identity politics to a civilisational politics, and from a politics of rage towards a politics of affirmation. Nagaraj sees Gandhi as a radical descendant of the great radical saints Basava and Allama, while Ambedkar represents the militant, socialist, Western method and the idea of equality.

Personally, I do not agree with Nandy's thesis on corruption as redistributive justice. But his statement must be read in the context of his larger work and his critique of modernity and the middle class. Modernity, in his view, is responsible for a technocide, which has made Indian artisans, most of whom are Dalits, its victims.

The debate on Nandy's remarks post-JLF posits individual rights against community. This distorts the life's work of a theorist who has viewed the subcontinent as comprising communities whose lifeworlds have been marked by creativity and cultures of faith, despite their being imbricated in structures of violence.

The writer is senior fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi

 

The Hindu: A.S. Panneerselvan-Artists' angst

 Opinion » Readers' Editor February 4, 2013
Artists’ angst A.S. Panneerselvan

Some readers feel that I jumped the gun and celebrated freedom, and failed to anticipate what happened to academician Ashish Nandy in Jaipur, filmmaker Kamal Haasan in Tamil Nadu and writer Salman Rushdie, who was ‘uninvited’ from visiting Kolkata. We live in difficult times, and, often events overtake written words in forms and manners that cannot be prejudged or even remotely predicted. 

I am not going into the details of what happened to these three fine minds or their plight, but share some vignettes from my personal interactions with all of them, spread over the last two decades, and let readers form their own opinion and decide whether these artists deserve the harsh treatment that has been handed out to them. 

I met Ashis Nandy for the first time in 1988 in the company of Shiv Visvanathan at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. He spent nearly three hours talking about two outstanding Indian scientists — J.C. Bose and Srinivasa Ramanujan — and multiple trajectories of science. From liberating to being ruthlessly misanthropic, science seemed to straddle multiple horses, and it was Nandy’s eloquence, laced with humour, provocation and sarcasm, that helped me overcome my romantic idea of science and my own unidimensional understanding of its use and its intrinsic value. Since then every meeting was a chance to widen my own positions and to reduce my own certainties about a range of issues that are confronting us. 

At a private festival

The late scriptwriter and an associate of filmmaker K. Balachander, Ananthu, introduced me to Kamal Haasan in the mid-1980s. Since then, I have spent many hours discussing with Kamal Haasan not just films but literature, politics, society and things that ranged from profound to trivia. In the late 1980s, he organised a private film festival at his home to look at the entire work of German avant-garde filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Screenings were always followed by intense discussions. It was during one of those evenings, Kamal read out a poem by Bertolt Brecht titled “The Burning of the Books”.

“When the Regime

commanded the unlawful books to be burned,

teams of dull oxen hauled huge cartloads to the bonfires.

Then a banished writer, one of the best,

scanning the list of excommunicated texts,

became enraged: he’d been excluded!

He rushed to his desk, full of contemptuous wrath,

to write fierce letters to the morons in power —

Burn me! he wrote with his blazing pen —

Haven’t I always reported the truth?

Now here you are, treating me like a liar!

Burn me!”

Ananthu pointed out that also among the books burned were those of the great German-Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, who in his 1820-1821 play Almansor accurately predicted, “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen. (Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.”) 

When artists were defended

My last meeting with Salman Rushdie was at Barnes and Noble in New York. He read out a short story, In the South, set in Chennai, in Besant Nagar to be precise. Line after line, as it rolled off his tongue, made my wife and I look at each other meaningfully as it mirrored this southern metropolis more truthfully, with its best and worst coming out starkly. Post reading, he told us that Chennai is a place where one can be endlessly argumentative without the fear of being lynched.

Let me just recollect one paragraph from his memoir, Joseph Anton, and leave the issue to the readers to introspect: “He was not, after all, the first writer to be endangered or sequestered or anathematised for his art. He thought of mighty Dostoevsky facing the firing squad and then, after the last-minute commutation of his sentence, spending four years in prison camp, and of [Jean] Genet unstoppably writing his violently homoerotic masterpiece Our Lady of the Flowers in jail. The French translator of Les versets sataniques, unwilling to use his own name, had called himself ‘A. Nasier’ in honour of the great Francois Rabelais who had published his first book, Pantagruel, under the anagrammatic nom de plume of ‘Acofribas Nasier’. Rabelais too had been condemned by religious authority; the Catholic Church had been unable to stomach his satirical hyberabundance. But he had been defended by the King, Francois I, on the grounds that his genius could not be suppressed. Those were the days, when artists could be defended by kings, because they were good at what they did. These are lesser times.” 

Can we honestly deny that these are lesser times?

readerseditor@thehindu.co.in

HindustanTimes: Karan Thaper-Shame on us

Shame on us    Karan Thapar, February 02, 2013

 

The truth is we've become an intolerant people. When we don't like a film we stop its screening. When we disapprove of a book we ban it. When we disagree with someone's speech we censor it. We forget that other people have different views, different tastes, different ways of doing things. Our way, we insist, is the only way.

