By Swapan Dasgupta
In 1983, prior to a British general election which was
easily won by Margaret Thatcher, I attended a conference on ‘Victorian values’
at Ruskin College, a Labour movement institution located in Oxford but detached
from the university. The conference, dominated by those who believed that
Thatcher posed a threat to civilisation as we know it, was unmemorable. Yet, one
incident stood out.
A BBC crew chose to film one of the sessions,
perhaps as an input for its larger election coverage. No one was particularly
bothered until an earnest activist stood up and protested against what he
imagined was political surveillance. Encouraged by this prickliness, others
also joined the protest and made passionate speeches about BBC’s fierce anti-Left
bias. There were a few voices of restraint but the gathering voted quite
overwhelmingly to exclude the TV crew from the meeting.
Looking back on this footnote of footnotes in contemporary
British history, two broad conclusions are warranted. First, despite the show
of ideological bravado, the activists who saw the conference as an occasion to
debunk Thatcher’s “reactionary” celebration of the Victorian ethos were also
aware that they were fighting a losing political battle. In the Britain of
1983, Thatcher’s appeal to put the “Great” back into Britain had the support of
not merely the middle classes but a large section of the ‘proletariat’. The
anger at the BBC—seemingly representative of the Establishment—was also an
admission of defeat.
Secondly, the visceral anger at the media was also a
protest against intellectual marginalisation. Unlike today when the BBC flaunts
an obvious Left-wing tilt, the institution tried to be more ‘balanced’ those
days. A staid middle-of-the-road consensus set the editorial tone. This implied
that other voices—whether of the Right or Left—were often ignored. It was this
relegation to the fringes that the lefty activists were protesting against that
afternoon in Oxford.
Even a casual overview of the chattering class storm
over Wendy Doniger’s alternative history of the Hindus points to similarities in
reactions. For a start, despite the ridiculous assertion by the publishers that
their decision to reach an out-of-court settlement was driven by concerns over
the safety of staff members, this was a battle that was not taken to the
streets—unlike the disputes over Satanic
Verses, Taslima Nasreen and M.F. Husain’s paintings. The conduct of the
aggrieved Dina Nath Batra was never constitutionally unbecoming: he went
through a court of law and got Penguin to admit that the book, in effect,
violated section 295A of the Indian Penal Code.
Penguin’s contention that India’s laws are
inherently illiberal may well have a basis but it is curious that liberals have
on other occasions been very forthright in their support for harsher laws
against what they perceive is “hate speech”—witness the still-born Communal
Violence Bill.
What seems to unite the Left outrage I witnessed 30
years ago and Batra’s litigation is the shared sense of intellectual
dispossession. The free flow of ideas in a democracy is invariably tempered by
value judgments over what is ‘respectable’ and what is not. Those who rubbish
Doniger feel, and quite legitimately so, feel that academia disregards those analyse
faith from the perspective of believers. They believe that studies of Hindu
faiths have been taken over, particularly in the US, by those who inherently
sceptical of the larger Indian inheritance. This conviction is bolstered by the
apparent arrogance of dominant intellectuals who refuse to concede space to
those who have a more sympathetic perspective of Hindu theology.
What adds to the muddle is that despite their
academic dominance those who are happy with a less reverential assessment of
faith find themselves politically beleaguered. Just as the British Left of the
1980s found itself unable to counter the appeal of Thatcher, those defending
Doniger are inclined to attribute Penguin’s surrender to what is colourfully
called “creeping fascism”—a code for the rising support for Narendra Modi. Yet,
rather than comprehend the reasons for Modi’s popularity, they would rather
retreat into their bunkers and uphold their own certitudes while waiting for
the proverbial hard rain to fall.
India is on the cusp of a consensus-breaking
transformation and the reactions to Doniger’s woes symbolise the turbulence in
the air.
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