West Bengal’s Left Front government, already
reeling under the ignominy of Nandigram, has
earned yet more embarrassment by throwing
Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen out of
Kolkata. Tossed since from Jaipur to Delhi to
Haryana, Ms Nasreen has been forced into an
emotionally insecure nomadic existence even as
the sangh parivar cynically tries to exploit her
plight to its narrow advantage.

Neither the state governments involved, nor the
Centre, seems inclined to defend Ms Nasreen’s
right to live with dignity and without fear
anywhere in India. There are reports that the
Centre is discreetly nudging her to leave
India-at least for awhile. Although Foreign
Minister Pranab Mukherjee says India will give
her shelter, the offer comes with a gracelessly
stated condition: she must do nothing to "hurt
the sentiments of our people"-whatever that means.

The episode raises serious questions about
artistic freedom, fundamental rights of belief,
expression and association, and the state’s duty
to protect them. One doesn’t have to be an
admirer of Ms Nasreen to defend her rights. This
writer is aware that she’s considered mediocre
and often writes provocatively. Yet, banning her
work or banishing her is not the solution.

The West Bengal government wants to minimise its
role in expelling Ms Nasreen from Kolkata, one
day after a violent rally held by the
little-known, but originally Congress-backed,
All-India Minority Forum, which brought the army
to the city for the first time since 1992. Some
Left Front leaders claim she left Kolkata of her
own will and is welcome to return.

This just won’t wash. Ms Nasreen’s departure from
Kolkata followed an unambiguous statement by CPM
state secretary Biman Bose that the LF had
welcomed her because two Central ministers
pleaded for her, but that her presence has since
created law-and-order problems, and hence she
should leave West Bengal.

Mr Bose hastily retracted the statement, but
meanwhile, reports The Indian Express, the city
police had asked two businessmen belonging to the
Rajasthan Foundation (HM Bangur and Sandeep
Bhutoria) to “facilitate” her exit, which they
did. She discovered she was headed for Jaipur
only when a police officer handed over the ticket
to her. Ms Nasreen’s move was certainly not
voluntary. She’s clear that Kolkata is her home
and she wants to return there.

The CPM kept its own Left Front allies in the
dark about its decision to expel Ms Nasreen. The
allies have termed the decision “shameful” and
“another blot on our name”. The CPM will find it
hard to deny that it so decided because it was
rattled by the ferocity of the AIMF rally, held
as a protest against the Nandigram violence and
to demand that Ms Nasreen’s visa be revoked. The
AIMF used Nandgram as a cover and tried to give
the issue a communal twist by claiming that CPM
cadres had specially targeted Muslims there.

This was a canard. More than half of Nandigram’s
victims were indeed Muslims. But then, two-thirds
of Nandigram’s population is Muslim too. Muslims
lead both the CPM and its rival, Bhumi Ucched
Pratirodh Committee. The AIMF’s real ire was
directed at Ms Nasreen because of her past
writings, some of which it terms
“anti-Islamic”-although it’s unlikely that many
Front members have read them.

It’s easy to deplore the AIMF. But the CPM
doesn’t come out of the episode smelling of
roses. It speaks poorly of its adherence to
secularism and other Constitutional values that
it should cave in to mob pressure for censorship,
or that it should bend over backwards to guard
its “Muslim vote” by expelling Ms Nasreen. Muslim
opinion has been moving away from the LF since
disclosures by the Sachar Committee about the
community’s abysmal status in West Bengal, and
because of the Rizvanur Rehman case (which
exposed class and religious biases in the police).

Muslims form more than 25 percent of West
Bengal’s population, but their representation in
government employment is an appalling 2.1
percent. (The respective ratios even for Gujarat
are 9.2 and 5.4 percent). Instead of remedying
this failure of inclusion through purposive
affirmative action, the Front resorted to
gimmicks of the kind that it itself criticises
other parties for, including pandering to
religious bigots.

However, the Left’s timidity in the face of
religious hardliners pales in comparison beside
the breath-taking duplicity of the Bharatiya
Janata Party and its allies. The BJP parades
itself as a saviour of Ms Nasreen and a defender
of the freedom of expression. It even demands
that she be granted refugee status because she’s
fleeing persecution by religious fanatics.