Yet we call ourselves a democracy and believe we uphold freedom of speech. But free expression is not just for those who we think are right. It's also for those who we believe are wrong. More critically, freedom of speech includes the right to offend. That has to be the critical test.

Sadly, that's where we fail. If Rushdie's interpretation of Islam upsets us, if Hussain's depiction of Hindu goddesses annoys us, if Nandy's analysis of caste and corruption raises troubling questions or if Kamal Haasan's Vishwaroopam disturbs our self-image we turn on them with viciousness and vengeance. 

The answer should be very different. If you disagree with something counter it with fact and argument. If a book upsets you, write another. If a painting annoys you, don't see it. If a film troubles you, criticise it and, if you can, counter its message with one of your own.

None of this do we do. Instead, we seek the easy but wrong solution: ban the work, jail the author, wipe out from existence what you don't like.

Voltaire is supposed to have said, "I disagree with what you're saying but I will defend to the death your right to say it." We've changed that to "I disagree with what you're saying and you will die for it."

Let's examine the Ashis Nandy incident a little closely. I concede that he expressed himself clumsily. I recognise that the point he was making was both complicated and, for many, novel. It wasn't easy to grasp or comprehend. Many got the wrong end of it. Additionally, some television channels and newspapers misrepresented him by editing what he said and omitting the context in which he was speaking. And, yes, those who know him say he has a penchant for speaking in surprising ways, even at times sensationally. So, perhaps, it was easy to misunderstand him.

However, once you realised you had, once it became clear he was making a very different point to what you initially thought, surely our response should have changed? But that didn't happen. We doggedly stuck by our initial impression even after it had been proven wrong.

But suppose for a moment we had been correct in our initial understanding of Nandy. Suppose he was out to offend. Does he not have a right to do so? Did that call for an FIR? Did that warrant the attempt to send him to jail?

Provided he was not inciting violence - and he wasn't, he was only speaking at a seminar in a literary festival - and provided he was not stirring up hatred - which he clearly wasn't - he has a right to say what he wants. Otherwise what is the value of our democracy? And our claim to champion freedom of speech?

The truth is this sorry affair reveals more about us than Nandy. We need to examine our behaviour. We need to question our responses. We need to ask whether we really understand what freedom means.

The Nandy episode and the treatment of Kamal Haasan's film diminishes us. Today we're smaller because of our actions. We've shamed ourselves.

Views expressed by the author are personal

 

India Today: Ritu Bhatia -Nandy deserves better

Ashis Nandy deserves better
Ritu Bhatia  New Delhi, February 3, 2013 http://indiatoday.intoday.in/

There is a beautiful story, a poignant one by the Swiss writer Frederich Durrenmatt it is about a detective. He is dying and his one dream is to convict a criminal, he has been hunting all his life. They meet each other and the criminal says "you can never convict me for a crime I have committed". To show his contempt for the law, he then pushes a man off a bridge. The policeman is stunned and then has the wits to reply that 'I will convict you for a crime you have not committed". Durrenmatt's novel Judge and the Hangman is a story of how he achieves this.

The Durrenmatt anecdote reminded me of the Nandy controversy. Here was a gadfly that the state and the radicals have never forgiven for the triumphant dissenter he has been. Oddly Nandy has grown in respectability with every controversy. As a friend observed feminists have not forgiven him for his writings on Sati, scientists have not forgotten his comments on the scientific temper document and the official Left has never forgotten that he has always questioned their intellectualist pretensions. When the Jaipur controversy on Dalits and corruption took place, there was a sense of vicarious justice. The Gadfly was going to get his "just" desserts.

Episode

The few letters issued in defence of Nandy appeared cautious and sounded more like good conduct certificates with caveats about his unorthodox and provocative style. They exuded a political correctness. Oddly the one Dalit present at the occasion, the usually vociferous Kancha Ilaiah was the most open about Nandy, cautioning against false accusations by observing that Nandy's was a bad statement made with good intentions. Contrast this sense of fairness with a well known TV anchor who seems to be playing both judge and hangman. TV anchors often become Kangaroo courts in pursuit of publicity. One is at least grateful that U.R. Ananthamurthy, the author issued a strong statement in Nandy's defence. Nandy must have missed the presence of his old friend D.R.Nagaraj, a major Dalit voice who might have brought balance and laughter to this dismal event.

The question is what was Nandy trying to do and how well did he do it. Nandy is always impatient with hypocrisy and especially the hypocrisy of the elite. He was critical of what one may call the corruption envy of the elite, which is noisy about the blatant corruption of Khoda and smug about its own welloiled nepotism. Probably reacting to the way scholarships and fellowships are nations. If Scott looked at the moral economy of resistance and even corruption as a form of resistance, Nandy examined the cognitive power of these groups, allowing them a certain ambiguity and paradox. This is not an elitist mindset that the CPM leader Brinda Karat attributes him. This is a creativity which goes beyond Marxist party categories which have been knowledge proof for decades. It is his critics who play the labeling game, freezing margins into stereotypes. Nandy on the other hand plays an enabling game with a full sense of irony. Nandy's writings while playful are clear; his conversation can leapfrog linear arguments. Sometimes it is almost as if he is talking to himself. But Nandy's style requires experimentation, of muddling through. It always remains a sensibility that has fought for the marginal but perpetually questioned the radicalism of middle class representatives. There is a pomposity to a lot of critique. I read one that drove to me tears at its sheer illiteracy.

