India’s Attack on Free Speech
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London — IN today’s India, secular liberals face a challenge: how to stay alive.
In August, 77-year-old scholar M. M. Kalburgi, an outspoken critic of Hindu idol worship, was gunned down on his own doorstep. In February, the communist leader Govind Pansare was killed near Mumbai. And in 2013, the activist Narendra Dabholkar was murdered for campaigning against religious superstitions.
These killings should be seen as the canary in the coal mine: Secular voices are being censored and others will follow.
While
there have always been episodic attacks on free speech in India, this
time feels different. The harassment is front-page news, but the
government refuses to acknowledge it. Indeed, Prime Minister Narendra
Modi’s silence is being interpreted by many people as tacit approval,
given that the attacks have gained momentum since he took office in 2014
and are linked to Hindutva groups whose far-right ideology he shares.
Earlier this month, a leader of the Sri Ram Sene, a Hindu extremist group with a history of violence including raiding pubs and beating women they find inside, ratcheted up the tensions. He warned
that writers who insulted Hindu gods were in danger of having their
tongues sliced off. For those who don’t support the ultimate goal of
these extremists — a Hindu nation — Mr. Modi’s silence is ominous.
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This
is a turning point for India, a country that has taken pride in being a
liberal democracy and that often adopts a high-minded tone when
neighbors fall short of the same standards.
When the liberal Pakistani politician Salman Taseer was assassinated in 2011, the Indian journalist M. J. Akbar, now the national spokesman for the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., chided,
“If Salman Taseer had been an Indian Muslim, he would still have been
alive.” In the run-up to the 2014 general elections in Bangladesh, India
expressed concern over the future of the country’s democratic
institutions.
We
should be worrying instead about what’s happening in India, and
recognize that it could go the way of the very neighbors it criticizes.
As Nikhil Wagle, a prominent liberal journalist based in Mumbai, told
me, “Without secularism, India is a Hindu Pakistan.”
The murders in India share striking similarities with the killings of four Bangladeshi bloggers this year.
But while there was a global outcry over what happened in Bangladesh,
India is hiding behind its patina of legitimacy granted by being the
world’s largest democracy.
Like
the murdered bloggers, the Indian victims held liberal views but were
not famous or powerful. Mr. Kalburgi had publicly expressed skepticism
toward idol worship in Hinduism, but he didn’t pose a threat to anyone.
While
the authorities are pursuing the culprits on a case-by-case basis, the
overarching attack on free speech has not been addressed. The threats
and killings have created an atmosphere of self-censorship and fear.
Some
of the killers are still on the loose, and while in one hand they wield
a gun, in the other they wave a list. On Sept. 20, Mr. Wagle, the
journalist, learned from a source that intercepted phone calls had
revealed that members of yet another right-wing Hindu group, Sanatan
Sanstha, had marked him as their next victim. The extremists who
celebrated the August murder of Mr. Kalburgi were more direct: They used
Twitter to warn K. S. Bhagwan, a retired university professor who is
critical of the Hindu caste system, that he would be next.
The
goal of transforming India from a secular state to a Hindu nation,
which seems to be behind the murders, is abetted not just by the silence
of politicians, but also by the Hindu nationalist policies of the
ruling B.J.P.
Over the past few months, the government has purged secular voices
from high-profile institutions including the National Book Trust and
the independent board of Nalanda University. The government is not
replacing mediocre individuals: The chancellor of Nalanda was the Nobel
laureate Amartya Sen. It is replacing luminaries with people whose
greatest qualification is faith in Hindutva ideology. The new appointees
are rejecting scientific thought in favor of religious ideas that have
no place in secular institutions.
One
of the government’s chief targets is the legacy of India’s first prime
minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who laid the foundation for a secular
nation. Last month, having nudged out the director of the Nehru Museum
and Library in New Delhi, the government announced plans to rename the
museum and change its focus to highlight the achievements of Mr. Modi. This is akin to repurposing the Washington Monument as an Obama museum.
In
addition to erasing the contributions of long-dead liberals, B.J.P.
leaders are busy promoting violent Hindu nationalists. Sakshi Maharaj, a
B.J.P. member of Parliament, described
Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, as a
“patriot.” Although Mr. Maharaj later retracted his statement, his
opinion is shared by many of his party colleagues. Gandhi’s assassin was
a former member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an armed Hindu
group, with which Mr. Modi has been associated since he was 8 years old.
THE
B.J.P.’s efforts to reshape institutions that embody secular values —
values they dismiss as “Western” — was certainly anticipated. It came as
no surprise when the culture and tourism minister, Mahesh Sharma,
recently promised
to “cleanse every area of public discourse that had been westernized.”
Mr. Sharma is well aware of the connotations of the word he used.
It’s
also not surprising that Hindu fundamentalists would feel empowered in
the shadow of a Hindu nationalist government. Still, few expected that
freedom of speech would become a contestable commodity and that some who
exercised it would lose their lives.
The realization has made for decisions that were once unthinkable.
Last
December, the acclaimed author Perumal Murugan informed the police that
he’d received threats from Hindu groups angered by a novel he wrote in
2010. Extremists staged burnings of his book and demanded a public
apology from him. The police suggested he go into exile. Realizing he
was on his own, in January Mr. Murugan announced the withdrawal of his entire literary canon. On Facebook, he swore to give up writing, in essence apologizing for his life’s work out of fear for his family’s safety.
It’s
hard to accept what is happening in India. It is easier to ignore or
dismiss the attacks and the threats as a liberal persecution complex or a
phase that will last only as long as the B.J.P. is in power. But the
country is undergoing a tectonic shift that will have long-term
repercussions.
The
attacks in India should not be seen as a problem limited to secular
writers or liberal thinkers. They should be recognized as an attack on
the heart of what constitutes a democracy — and that concerns everyone
who values the idea of India as it was conceived and as it is beloved,
rather than an India imagined through the eyes of religious zealots.
Indians must protest these attacks and demand accountability from people
in power. We must call for all voices to be protected, before we lose
our own.
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