Nandy, Rushdie, Haasan, Khan has the cadence of a charming limerick.
However, the cadence and the charm vanish quickly when you discover that the four men carrying these respective last names are confronting intolerance in India these days.
With the possible exception of the actor and filmmaker Kamal Haasan, sociologist Ashis Nandy, writer Salman Rushdie and actor Shah Rukh Khan have all experienced societal wrath in varying degrees in the past.
The themes of intolerance that these four men are up against may be very different. What unites them is that they are up against ferment of some kind for saying something. In Rushdie’s case, of course, it is an open-ended protest without any expiry. If he is there, someone will find a reason to protest. He has long become a classic template for protest where the immediate provocation can be plugged in at the last moment.
It strikes me that what also unites these four men for now is the utter silliness of the protest surrounding them. Khan wrote a piece for Outlook Turning Points magazine, published in association with The New York Times, where he said, "I sometimes become the inadvertent object of political leaders who choose to make me a symbol of all that they think is wrong and unpatriotic about Muslims in India."
"There have been occasions when I have been accused of bearing allegiance to our neighboring nation rather than my own country - this even though I am an Indian, whose father fought for the freedom of India. Rallies have been held where leaders have exhorted me to leave and return to what they refer to my original homeland," added the 47-year-old Khan.
The piece prompted one of those ridiculous spats between India and Pakistan. Sensing an opportunity to muddy India’s domestic political waters, Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik and wanted terrorist leader Hafiz Saeed, who is the chief of the Jamaat-ud Dawa and carries a $10 million U.S. reward, both jumped right in. Both said if Khan did not feel safe as a Muslim in India he should consider locating to Pakistan. They both knew that inviting Khan to Pakistan would only fuel the antipathy that the actor says he occasionally encounters, although the general tone of the piece was rather upbeat.
That brings me to the silly controversy number 2 involving legendary Tamil actor Kamal Haasan whose latest film ‘Vishwaroopam’ has run into major obstacles amid protests from some Muslim groups. His own state of Tamil Nadu, where he enjoys a near godlike status, wants the film banned because it is supposed to be offensive to Muslims. The high court of his state gave him the go ahead but the movie has again run into problems with major editing being demanded. Some Muslim groups want it banned altogether.
So dismayed does Haasan feel that at a news conference he practically announced his decision to forsake his home state and shift to any other “secular” state in India or even another country. “After this (controversy) I will have to seek a secular state for me to stay in. I have lost what I have got. I have nothing to lose. And I might as well choose. That choice will be a place where it will be a secular state….If I can’t find it within India I will find hopefully another country that might take me in,” he said. The actor says he has put his house as a collateral to finance his movie which reputedly cost him one billion rupees (About $20 million) and may have to turn it over to his lender.
It is unclear what precisely is considered objectionable about the film but going by the preponderance of media reports it is the way radical Islamic groups in Afghanistan have been shown. Haasan himself is baffled by the reaction.
Now on to the third silly controversy. At the recently concluded Jaipur Literature Festival well-known Indian sociologist Ashis Nandy spoke about corruption in India. One of the points he seemed to make was that most cases of corruption involved India’s traditionally oppressed classes known as backward classes, scheduled castes and tribes. There was a much deeper point to what Nandy was saying as a lifelong academic but what got transmitted by India’s ever hyper broadcast media was the simplified sound bite that Nandy says the oppressed classes are more corrupt.
As he explained in subsequent interviews he was merely pointing out how the corruption among the people at the lower end of India’s society gets highlighted much more because they are unable to finesse it the way the rich and the powerful do. He also said that unlike the corruption of the rich which is out of greed, the corruption of the oppressed classes is out of desperation. In an interview with Niharika Mandhana for The New York Times’s India Blog, Nandy said, “The point I was trying to make was this: if you remove all corruption from society, that’s good. But that will take decades. In the interim period, those who are on the brink of desperation, those who have been deprived of access to power for centuries, deserve to get a share of the loot. Their corruption is a sign of their empowerment and the growth of the Indian republic. In fact, it should be encouraged.”
Nandy’s comments caused a minor firestorm with some groups demanding his arrest, which he has welcomed.
The fourth and final controversy is really not anything specific because it involves Rushdie. The author is in India these days to promote the movie version of his much celebrated book ‘Midnight’s Children.’ He had had to cancel a visit to Kolkata because of what the media reports described as “security concerns.” As I said Rushdie is now a template for protest. It seems it is no longer even necessary to look for a reason when he is involved. With Rushdie, people protest first and think of a reason, if at all, later.
My personal takeaway from these four disparate cases of silliness is that silliness is a monster that feeds on itself. What is not silly is that it involves real human beings who have to pay a real price for it. That the four protests unfolded so close to each other may be just a coincidence but now that they have occurred almost simultaneously it is fair to wonder whether they are part of a larger pattern of silly intolerance that grips India so often these days.
One can always fairly argue that the freedom of expression applies equally to those who have chosen to challenge that of these four men. Protest is enshrined in democracy. Silliness is not.