One author compares Nandy's fall in the current controversy with Martin Heidegger's sinister Nazism, Michel Foucault's enthusiasm for the Iranian revolution or Hannah Arendt's bizarre celebration of the military prowess of the Israeli state. The pomposity and illiteracy of the comparison merits reference. It shows how far some of our academia will go to both misread and malign a leading intellectual. The writer presents it as a fable while the style turns it into a farcical representation of critique today. I was just imagining the process of interrogating Nandy. He has cheerfully admitted that he is ready for jail claiming prisons are great places to write books. In doing so he was claiming a genealogy of distinguished dissent going back to Thoreau, Gandhi, Gramsci and Nehru.

Issue

The question we must ask however is that while no one is above the law in a normative sense, can laws become so oppressive that they trigger a form of political correctness that eliminates parody, black humour and irony? Should our lives become a bleak search for uniformity and political correctness which has made intellectuals wary of entering the fray, of carrying on the debate, of going beyond Nandy in understanding the ironies of change? Nandy is one of the few public intellectuals left in India. He is a survivor at a time when public policy and public spaces have become shrinking spaces. Reflecting on the controversies his work generated, he told me impishly, the bureaucrats might hate me, but their children come and talk happily about my ideas. He felt a sense of hope and chuckled quietly about the fate of ideas. Nandy's comments at the Jaipur festival would have been translated into Hindi and then scrutinised by the police.

I believe there are charges against him filed at five separate police stations. I am imagining the questions, the detailed ethnographic examination. At one level it could be routine, at another it could have a touch of Alice and Kafka. I can imagine him arguing in his labored Hindi, trying to capture nuances, injecting humour into a ritual of clerks. It is a pity that he has to be subject to this. One wonders about the fate of public intellectuals when political correctness and intellectual caution rules the day. Nandy and the struggles for intellectual justice deserve more. The writer is a social science nomad awarded in Delhi, Nandy exposed this process by claiming the elite sees nothing wrong in its reciprocities of nepotism while condemning the general decline of honesty among Dalits and OBCs.

Nandy recognised this latter trend as a sociological fact contending corruption is blatant among OBCs, Dalits and increasingly scheduled tribes. He was not attributing essentialism to Dalit corruption. In fact corruption, he claimed, signified agency, a sense of the rules of the game and the ability to manipulate them. What others saw as the noise of Dalit corruption, Nandy would designate ironically as a welcome music. Corruption is seen as a political bureaucratic skill which new elites must learn to survive in the system. What Nandy constructed as agency was read as a genetic or an in born quality. He was implying that electoral democracy is a circulation of corruptions and as a result, becomes an ironic form of distributive justice. The argument is systemic, though in Nandy's presentation, the emphasis is on the performative aspects of corruption. This is the argument that critics like Arvind Kejriwal did not understand or chose not to in their rush to enter the fray.

Criticism

I must add that text has to be understood within context. Nandy is a truly subaltern writer who focuses on the imagination of marginals. Like James Scott the Yale social scientist, he has understood the voices of the weak and explored them as imagi-nations. If Scott looked at the moral economy of resistance and even corruption as a form of resistance, Nandy examined the cognitive power of these groups, allowing them a certain ambiguity and paradox. This is not an elitist mindset that the CPM leader Brinda Karat attributes him. This is a creativity which goes beyond Marxist party categories which have been knowledge proof for decades

It is his critics who play the labeling game, freezing margins into stereotypes. Nandy on the other hand plays an enabling game with a full sense of irony. Nandy's writings while playful are clear; his conversation can leapfrog linear arguments. Sometimes it is almost as if he is talking to himself. But Nandy's style requires experimentation, of muddling through. It always remains a sensibility that has fought for the marginal but perpetually questioned the radicalism of middle class representatives.

There is a pomposity to a lot of critique. I read one that drove to me tears at its sheer illiteracy. One author compares Nandy's fall in the current controversy with Martin Heidegger's sinister Nazism, Michel Foucault's enthusiasm for the Iranian revolution or Hannah Arendt's bizarre celebration of the military prowess of the Israeli state. The pomposity and illiteracy of the comparison merits reference. It shows how far some of our academia will go to both misread and malign a leading intellectual. The writer presents it as a fable while the style turns it into a farcical representation of critique today.

I was just imagining the process of interrogating Nandy. He has cheerfully admitted that he is ready for jail claiming prisons are great places to write books. In doing so he was claiming a genealogy of distinguished dissent going back to Thoreau, Gandhi, Gramsci and Nehru.

