The Rushdie Affair and the Hand of the Congress

Cynical Congressmen and supine litfest organisers script a dangerous farce

Salman Rushdie did not need permission from the Government to come to India. The actual danger to him was largely an exercise of fiction that over two weeks came closer to reality only because those who should have known better did not stand up in the first place. This includes not just the Government, it includes the organisers and literati who flock to Jaipur every year.

The Rajasthan government may have insidiously exerted pressure behind the scenes and publicly made it clear that it would rather not have Rushdie visiting Jaipur, but it is difficult to believe that the organisers of the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) did not realise that the perceived threat was largely the result of a politically expedient use of the kind of nonsense the Intelligence Bureau (IB) issues on a daily basis to state governments across the country.

From all accounts, Rushdie kept away from the festival because of what the organisers were telling him. They have stated that they were shown intelligence dossiers that revealed there was a threat to Rushdie’s life. Perhaps they are rather naïve, but they could have considered asking someone in the Government—after all, Kapil Sibal was invited to the festival—or a journalist who covers a beat other than culture. They would have learnt that IB inputs are rarely worth the paper they are written on, and the dossiers might have read much the same when Rushdie did visit Jaipur in 2007. The threat, if any, was no graver this year. The only difference is that the Congress wanted to create the impression that it was, and the organisers went along with this.

The Congress was acting according to the twisted logic of political expediency. With its electoral performance in Uttar Pradesh (UP) dependent on how Muslims in the state vote, the party, adept at catering to the needs of what today are more often than not illusory votebanks, felt it would only gain from the controversy over Rushdie’s visit. Even as party spokesperson Manish Tewari was espousing a newfound, and under the circumstances absurd, belief in liberal values (which no doubt was what led the party to ban The Satanic Verses in the first place), Mahesh Joshi, Congress MP from Jaipur, was assuring Muslim ‘leaders’ that Rushdie would be kept away from the city for the duration of the festival.

It is already clear that Rahul Gandhi seems to have learnt little from his father’s years as Prime Minister. It may be of concern to the party that his father’s decisions on issues such as the Shah Bano case and Babri Masjid had  kept the Congress out of power for a decade, and marginalised it in UP, but for the rest of us, the greater worry is what it did to the nation. The same mistakes are being repeated, the same kind of shallow symbolism that led to the October 1988 ban on The Satanic Verses is being re-adopted. At the very first sign of a real political test, the projected idealism of Rahul Gandhi has given way to the tired old clichés of Congress politics.

It was thus no surprise that it was the Deoband seminary that obliged the Congress to act as it did. The seminary and the party are old friends who often act in tandem, but over the course of this campaign, Deoband’s self-professed hold over Muslim opinion has been challenged.  The state’s Barelvis and other Sufis, who outnumber Deobandis by some admittedly unverifiable counts, have come together under the banner of the All India Ulama and Mashaikh Board (AIUMB). An earlier Open report had quoted Syed Babar Ashraf of the AIUMB, thus: “The Congress listens to hardliners. It has propped up hardline organisations like the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind and has patronised Deobandis at the cost of Barelvis.” AIUMB General Secretary Maulana Syed Muhammad Ashraf Kichhouchhawi had this to say about Deobandis: “The ideology they teach and spread is hardline Wahhabism… We want to distinguish ourselves, keepers of harmonious Islam, from those who are promoters of terror.” Whatever the truth of these statements, this is the perception of a number of devout Muslims in India.

When a hardline organisation sees its perceived hold over a community slipping, it usually reacts by building on outrage over a symbolic issue that consolidates the faithful. This is as true of the Hindu right and Sikh fundamentalists as of the Muslim clergy in the country. Rushdie was served up by the JLF just in time, and he was abandoned by the very people who invited him. Within the community, the Deobandi ploy appears to have worked—the Barelvis who had earlier called them ‘Wahhabis’ also joined the protest against Rushdie’s visit.

It is understandable that Deobandis would work in tandem with the Congress, but what about the JLF’s organisers? Well, they are the only ones who apparently believe that Congress Minister Kapil Sibal deserves a session of his own at the festival, year after year, on the strength of his doggerel.

The defence the organisers have offered is that there were other writers at the festival, and they had to consider their interests and safety. Well, actually there was no real danger to their safety. And since when has literature become a question of numbers? Is, then, the business of the festival more important than the idea of literature?

A piece in The Economic Times, with unintended irony, revealed that the budget of the festival this year ‘is Rs 5.3 crore, up from Rs 1.2 crore in 2008. More than 70,000 people are attending this year. More than 400 accredited journalists are covering the event, and hundreds more are here unofficially. The profile of the attendees is deemed so favourable that alcohol firms vie with each other to market themselves at the venue. The high-end fashion label Ritu Kumar has a stall. A large ethnic-wear retailer is indulging in “ambush marketing”, say the organisers.’

Last year, when JM Coetzee spoke at the JLF, the venue was packed. The audience did seem to have that ‘favourable’ profile that has alcohol firms vying for their attention, but I’m not sure if the vast majority had ever read a book of Coetzee, or ever would. Only a small minority of the people I spoke to later even managed to hear Coetzee’s address. It was the celebrity status of the author, fed by a media that thrives on the money and glamour of literary prizes, that had drawn them to Jaipur.

Such an audience encapsulates the problem with the festival. Seven years after its inception, it has no local constituency in the city, or for that matter the state of Rajasthan, which is why a few people claiming to speak on behalf of Muslims could act without any local opposition. Jaipur was a venue chosen primarily for reasons that had nothing to do with literature; it was a good place to visit for a party and perhaps (in a few cases) listen to some well-known authors. The festival was primarily an exercise in literary tourism. If it is no longer held next year in Jaipur, maybe the only people with regrets in the city will be hoteliers and youngsters who turn up and enjoy a few drinks at the venue.

