The retreat of liberalism

Where the mind is without fear/Where the head is held high/Where knowledge is free/Where the world is not broken up into fragmentzs by narrow domestic walls...Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way.. Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, Let my country awake!"

Thus wrote Tagore. Contrast this with what the government has done with Taslima Nasreen, the Bangladeshi author who has been sent packing to an undisclosed destination in Europe. Some Muslims, acting on command, pretended to get enraged over her insults to Islam in a book she wrote several years ago. They noticed nothing until last year and then suddenly demanded her head. She was hounded out of Marxist-ruled and therefore self-avowedly secular Kolkata, where she had lived after she had been hounded out of her own country a decade ago. She went to Jaipur but was chased out of there. And last week she was forced out of Delhi and out of India as well. The assault has been against a Muslim by Muslims, and abetted by the state. It has been against the freedom of expression guaranteed in the Constitution. Those ready to jump on to every secular bandwagon have watched this shameful episode with a determination to do nothing. No Karat, no Yechury, no Arjun Singh, no Ansari, no Hussein, no Setalwad...no shame, just hypocrisy exposed.

India has reached a low point in the confrontation that identity-based politics has been having with the basic tenets of liberalism. Shortly before Ms Nasreen was shown the departure gate at Delhi airport, the government cracked down on a peaceful march by non-violent Tibetans, presumably to make sure that China does not get offended. But what about the right to free assembly and to free movement throughout the republic, both Constitutionally guaranteed? Then there is the case of M.F.Husain, who lives in exile because some of his paintings have caused offence to Hindus.

The slide down the slippery slope began with the banning of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses two decades ago""shortly after Hindutva-based politics came into its own following the Shah Bano judgment. Now anyone can claim offence at anything, and the state will come barging in. Indeed, the state in almost all cases takes no action against the people who take the law into their own hands and protest at someone else's use of his right to free speech. Rather, it is the victim who ends up in the dock.

Either we are a secular state and a liberal democracy, or we are not. At the moment, the liberalism is severely circumscribed, to the point where free speech is ok so long as you keep glancing over your shoulder. To be sure, the Constitution accepts limits on the freedom of expression where there is a threat to public order, decency or morality. But these are value-loaded terms and have elastic meanings that vary over time and context""The Last Temptation of Christ, for instance, was a minor classic that sold for many years as a book without causing anyone offence, until it was staged as a play in Kerala and brought Christians out in protest. More recently, a students' art exhibition in Baroda invited the Sangh Parivar's attention, with the surprise consequence of the dean being suspended by the university.

Rationalisers and apologists will find reasons to justify the assault on liberal values. There is always an immediate cause that can be used to obscure the larger purpose. The term for this is expediency. But expediency has final effect: it degrades core values. How can India reverse this string of reverses that liberalism has faced? There is only way: the state must do its duty, and must be made to do its duty. The courts have been doing what they can. Citizens too need to step up. For when liberal values fade, it is they who pay the price.