Issue The question we must ask however is that while no one is above the law in a normative sense, can laws become so oppressive that they trigger a form of political correctness that eliminates parody, black humour and irony? Should our lives become a bleak search for uniformity and political correctness which has made intellectuals wary of entering the fray, of carrying on the debate, of going beyond Nandy in understanding the ironies of change?

Nandy is one of the few public intellectuals left in India. He is a survivor at a time when public policy and public spaces have become shrinking spaces. Reflecting on the controversies his work generated, he told me impishly, the bureaucrats might hate me, but their children come and talk happily about my ideas. He felt a sense of hope and chuckled quietly about the fate of ideas.

Nandy's comments at the Jaipur festival would have been translated into Hindi and then scrutinised by the police. I believe there are charges against him filed at five separate police stations. I am imagining the questions, the detailed ethnographic examination. At one level it could be routine, at another it could have a touch of Alice and Kafka. I can imagine him arguing in his labored Hindi, trying to capture nuances, injecting humour into a ritual of clerks. It is a pity that he has to be subject to this. One wonders about the fate of public intellectuals when political correctness and intellectual caution rules the day. Nandy and the struggles for intellectual justice deserve more

- The writer is a social science nomad

Read more at: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/ashish-nandy-jaipur-literature-fest-controvesry/1/248686.html

KAFILA: Meera Asher --Corruption and Political Correctness: A Severe Case of Intellectual Laziness

Guest post by MEERA ASHAR  http://kafila.org/
January 30, 2013

Ashis Nandy has been called, rather, accused of being, many things—sociologist, historian, political theorist, public intellectual, philosopher, psychoanalyst, leftist, centrist, right wing, Dalit, Christian, Brahmanical, casteist (he describes himself, more poetically, as an intellectual street fighter and reason buster)—but ‘politically correct’ has never been one of them.

This time, Nandy’s political incorrectness has cost him more than before. As in the past, he has been attacked by politicians and the popular media for presenting his analysis of social phenomena—for doing his job well. The response of the Indian intelligentsia to Nandy’s threatened arrest by the right wing government of Gujarat in 2008 was markedly different from the response now. The difference this time, of course, is that Nandy has not offended the right people. He is seen to have betrayed the marginalized. This time, he has been unfashionably politically incorrect. The similarity between the two episodes is the ‘freedom of speech’ brigade, which has dutifully stood by Nandy. But I shall turn to them later.

Nandy’s abandoning of political correctness, perhaps the second-most malignant epidemic of the modern age after ‘bullshit’, is not just an act of impudence or foolhardiness. Sympathetic students and avid readers of Nandy’s writing have often been heard asking, “but why does he have to say these things in this manner; why does he make jokes like this?” It is as though we have assumed that Nandy’s ideas can be repackaged into a politically appropriate, academically gratifying, sanitized format, preferably footnotable. (Many have actually succeeded in achieving that—and rendering him redundant in the process.)

At a time when academics presume that their role is to perpetuate more and more politically correct research (“score one more for the underdogest of the underdog”), Nandy’s work, while challenging old dogmas and hierarchies, cannot be recast into a bite-size snack. There is no ‘Understand Nandy in 3 Simple Steps’…or even 5. Perhaps this is why he has been critiqued almost equally by ideologues of all hues. For example, his brilliant essay on humiliation baffled many. What could he possibly mean when he argues that for humiliation to occur, both the perpetrator and the humiliated need to share the same symbolic world. Humiliation cannot be completed unless this cognitive circuit is complete and another’s categories are violently imposed upon one. A potent identity marker, humiliation can have “creative possibilities”; it can “crystalize new forms of political awareness”. “He makes these statements, and then we have to unpack them for days,” one of my bright students once said of him. But this is a far cry from inane questions such as: Is he justifying humiliation? Is he blaming the humiliated? Is he forgiving the perpetrator? Nandy does not give us new and improved answers; he compels us to question our own questions.

The reactions to Nandy’s exposition on corruption (which has strangely been relegated to the status of ‘remarks’) betray once again the intellectual laziness that pervades society. At the crudest level, Nandy’s words were taken out of context. No surprises here. Blame the media: 24×7 news bites, running the same half-sentence over and over again, uproar, more reruns of the sentence fragment. You get the picture. And indeed, there were people who are either just waiting to pick a fight, be offended, outraged, protest… a familiar routine. Some shook their head in dismay and said this was a reflection of the attitudes of a casteist society.  Brinda Karat called him elitist and Mayawati and the rest wanted him arrested. No one paused even to hear the end of the sentence that began, “It is a fact that most of the corrupt come from the OBCs and the Scheduled Castes, and increasingly the Scheduled Tribes….” This was met with a collective chant of ‘FOUL’. “And as long as this is the case,” Nandy had continued, with his characteristic aphorismic charm, “the Indian Republic will survive.” Of course, Nandy’s point was that the discourse of corruption victimizes the marginalized, while the elite get away with it. He was making the argument that the elite have subtle age-old mechanisms of manipulating power, which the marginalized lack. His use of West Bengal as an example of the least corrupt state but also the state that has kept the SCs/ST and OBCs from getting close to power makes that amply clear.

