Of Writers and Mobs

Our very own Taslima Nasrin has won her newest battle to stay on in India. The BJP-led government in Delhi has agreed that she can stay in the country without having to move out in two months. That is good news. The bad news, something we have lived with for the past many years, is that we in Bangladesh do not have the courage to demand of our government that Nasrin be brought back home. Now that we have a secular administration, however putative, running the show in Dhaka, it should have been our moral responsibility to have Taslima Nasrin come back home.

We have failed to do that. Successive governments in Bangladesh have simply ignored the plight of Taslima Nasrin, a writer with whom we may not agree all the time but whose courage in projecting reality remains unsurpassed. Bigots will not agree with her. But, then, bigots throughout history have never been comfortable with reason. The bigger issue here is that in Bangladesh, there have hardly been any writers or poets or intellectuals who have in these past couple of decades demanded that Taslima Nasrin be permitted to return to the country. She has been in exile, a refugee who has sought a home in countries not hers. She has lived in Sweden, has trekked all over the West. She then decided that it would be Kolkata (because of its proximity to Dhaka) that would be her home.

But Kolkata was not to be, for even there roving bands of Muslim fanatics made sure that she was driven out of the city. It is rather strange when governments, be they in Dhaka or Kolkata, must genuflect before mobs baying for a writer's blood. The moral authority that governments are expected to exercise has been absent in Bangladesh and West Bengal. And the dire message these governments have, unwittingly or otherwise, sent out is that they have little or no responsibility for individuals who happen to be writers ready and willing to project the truth. Taslima Nasrin's is not the only instance of pusillanimity politicians have demonstrated in the face of publicly displayed criminality. There is the story of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who today is forced to eke out a living abroad because fanatics have asked for her head.

Fanaticism is not religion, which is why when the forces of bigotry try to tell you that their version of faith is all and that nothing else is, you do not agree. And when you do not agree, it is the threat of plain and vicious violence which hangs over you. Wendy Doniger's excellent account of Hinduism has not gone down well with a good number of Hindu fanatics. The result has been a withdrawal of her work from bookstores all across India. Her publishers should have stood up for her. They did not. That only exemplified the swiftness with which some publishers are willing to appease the mob. And once you try mollifying the mob, you are actually putting the future of writers' independence at risk. A writer is no politician. Why then must she or he be pushed into a situation where the nature of what she or he will write must need the approval of the mob? A reader has all the right in the world to express a dissenting opinion about a writer's work. But when he asks that the writer's book be placed under a ban, he exceeds his authority. It is not his job to ask that the writer's head be placed on the block.

All too often, it is governments more than readers who choose to pounce on writers because they see in the writers' works a threat to their unquestioned authority. Rajiv Gandhi had no business clamping a ban on Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. The book, badly written and based on a theme the writer ought not to have touched on, should have been left for readers in India to judge. That did not happen. What did happen is that Gandhi's act quickly turned Rushdie into a household name. Ayatollah Khomeini only added to the entire ugly episode of turning the writer into a celebrity in the West when he decreed that Rushdie be murdered.

There are governments which live in fear of writers. In the Soviet Union, there have been Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The communist regime would compel the former to renounce the Nobel Prize for literature; and it would force the latter into exile. In the Stalinist era, the poet Anna Akhmatova was systematically subjected to psychological brutality. In Britain and India, the fact that D.H. Lawrence and Buddhadeva Basu were accused of obscenity in their works is an episode we should not be forgetting. The deep wounds inflicted on Saadat Hasan Manto by the British colonial authorities in pre-partition India and then by the state of Pakistan are some of the darkest instances of the trauma writers are often put through by the powers that be or the mob or both.

Curbs on writing are a measure of the insecurity a state suffers from. And when fear of the mob provokes the state into silencing writers or keeping them away from their native land, it is shame in the superlative degree we collectively suffer from. It is not a writer's job to please. But it is certainly his job to inform and enlighten. The renaissance of the mind is all.