Another day, another band of right-wingers demanding a pound of flesh for their tender religious sentiments - so what's new? Reporters Without Borders ranks India 140 out of 180 countries surveyed for freedom of speech. This week saw another round of outrage from writers, journalists and readers as a publisher rolled over before a ridiculously anti-intellectual legal challenge.
Penguin India's decision to withdraw and, in a particularly pointed move, pulp Wendy Doniger's much-respected scholarly work The Hindus was followed by three days' silence from the company, leaving Delhi's literary circle - one of the most gleefully leaky places in the universe - clueless and angry.
Why did a company like Penguin abandon a reputed book at a time when the space for intellectual and artistic endeavour in India is increasingly embattled? The world of ideas needs defending. If Penguin can't afford to, or doesn't care to, then who can and does? And what's with the silence?
Some people thought that the book may have been caught in the crossfire of internal organisational politics - parent company abroad, big merger between Penguin and Random House, turf wars and so on. Some people wondered if employees faced credible threats to their safety given that the petitioning Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti is affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishva Hindu Parishad, in an increasingly polarised and intolerant political and cultural climate.
But the near-unanimous backlash from writers, journalists, bloggers and even the odd politician came because most thought that Penguin had simply decided that it wasn't worth fighting endless costly battles for a book that has had a reasonable run and whose author will next be published by someone else; in other words, that the company threw freedom of expression under the bus.
On Friday the company finally issued a fighting but ambiguous statement that includes this line: "…a publishing company has the same obligation as any other organisation to respect the laws of the land in which it operates, however intolerant and restrictive those laws may be. We also have a moral responsibility to protect our employees against threats and harassment where we can." The statement points out that the company fought for the book up to a point, but blames Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code for its withdrawal.
Section 295A, which criminalises "deliberate and malicious intention" to outrage religious feelings, is certainly the crux of the issue. It's a lousy, retrograde law that can send you to jail for three years for hurting someone's feelings. It empowers the chronically offended, and deters intellectual and artistic endeavour with the prospect of a long, expensive legal process.
The company did not complete the legal battle. If it faced thuggish threats, it would have gotten massive public support. But if there was no threat, then what the thinking public sees is a leading publishing house caving in to a petition that, among other idiocies, accuses Professor Doniger of a being "a woman hungry of sex", without appealing in a higher court, in a banal, garden-variety corporate decision. In that case, Penguin fully deserves every bitter, appalled letter being written to it by its own authors, and every book being mailed back to its offices by disgusted readers, and the scathing representation, by one netizen, of its logo with its name changed to "Chicken". Because publishing is more than just a business. It stands for the healthy competition of ideas, for tolerance, for dissent, for originality, and for constructive criticism. The Penguin that stood by Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses staked its business on those values.
The defeat of Professor Doniger's book is terrible news for the ever-shrinking space for creative and intellectual achievement. In this country, that space is under constant legal and physical siege from fundamentalists and cranks, and needs all the backing it can get. It desperately needed a symbolic fight, and was instead handed a symbolic retreat from the battlefield.
But whether or not one blames Penguin in this instance, the fact remains that every writer, artist and publisher lives with the unreasonable threat of Section 295A hanging over their heads. This law coddles religious hypersensitivity, empowers intolerance, and is used with impunity by anti-intellectuals who cannot abide a plural, rational, democratic society. It deters intellectual endeavour and pluralistic thinking. Lobbying to change this law is the vital long-term battle, the outcome of which will determine whether we stand for social and intellectual progress, or religion-stupefied intolerance.
Meanwhile, the creative and intellectual community needs solidarity and organisation if it is to stay standing. People working in these spaces are rarely temperamentally suited to organisation, but need to step up to it. They might win some and lose some, but they will have to fight for them all. The alternative is too tragic to contemplate.
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