Of course, this was not all he intended to say. When Nandy said that his co-panelist, the eminent philosopher Richard Sorabji, and he can be corrupt in more subtle ways, by offering scholarships and jobs to kith and kin, he was not simply saying that corruption is everywhere. Nor was he merely stating that the elite get away with it. He was asking us to rethink the category of corruption. Why do certain things not look like corruption? “We congratulate ourselves for promoting talent,” Nandy said of the ‘corruption’ that the elite may engage in. Before we jump in and claim to have solved the paradox by categorizing this as hypocrisy, let us pause to think what Nandy could have been saying. Do we even have a theory of corruption? Or are we blindly waving around a baton against it. It will not do to only say, “corruption is everywhere, let’s strike it, or strike against it,” depending on our chosen mode of ‘participation’ in politics. We have recently seen how that did not turn out too well for the Anna Hazare movement.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing here is the defense that Nandy’s compatriots, students and fellow social scientists have offered: freedom of speech. Indeed, as our society becomes more and more intolerant, there is a need to hold on tight to our right and ability to express dissent. But that is hardly the end of our task. Far from it. Neither is it enough merely to assert that Nandy’s heart is in the right place. (Indeed it is.) Can our intellectual response to a sophisticated argument, and the furor it created, be: “But he has always spoken for the marginalized”? Is this the only validation an intellectual work needs: that it should speak for the marginalized? If this is the only stipulation for scholarly work, we may as well be lobotomized.

It is no surprise that, where multiple academic and scholarly careers have been built primarily on polished bleeding-heart stories, a ‘gadfly’s’ annoying and persistent demand that we be intellectually honest and willing to challenge the very categories of our analysis has not always been welcomed. His work, even if presented as “paradoxes, aphorisms, ironies, jokes and riddles” strikes at the very foundation of the business of knowledge production.  Nandy’s analysis reveals not just the vacuity of the concept of corruption, but also the intellectual indolence that we all revel in. Nandy has often been called a gadfly. Ironically, this reminds me of another friendly neighbourhood gadfly, Socrates, who was asked to drink hemlock for ‘corrupting’ the youth.

Meera Ashar teaches at the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University and can be contacted at meera.ashar@anu.edu.au

Kashmir Times: Angshukanta Chakraborty--When mayhem is the message

When mayhem is the message 

TRP-Driven media distorted Ashis Nandy's words
By Angshukanta Chakraborty

Exactly when those of us who attended the just-concluded Jaipur Literature Festival were heaving a sigh of relief, and were, in fact, celebrating the point that deliverance from "tamasha" and re-immersion in the old-fashioned literary world had been, as it were, the foremost achievement of the Litfest, we were caught off guard in the dire straits of the Ashis Nandy controversy. Nandy's words, when nipped from their bookending sentences and broadcasted on a continuous loop, reminded me of Marshal McLuhan's best remembered saying, 'the medium is the message'. However, adapted to our current times of telegenic public sphere, the idea coined by that revered Canadian prophet of communication theory can easily be repackaged as 'the mayhem is the message.' The medium, clearly, is pure mayhem.

Anyone who was present at the session, titled 'Republic of Ideas' and having fellow panelists such as Tarun Tejpal and Shoma Chaudhary of Tehelka, along with moderator Urvashi Butalia, Ashutosh of IBN7 and Nandy himself, could only be baffled at the turn of events that emanated from the rather heartening, and perhaps a trifle provocative, albeit intentionally so, discussion that took place. The thread of 'corruption as a leveling force' started when Tejpal, and not Nandy, first came up with the suggestion and commented that in a country like India, where entrenched systems of self-aggrandizement are well in place for those with the means, mostly along caste lines, corruption could also be seen as a method of subversion by the poor and the historically disenfranchised, so as to gain access to the very entitlements that are guaranteed by the Constitution. Nandy, who has throughout his long and illustrious academic career as a social psychologist championed the cause of the 'others' within India - whether religious minorities, SC/ST and OBCs, or the rural and urban poor - took up the idea and elaborated that corruption was indicative of a social churn and a republic at work, because corruption need not be the domain of the elites only.

