New York Times (May 15, 2012)
May 14, 2012, 8:30 AM
Too Many Sacred Cows
By HARTOSH SINGH BAL
Reuters
The first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, in 1947. He was
portrayed in a cartoon that upset India’s Parliament.
DELHI — On May 11, a furor erupted in India’s Parliament over a
black-and-white cartoon from 1949. Reproduced in a textbook for
high-school juniors, the drawing depicts B.R. Ambedkar — India’s
foremost Dalit leader and the chairman of the committee that drafted
India’s 1950 Constitution — whip in hand and astride a snail labeled
“the Constitution.” The first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal
Nehru, stands behind him, also wielding a whip.
Some say the cartoon portrays the two politicians trying to speed up
the constitutional drafting process, but several prominent Dalits have
claimed it shows Nehru lashing Ambedkar. The Dalit member of Parliament
Thol. Thirumavalavan called the cartoon “insulting to Ambedkar, Nehru
and the whole nation.” Under pressure, the government quickly agreed to
withdraw the textbook.
Ambedkar, a student of John Dewey’s and a staunch defender of freedom
of expression, would probably have disdained that decision. Meanwhile,
none of the people objecting to the cartoon have been asked to explain
what wrong they’ve suffered exactly. India is increasingly becoming a
country where any group’s claim that it was slighted, however baseless,
is a justification for censorship.
Many groups in India have become increasingly sensitive to perceived
insults. Groups here are largely defined by reference to caste,
religion or language (or a combination of the three), and they often
channel feelings like those that gave birth to nationalism in Europe.
But unlike in Europe, minority groups overlap in ways that makes
dividing them based on geography untenable.
The Indian Constitution treats diversity as a given and protects group
rights. Under Indian law, jail terms of up to three years can be
awarded for “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage
religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious
beliefs,” including outrage caused by either the spoken or the written
word. Cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad cannot legally be
published in India, for example. Turbaned Sikhs are exempt from wearing
helmets when riding motorcycles. Affirmative action measures give
Dalits preferential access to universities and government jobs.
This tolerance for diversity has allowed strong group identities to
emerge. But with Indian democracy rewarding groups that assert
themselves aggressively, identity politics is now threatening to
undermine the kind of mutual accommodation that allowed for group
identities in the first place.
Last month, Dalit students at Osmania University in Hyderabad
campaigned for the right to freely consume beef: the university
currently does not serve it out of deference to upper-caste Hindus, who
oppose cow slaughter. The students were running headlong into the
preferences of another group in the name of fighting long-standing
discrimination against their own.
Some commentators have seen this initiative as challenging not just the
forces of Hindu nationalism “but equally the gentrified left-liberal
politics of composite culture” — shorthand for the politics that
accommodate group identities. It is an apt observation, but its
celebratory tone is misplaced. Seen on its own, the call for lifting
dietary restrictions can be a form of struggle against the impositions
of caste. When such measures multiply, however, the problem becomes
clear.
Dalit activists protesting the Ambedkar cartoon make much of their own
sensitivity: some even vandalized the office of the academic who
supervised the publication of the textbook. But they seem to regard the
sensitivities of the upper castes as an undue burden on them. Likewise
of the Catholic associations that encouraged the arrest, on grounds of
inciting religious hatred, of a rationalist who claimed that water was
dripping from a crucifix in Mumbai because of capillary action rather
than a miracle.
India’s political establishment indulges this competition of hurts
because catering to group prejudices tends to bring electoral gains.
This is the reason that no one in Parliament — not from the liberal
left, not from the Hindu right — challenged those who were offended by
the Ambedkar cartoon. Or that no political party defended Salman
Rushdie’s right to speak against the Muslim clerics who opposed his
participation in the Jaipur Literary Festival a few months ago. Yet by
giving in to such demands again and again, Indians are allowing
tolerance to turn into a tyranny of its own.
Hartosh Singh Bal is political editor of Open Magazine and co-author of
“A Certain Ambiguity.’’
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