Encroaching on India's middle ground

As he lay in a bunker during the Second World War, George Orwell wrote later, "As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.''

Last week, as Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen was shunted across the north Indian heartland because a little-known Muslim group had protested her presence in Kolkata, she may have, despite a vastly different context, empathised with Orwell.

It doesn't really matter why this little-known Muslim group had woken up so late to the fact that Taslima had been living in that city for over a year. It doesn't matter either that the anti-Taslima protests in Kolkata were, at least partially, the result of political differences between the ruling Communist parties of West Bengal and those in the Opposition.

For the major part of this year, Bengal has been on the boil over land acquisition from poor farmers for the setting up of a special industrial zone in a small village called Nandigram. This is picture postcard country, with green rice fields and waving palms stretching into a golden horizon. And yet for the last nine months it has seethed with rural unrest, and what is worse, with open disaffection against the ruling Communist parties.

But back to our Taslima Nasreen story. Having escaped the wrath of religious fundamentalists at home in Bangladesh several years ago for her writing, Taslima has for the last many years shuttled like an eternal refugee between the do-good nations of Scandinavia and India.

For her, India really means Bengal, because it is here that she feels completely at home. She, just like the rest of the state speaks Bengali, eats the same kind of food and best of all, has basked in the limelight of a self-respecting cultural milieu. Bengal seriously takes the self-promoted maxim that the state does today what the rest of the country will do tomorrow, and culture leads everything else.

Taslima Nasreen quickly took to the Bengal pond when she arrived here just over a year ago and swam delightedly in it, revelling in the attention showered upon her. In a sense, she was like the state's mascot, the emblem of its liberal beliefs.

Until two weeks ago, when the Army was called out to quell street protests by the little-known Muslim group, which demanded that Taslima Nasreen had hurt the religious feelings of Muslims and be asked to shut up or ship out.

Most Kolkata people were mystified at the suddenness of the protests. It wasn't as if Taslima had made some anti-Muslim statement recently, on the lines of the Danish cartoonists last year or what Salman Rushdie had written in his Satanic Verses in 1989. Were the Taslima protests a state-inspired propaganda ploy to divert from the heat of Nandigram, as was largely suspected?

Whatever the motive, overnight, the Bengal government packed her off on a plane to Rajasthan. When that provincial government developed cold feet, this time anticipating protests from Hindu religious extremists, she was packed off to Delhi. Here the matter reached parliament, and Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee was forced to state that the lady was welcome in India as long as she didn't offend the sensibilities of any group.

Isolation

The Taslima Nasreen issue has, once again, vividly brought home the fact that at least in India, there is no such thing as a writer living or writing in isolation. In 1989, when asked what he thought of the Indian government banning Satanic Verses, Rushdie replied, "Its funny that they think a book can cause a riot.''

Certainly, Penguin India refused to bring the book into the stores in 1989 although thousands of copies had been published, because it believed that some passages may offend the sensibilities of India's large Muslim community.

Taslima's admonition, by none other than the foreign minister in parliament, is meant as a similar salve. As long as the author doesn't offend the sensibilities of any group, she is welcome to stay on as a guest in India.

In the hullabaloo that has since followed over freedom of speech and expression, over the limits and trespasses that all artistes enjoy, one thing is clear : Unlike in the West, where the freedom of speech of a writer is often defended to the exclusion of everything else, India, it is clear, abhors the extremist fringes.

This was true in 1989 with Salman Rushdie, and it is true in 2007 with Taslima Nasreen. You could call it the great liberal cop-out or you could call it plain and simple pragmatism.

Truth is, India will defend the middle space, the area of moderation, where you will be allowed your 15 seconds of both fame and free speech - as long as it is not offensive to anybody.

In practice, of course, all extremists will always seek to encroach upon this middle space and colour it in the brush of their predilection. Religious riots, from the partition of India in 1947 to the more recent riots in Gujarat in 2002, are testimony to grievances, both real and imagined, on both sides. Then there are caste differences, gender discrimination, political power imbalances... the list is long and varied.

India would have long been lost on the diversity roller-coaster and often it is. Then someone or the other dins the middle path back on track. Sometimes it works. Often it doesn't.

Question is, will Taslima Nasreen stay on in her beloved Kolkata, despite the fact that she has apologised profusely for her actions, or will she leave for freer, and probably much less colourful, Scandinavia?

All those who love a feisty good fight probably hope she will stay. Who knows, the incident may even improve some of her writing. Even better, the return to Kolkata of a much-chastised Taslima Nasreen would also send a message to the little-known Muslim group whose streets protests in the first place had driven her out.

The fact that she's back would tell them that she's back, with the support of the people, to reclaim the forever-contested middle ground.

Jyoti Malhotra is the Diplomatic Editor of The Telegraph newspaper, India.