Then came the bit that caused the entire furore. Nandy went on to declare, sounding the prior caveat that it might sound rather "vulgar" to the general ears that are more used to hearing unequivocal and uncomplicated paeans to the national ideals of secularism and anti-casteism, that most of the corrupt in India happen to be SCs, STs and the OBCs, but as long as that is the case, he still had hope in the republic. Thereafter, Nandy explained his admittedly gauchely formulated words to the fidgeting and fretting audience, by saying that the corruption of the SC/STs and the OBCs are visible because they have not yet developed the mechanisms of effective social camouflage, which the elites are adept at, of course. Such mechanisms of hiding and masking self-serving systems turn deep-rooted corruption into accepted techniques of socialization and social engineering. Because the Dalits, the OBCs and other historically disenfranchised lack the finesse, their corruption remains crude and visible to the general eye. Their bonds and affiliations still tend to be dynastic or familial, instead of global or transnational class patterns, which keep the status quo of contemporary capital flows intact. When the marginalised start subverting the system by using the very tools of the system, we call it corruption. What does this say of the media, and the news anchors on the TV channels that kept playing that one line uttered by Nandy in a ceaseless circuit of imposed malice and malignity on one of the tireless champions of the disenfranchised in India? Did they even know where Ashis Nandy worked, leave alone what he taught? Had anyone bothered to even cast a casual glance at his oeuvre of scholarly and popular works, just the bibliography of course, available on Wikipedia? What kind of an irresponsible media pounces on the crumbs of a stimulating and fearless intellectual debate [taking place at a platform such as Jaipur Literature Festival, which, in any case, was attempting to return to its thinking roots after last year's elaborate fiasco] and tosses it over, denuded of the context, to the boiling matrix of the Indian public sphere at large?

It can be equally said of Nandy that he, too, behaved irresponsibly by falling back on the banalities of empirical evidence. "Most of the SC/STs and OBCs are corrupt" sits extremely well with gems like the following, all backed up by enough statistical data and market surveys, of course - "most of the working women tend to drink and smoke"; "most of the college-going girls have premarital sex"; "most of the terrorists are Muslims"; "most of the AIDS patients in the 1980s were homosexuals"; "most of the musicians are drug addicts" - the list can go on.

That Nandy, in a charged moment of displaying his marvelous rhetorical flourish, and unable to resist yet another feat of showcasing some intellectual calisthenics, imagined the podium in Diggi Palace's Char Bagh to be an extension of his office in Delhi's Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (the hallowed CSDS), or, perchance, that of his own drawing room, or the seminar halls of India Habitat Centre, where this remark would have met with characteristic applause - is cause for concern too. This means that the venerated sociologist had momentarily forgotten the enormous consequences of a slip of tongue in a mass culture as volatile as ours, in an age of (mis)communication as instantaneous and as fabricated as ours.

But the real culprit is the TV media, which, as it is obvious now, was waiting breathlessly for its 'breaking news' from Jaipur Litfest. Without so much of a line out of place, the TRPs would not have been served. The perfunctory interview with Will Dalrymple, in which the author talked about the international literary critics and sociologists, and the battalion of writers, who had come to speak at the festival, was not titillating enough. Jeet Thayil looked subdued and without a straw of controversy this time, like reading from a banned book again, although his winning the DSC South Asian Literature Prize for Narcopolis went unreported in the only Indian English news channel that I happened to get on my hotel room television there. Thank goodness for Ashis Nandy then, that all the festival had to say and reflect upon could once again be transmogrified into pure cacophony and one more doctored controversy, much to the relief of our 24X7 media.
—(IPA Service) Sunday February 3, 2013
 

BBC: India court tells police not to arrest academic

Ashis Nandy: India court tells police not to arrest academic, BBC, 1 February 2013

India's Supreme Court has ordered the police not to arrest leading academic Ashis Nandy for making controversial remarks at the Jaipur Literature Festival.

But the court advised Mr Nandy to be more cautious when speaking.

The sociologist was reported as saying that some of India's most disadvantaged groups were the "most corrupt".

He later clarified saying he meant that the poor and disadvantaged were more likely to get caught than the rich.

On Thursday, he filed a petition in the court after fears that he would be arrested.

On Friday, the bench headed by Chief Justice Altamas Kabir told Mr Nandy that he must "exercise caution" in the future if the "intention was not to cause hurt to the sentiments of another person or community".

In his petition, the academic had argued that lodging a case against him "is against the basic principles of the fundamental rights which envisages that free speech is the foundation of a democratic society".

He said that in the "surcharged environment... and the rabid statements made by important political personalities, his physical safety is itself compromised and there is imminent threat of injury to him".

Criticism
 
A number of political parties have criticised Prof Nandy's remarks, but several academics have also supported him.

Former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh state and low-caste Dalit leader Mayawati said that he should be "sent to jail".

"Most corrupt people come from Other Backward Classes, scheduled castes and scheduled tribes [three disadvantaged groups]," Prof Nandy was quoted as saying during a panel discussion at the festival on Saturday.

He later said that he was sorry if anybody was hurt because of the misunderstanding and clarified his comments.

"I have been misquoted. What I meant was that most of the people getting caught for corruption are people from OBC, SC and ST communities, as they don't have the means to save themselves unlike people from upper castes," he is quoted as saying by The Hindu newspaper.

Dalit scholar Kancha Ilaiah said Prof Nandy had made "a bad statement with good intentions".

"While referring to Dalits as corrupt, Prof Nandy probably missed out saying that upper castes [in India] have always been corrupt," Prof Ilaiah said.

