India’s fetish: Protecting the sensitivities of the offended dumb

Once upon a long drive from Nariman Point to Mahim, I asked the cab driver what movies he likes to watch, and what music he likes to listen to. The man who was brought up in Bombay had never set his eyes on a screen, even a television screen, never listened to music. He explained that it was haraam, the cinema and music. Very early in his life, his father had forbidden this kind of entertainment, and he had followed through and brought up his children in the same manner. I asked him how he could know his father was right, if he never ventured to form his own thoughts on the matter. He said it makes sense to outsource thought to the Darul Uloom at Deoband whose sole occupation is to bring the word of Allah to the rest, and it is not his mandate to exercise his mind on these matters.

Soon we reach Mahim where I live near the dargah of Makhdoom Ali Mahimi, a sufi saint of the 14^th century. It was during the Mahim fair, and processions sprung from the dargah onto the streets, green lights flashing and speakers screaming, the intoxication of song in the air and white robed men dancing in wild enchantment, moving through the lanes where women and children indulged in succulent kababs.

While I got off, the cab driver looked around in disgust. Then turns to me and says, this naach gaana this disfiguring of Islam, this is wrong! This should never happen. These people will go to hell.  I pay him and say, the Makhdoomi precedes Deoband, maybe you should let us be.

 

The media has been up in arms, and the liberal heart broken at India’s capitulation to the crackpots who didn’t want Salman Rushdie at the Jaipur Literary Festival. Further investigations reveal that Salman Rushdie has in the past come and gone unhindered, and suddenly now we have crackpots all over the place who want to kill him if he sets foot. The more tolerant of the lot have promised to stage a passionate and hopefully, violent protest. Everyone is confused, the organizers cautious, 3 governments are exchanging notes and 2 of them advising the highest caution. Some say even the governments are intimidating the writer ostensibly, to keep the peace lest the country fall apart. This is not jihad, this is internal resurrection.  This is not cross border terrorism, this is religious sensitivity.

What beats me is why we are aghast at the so-called religious fundamentalists, the Darul-Ulooms and the SIMIs. Why we think that this has something to do with religion, or religious fundamentalism. Why the beards and trisuls fool us so easily, that we train our liberal bazookas diligently at these religion crazed idiots. Organized religion is certainly a problem, but surely only some of the religious are indulging in being offended? What is it about them that makes them offended? Or as some like to put it, why should we respect their right to be offended?

Those of us who measure progress with GDP figures, investor friendliness, social harmony, and the Human Development Index often overlook the difference between progress economic and of civilization. In our obsession with building on the numbers and respecting everyone’s ‘sensitivities’ we have forgotten some of the basic ideas that history has taught us. What matters most and what we often fail to realize in our theoretical rigmarole is that civilization is measured by its ideas, and well-being be it economic or social is premised on the constant advancement of thought. In the past, whole civilizations have met their end once they stopped nurturing free movement and evolution of ideas. What leads societies to stifle ideas, to withdraw their support for their nurture, and clamp down on their growth?

It is not religious fundamentalism. Religious fundamentalism is only a symptom of a certain kind of insecurity, an intellectual laziness. The same kind of insecurity suffered by every person, every cult which fears ideas, thought and free discourse. Offence is caused because the offended feel the waves of thought will capsize their boat. More unfortunate is the fact that very often, the waves don’t mean to capsize the boat and never will, and hence I refer to it as ‘insecurity’ and not fear. Why are they insecure? Is it because new ideas will displace the old? Why should we indulge this insecurity? The question is irrelevant and self defeating. As a society, if we don’t allow free discourse, competition between ideas, entrenched and fledgling, how would we be in a position to judge their relative merit? We would be like my cab driver who constantly runs in disgust from cinema, music and ideas in the fear that it will shake his boat. The boat his father locked him up in, and which he feels his children should suffer. A pathetic man who cannot think for himself, and who has outsourced his mind, who waxes eloquent on Deoband which has given him the word of God, giving him an excuse to otherwise miss the plot.

In Jaipur, all we have done is indulge the most insecure among us in the name of keeping the peace, and democracy. If this is what the most number of us want, and this is what democracy dictates, we should also consider what the point is of having a democracy in the first place, if it does not allow its constituents to think for themselves. Instead of raising an army to protect those among us who think, who write, who express and who question, we are shaming ourselves by helplessly throwing up our hands in the air for accommodating those of us who wish to convert the rest to the creed of the intellectually bankrupt.