In reality, the sangh parivar is merely
capitalising on the fact that Ms Nasreen’s
adversaries are Muslims; and that she wrote a
novel on the persecution of Bangladesh’s Hindu
minority following the Babri mosque’s demolition.
This gives the parivar a chance to indulge in
Islam-bashing by claiming that that faith is
uniquely, incorrigibly intolerant.

However, the parivar vilifies Islam. It has
nothing but contempt for the right to free
expression, in particular, artistic freedom. It
is inherently suspicious of originality and
creativity, and of bold experimentation with
art-forms that delve deep into the human or
social condition. It fears freedom and rational
inquiry.

Not just the parivar’s goons in the Vishva Hindu
Parishad and Bajrang Dal, but even the BJP’s most
respectable parliamentary leaders are
instinctively censorship-oriented and prone to
demand bans on anything they don’t approve. If
the government doesn’t ban the books, paintings
or films and plays they label “anti-Hindu” or
“anti-national”, the parivar itself terrorises
the concerned writer, artist, playwright or
filmmaker.

This has happened so often to distinguished
artists like M. F. Husain, filmmakers like Anand
Patwardhan and Deepa Mehta (of Water and Fire
fame), to authors of countless books pertaining
to Shivaji, and to exhibitions on historical or
contemporary themes, that it has become an
inexorable, entirely predictable, pattern.
Students like Chandramohan and scholars like
Shivaji Panikkar of MS University in Baroda, and
actresses such as Khushboo, have been victims of
the same phenomenon. So have publications like
Outlook, Mahanagar and Deccan Herald.

The parivar has not only imposed its fanatical
will upon every performing art and every form of
cultural expression. It has often succeeded in
bullying the state into conceding its demands-to
the point of abdicating its responsibility to
protect the life and limb of its citizens.

Husain’s case is a painful reminder of the Indian
state’s failure to provide security to a 92
year-old painter so he can return home from
self-imposed exile and live in freedom from
threats to his life by Hindutva bigots bent on
misrepresenting his work, and questioning his
deep respect for all faiths, based on
spirituality. Husain is a victim of mob
censorship, as well as the state’s cowardice in
the face of communal bullies and religious bigots.

True, it’s not only the Hindu fanatics of the
parivar who demand censorship and bans. Groups
that claim to be speaking in the name of Sikhs,
Muslims, Christians or Jains also do the same.
Typically, the state yields to them; indeed, it
acts as if it had granted them the “right” to
vandalise works of art and criminally assault
writers. The cases of The Last Temptation of
Christ and The Da Vinci Code, or Salman Rushdie
and the Dera Sacha Sauda are instances of this.

All such groups effectively exercise veto power
over society and the state by invoking the "hurt
sentiments" of a particular community. So we end
up defining tolerance as the sum-total of
different intolerances, as Amartya Sen so aptly
put it. This is not the sign of a deeply
democratic, mature and balanced society which
genuinely respects difference and the right to
dissent.

Of course, some books or works of art do hurt,
upset or even scandalise holders of particular
beliefs. But banning them is generally
incompatible with their authors’ freedom of
belief and expression. If they are indeed
scurrilous or defamatory, the remedy lies in
filing civil and criminal lawsuits, which would
lead to appropriate penalties-including a ban in
the exceptional case.

In any case, private groups or individuals have
no right to usurp the functions of the courts in
deciding what is permissible and what is
impermissible by virtue of being gratuitously
offensive, vulgar, egregiously scandalous, or
calculated to incite violence or to insult and
humiliate. Such groups only impoverish social
life by regimenting it and imposing conformity or
homogeneity on it. They simply have no business
to dictate uniform norms, whether in respect of
sexual preference, dress, religious practices or
social behaviour.

Societies greatly enrich themselves if they
respect difference and celebrate diversity-as
India did during the best, most tolerant periods
of its history. This means accepting the unusual,
the irreverent, the quirky-even if some of us
find it distasteful. In the last analysis, we
don’t have to read the books we don’t like, or
eat things that we find “impure” or “bad”, but
others relish. Let a thousand flowers bloom!