The Hindu: ‘It smacks of intolerance of our times and the inability to comprehend’

‘It smacks of intolerance of our times and the inability to comprehend’

 Deepa Ganesh, BANGLORE, FEB 2, 2013

The recent uproar over Ashis Nandy’s remarks is a cause for worry

Writers and thinkers of the State have joined their counterparts in other parts of the country in expressing their concern over the furore at the Jaipur Literature Festival caused by a misrepresentation of comments on corruption made by sociologist Ashis Nandy, who has since had at least five FIRs filed against him.

According to the eminent writer and Jnanpith awardee U.R. Ananthamurthy, “The hostile reaction to Ashis Nandy at the Jaipur Literature Festival is an indication of the intolerance of our times and also our incapacity to understand complex and subtle statements.” He said that Ashis Nandy was among contemporary India’s “tallest and most insightful commentators” and that he was “pained by the nature of the attack against him”. There is, he said, a visible divide between the world of literature and the world of politics. “In the past, in Karnataka, one of the most critical accounts of our caste system came from the upper classes. Fortunately, the Kannada ‘literary world’ has produced such self-critical works from the lower castes also,” he said.

Dalit writer Devanoor Mahadeva is not in total agreement with Ashis Nandy’s views on corruption. “However,” he says, “he is anything but anti-OBC and anti-Dalit.”

Referring to renowned cartoonist Shankar’s 1949 cartoon on Ambedkar that triggered a controversy after it was published in the NCERT Class 11 political science textbooks recently, he said, “They misinterpreted the cartoon. As a society, we are jumping to conclusions and closing ourselves to debate and discussion. This is a very painful development.”

Devanoor Mahadeva said that he had been talking to activists over the last few days asking them to view the entire episode in the light of Ashis Nandy’s body of work.

Reactions have come in from various quarters, with one commentator calling it a “dark age spectacle”.

Theatre person and writer K.V. Akshara said that in the “claustrophobic environment of political correctness”, a thinker who does not present “sterile” and “sanitised” views is hastily branded as “anti-minority”. He added that “as a society we suffer from an intellectual lethargy and are unwilling to pay attention.”

While acknowledging that Ashis Nandy’s statement was “sweeping”, writer and cultural analyst, Nataraj Huliyar said that it should inspire the non-corrupt among Dalits and OBCs to introspect. “If they take up cudgels against Ashis Nandy, they will miss an opportunity to kick up a debate on the nature of corruption in the private sector controlled mainly by upper castes, and the public sector which has a relatively larger participation of the lower and middle castes,” he said.

The New Yorker:THE NANDY AFFAIR- Basharat Peer

The Nandy Affair Posted by Basharat Peer,  February 1, 2013

On January 26th, I was in the writers’ lounge at the Diggi Palace Hotel, in Jaipur, where the city’s annual literary festival was being held, and was in a leisurely conversation with fellow writers. Suddenly, a group of police officers barged in. A gruff man in a traditional kurta pajama, wearing a black cap and a shawl, was leading them. I began to hear the name of Ashis Nandy being repeated. Ashis Nandy is one of India’s foremost intellectuals, a clinical psychologist and sociologist who has produced some of the most original and important works of scholarship in independent India in his forty or more years in public life. He is also a prolific writer of essays and newspaper columns and a feisty public speaker.

 

“How could Ashis Nandy call us the most corrupt in India?” the politician in the black cap shouted at the growing crowd of festival organizers and writers. A few hours earlier, Nandy had been on a panel discussion called “The Republic of Ideas” with Urvashi Butalia, a writer and publisher; Tarun Tejpal, a magazine editor and novelist; and a few others. The conversation had turned to the endemic corruption in India. Nandy, a small, bespectacled seventy-five-year-old man with a balding head, a wispy beard, and a ready laugh, had, as usual, an unorthodox take on corruption, “I do wish there remains some degree of corruption in India because I would also suggest that it humanizes our society.”

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.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/02/the-nandy-affair-in-india.html#ixzz2JiWbWWXl

The Pioneer OpEd:Kamal Mitra Chenoy-Free speech, everything decent, under attack

Free speech, everything decent, under attack Kamal Mitra Chenoy, Feb 2, 2013

India’s imperfect democracy got a little more flawed this week, and we all know the reasons. Democracy has come to mean protection of the organised minority, while those who dare to speak the truth are forced to run for cover

It is dangerous to make profound statements in these times, especially if they are imaginative and try to challenge dominant wisdom. You might think that being outspoken at literary meet, in this case the annual Jaipur Literary Festival, is reasonably safe. Professor Ashis Nandy clearly thought so and is paying the price.

Nandy is known for his more than four decades of support to the backward classes. In 1991 when the Mandal Commission came out with its report, he supported it, unlike the hordes of upper caste intellectuals even in a supposed egalitarian bastion like JNU who were in the opposition.

But there is a bitter irony in the current situation. The area of reservation, subsidies and weightage in matters of education, work and other facilities have not led to what the Mandal Commission had advocated and hoped. Tarun Tejpal, who spoke immediately before Nandy, raised the question of the oppressed classes and was pessimistic about the end of their oppression given the system of written and unwritten rules which govern society by an elite and for an elite.

