If His Hand hadn’t been Cut off

Would there still be sympathy for Professor TJ Joseph and pressure to reinstate him?

As against the customary ‘son of a bitch’, naintemone in Malayalam means ‘son of a dog’. There are expletives greater in scale in the language. Naintemone is mild enough to be used in a family gathering without raising eyebrows. In the incident of the professor whose hand was chopped off, the word is crucial. It figures in the question paper he set for second-year BCom students of Newman College in Thodupuzha, Kerala. The question that did him in asks students to mark punctuation in a short dialogue. The dialogue is lifted from an essay by a Kerala filmmaker, which is published in a book on scriptwriting. In the original, a lunatic is calling out to God. And God, in turn, asks, ‘Naintemone, what do you want?’ But when Professor TJ Joseph set the question, he gave a name to the unnamed—Mohammad.

That’s when Joseph’s life began to come undone. He was suspended from his job, attacked, his hand chopped off. More recently, he was sacked. Last week, the Syro Malabar Catholic Church, which runs the college, refused to extend any support. But there have been forces gathering on Joseph’s side after the assault. TV channels and newspapers have all been sympathetic. So too the government. Kerala’s education minister’s comment on his sacking was that a pickpocket cannot be given a life sentence. The university to which the college is affiliated is applying pressure for his reinstatement. And the tide seems to be turning the professor’s way.

Yet, the question must be asked: what if his hand had not been chopped off? Aren’t the assault and the sacking two unconnected consequences of Joseph’s alleged act (he still maintains that he didn’t mean the Prophet when he wrote Mohammad). One of them—the chopping of his hand—was a crime. The other—the decision to fire him—is the right of an educational institute convinced that a teacher is using his office to insult his students’ religion.

There is also a difference between what Joseph did and legitimate acts of blasphemy, like the Danish cartoons. In the latter, the reader has a choice to look at the cartoon or ignore it. In an examination hall, it is enforced humiliation for a student to answer a question ridiculing one’s faith. Should it be established that he did it deliberately, Joseph’s sacking is not wrong. His hands have nothing to do with it.

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