There is nothing wrong with the idea of literary tourism, but when it goes with the pretension of a higher purpose, it does get shown up for what it is. For all the claims made for the festival, it has done little for Indian writing. The seven years of its existence have largely been bad years for Indian fiction, and the non-fiction that has emerged has come from the work of journalists who have had very little support from the publishing industry till their manuscripts were ready. What the festival has done, and done well as The Economic Times quote reveals, is promote the marketing of literature.

Again, this is no bad thing. The few authors who have worked hard on their first books have been rewarded with better advances, but it has also meant that an entire industry of literary journalism has sprung up around the festival. It is this industry that has led us to believe that the festival is an end in itself; otherwise, what explains the decision to go ahead with it in the face of censorship? How many Indian—I stress ‘Indian’ only because it is our battle, the others can only extend support—critics and authors chose to stay away or walk away from a festival where the organisers themselves were complicit in the act of censoring an author, erasing his presence not just in person, but even on video via satellite from London?

Four authors did run the risk of reading from The Satanic Verses at the festival. Of them, only Ruchir Joshi seems to have taken a coherent and admirable public stand. Hari Kunzru, who began by claiming he wanted to give voice to Salman Rushdie, ended up saying, “I would like to reiterate that in taking this action, I believed, and continue to believe, that I was not breaking the law, and had no interest in causing gratuitous offence. I apologise unreservedly to anyone who feels I have disrespected his or her faith.” In so giving voice to Salman Rushdie, Kunzru seems, by proxy, to have once again forced him to apologise for a crime he has not committed. 

Kunzru’s stand, while lame, is understandable in the light of how the organisers reacted. As soon as they realised that passages from Rushdie’s banned book were being read out, they distanced themselves from the act and issued a statement: ‘Any views expressed or actions taken by these delegates are in no manner endorsed by the Jaipur Literature Festival… Any action by any delegate or anyone else involved with the Festival that in any manner falls foul of the law will not be tolerated and all necessary, consequential action will be taken. Our endeavour has always been to provide a platform to foster an exchange of ideas and the love of literature, strictly within the four corners of the law.’

According to The Hindu, ‘Despite the lack of any evidence that the authors broke any law, Supreme Court lawyer Akhil Sibal—who also happens to be the son of IT minister Kapil Sibal—advised the festival’s organisers that there were “certain legal questions” regarding the action of the authors.’ Isolated, the four authors left the festival, fearful of the legal consequences.

Once again, the organisers could have chosen to defend them within ‘the four corners of the law’. Their failure to do so only emboldened the isolated voices that had been asking for the ban in the first place. The final act of this farce was played out when Rushdie was to speak over a video link. Mobs bent on violence outside the venue Diggi Palace served as the pretext for calling off the event. It was another matter that according to no independent report were there more than a handful of protestors.

Consider the escalation. When Deoband first opposed Rushdie’s arrival, there was no direct threat of violence. No Muslim organisation contacted the organisers, but yet they succumbed and kept him away on day one of the festival, claiming he would make an appearance later. Then Ashok Gehlot’s Congress government in Rajasthan, more overtly, entered the picture and raised concerns about a law-and-order situation, concerns that seem to have bothered no one back in 2007 when a BJP government was in power in the state and the same police force had ensured Rushdie’s security during his JLF visit. Once again, the organisers gave in, betraying among other things a lack of spine. Emboldened by this, a few local Muslim leaders then opposed the video link, which led to another by-now-inevitable capitulation by the organisers, this time on the pretext that the owners of the property, who had gained so much from the festival, would not risk even a satellite hookup for Rushdie to speak and interact with JLF attendees.

The consequences of such cowardice will stay with us. What started as a plea to throw a shoe at Rushdie has already ended in a death threat to William Dalrymple, a co-director of the festival who has reason to be perplexed, as he was mostly on the sidelines watching festival producer Sanjoy Roy and fellow co-director Namita Gokhale mishandle the situation.

Complicit in this cravenness were also those who made a few odd noises, issued Twitter statements, and stayed on to party. This is in keeping with the larger cowardice of this literary culture, this ability to make the best of both worlds, keeping a clear conscience without risking anything. It begins with reviewers who say one thing about a book in private conversations and quite another when they write about it, and ends in books that never seem to risk anything. The presence on stage at a session, the promise of an event to promote a publishing house or media group, and the attraction of a media partnership are all ways in which a huge number of people are co-opted by the hype around the JLF as a literary endeavour.  

And let us make no mistake. Rushdie’s presence in Jaipur was part of this hype. Perhaps, another Rushdie visit going the way it did in 2007 may have allowed us to believe the hype the festival stands for. The cravenness of its organisers and games of politicians have at least done us the service of revealing how subjugated our literary culture really is, how beholden it is to those in power. In all likelihood, they will all be back in Jaipur next year, organisers, writers and the Twitterati, hosted by the same police force and politicians, with little or nothing to show for themselves in the cause of artistic liberty.

Perhaps the Judiciary will eventually come to our aid. There is already a petition doing the rounds talking of approaching the courts to revoke the ban on The Satanic Verses, and asking for clear guidelines on which books can be banned. But that is not how a literary culture acquires self-worth. It is when we have writers who write the unnamable, say the unsayable, when readers and critics are willing to defend their right to do so, and when we think of literature as something far removed from the parties and commerce at Jaipur, that we can even begin to be worthy of the freedom we seek.

About The Author

Hartosh Singh Bal