Nandy reacted by going a step further. In a widely believed corrupt system he felt the backward classes were also being corrupt in order to survive. His presentation was full of irony and some satire. For example he said that West Bengal was a state without corruption because it had no backward classes. He, of course, meant the opposite. Anyone who is acquainted with Nandy’s corpus of writings would know that this was a sharp criticism of the Left and its performance in West Bengal. After all it would be absurd to state that there are no backward classes there.

The problems clearly arise from Nandy’s view of the egalitarian possibilities of corruption. This led him to argue that Dawood Ibrahim’s gang had a lot of Hindus and was therefore totally secular. Secularism does not mean that subordinates who are Hindu by following their Muslim gang leader become secular. It is not a dreaded gang’s religious mix but what it does for inter-religious and inter-caste wellbeing and amity that makes it secular.

Nandy then went on to cite OBC politicians like Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Yadav and Dalit leader Mayawati to show that compared to the upper caste/ class leaders these leaders suffered from “a sense of desperation, utter desperation and insecurity.” Thus, “our corruption doesn’t look that corrupt, their corruption does.”

Now this is certainly a sweeping statement that needs more analysis and factual basis. It is made more problematic by his conclusion:  “It is a fact that more of the corrupt come from the OBCs, and the Scheduled Castes and now increasingly Scheduled Tribes and as long as this is the case, Indian Republic will survive.”

This is a paradoxical statement. Since Nandy holds that the backward classes though corrupt are less so than the upper castes/classes and this is largely due to a ruling machinery that favours the traditional ruling classes over the backward classes, how could he arrive at this particular formulation?  The poorer, less empowered backward classes are, according to him, necessary to save the Republic.

Who are the backward classes saving the Republic and how?

Nandy concedes that though the backward classes are corrupt, they do not have the network and class-biased rules which facilitate the rule by upper castes/ classes.  Since he himself says this is the case, then how can this backward class formation displaces an entrenched upper caste ruling class and saves the Republic?  It appears that Nandy is caught between two stools. On the one hand, he argues that “corruption in India…humanises our society.” But all studies of the poor show that they are victims and not beneficiaries of corruption.

The scale of corruption in welfare schemes for the poor is notorious. Rajiv Gandhi had famously stated that not much from each welfare Rupee actually  reaches the poor. This is no less true now. Experiences with what was called NREGA — a rural employment scheme in recent years has shown that its performance has declined sharply. Further, the Indian political economy which has embraced neo-liberalism is just not concerned with the hopelessness of the poor and the backward.

Nandy’s humanity has led him to argue that corruption humanises society. But the reverse is true. It is the poor who pay a relatively higher proportion of taxes including indirect taxes on fuel, food etc. Since 1947, if Nandy had his way, the Indian polity and economy would have been near paradise. The power of the so-called corrupt backward classes to provide stability to the system, humanises it and secularises it.

This is precisely the kind of utopia that Dr BR Ambedkar warned against in the Constituent Assembly. Contrasting political equality with social and economic inequality, Ambedkar warned that this contradiction if not resolved could have very serious consequences for society and the Constitution itself.

The rise of insurgencies as well as social banditry (eg Phoolan Devi, Dadua and others) in various parts of the country is a clear consequence of what Dr Ambedkar had warned. Arguably banditry is also a form of corruption which should lead to equalisation and stability for the Republic, by his standards. Of course, he would not make such a formulation. But in the light of what he, an internationally renowned sociologist and a consistent supporter of the backward classes has stated as cited above, people may read him this way.

It is a denial of the promise of social justice and intellectual liberation to attack a thinker because you disagree with him. The Chairperson of the SC/ST Commission had called for Nandy’s arrest even before giving him a showcause notice, leave alone having a talk with him. Another Dalit leader called for  Nandy’s arrest under the National Security Act. The political class jumped in. Hardly any of them spoke openly in his support. Of course, intellectuals from the backward classes like Kancha Iliah, Chandra Bhan Prasad, Tulsi Ram and others are notable exceptions. The upper caste intelligentsia also rallied in some measure but the majority chose to stay away from an issue that had enraged backward classes and their leaders.

It is basic to examine the foundational concepts of any theory and relate them to society. Nandy did not do that. And he could not in a brief speech. But his body of work clearly illustrates his commitment to the backward classes and to an egalitarian Republic. One may not agree with Nandy’s latest somewhat stray comments. But even reading those does not show him to be a bigoted upper caste/ class intellectual ignorant of the social reality of the poor and the depressed. Building on what Tarun Tejpal and Nandy said in Jaipur, will be a Herculean task. There can and should be any number of nuances because India is complex and diverse.

But philosophers and theorist must be given due space and latitude. To cite a famous incident during the Algerian war, a French minister urged President De Gaulle to arrest Jean Paul Sartre for opposing the war. De Gaulle, retorted: “One does not arrest Voltaire”. Intellectuals are critical for the development and plurality of India. In such an India, the Ashis Nandys should be cherished.
(The author is Professor in the School of International Studies, JNU)