Left without a choice by one ban after another

Author publisher Urvashi Butalia has an interesting question on how selectively creative freedom gets gagged in India. She points out that Nine Hours to Rama by Stanley Wolpert was banned because it depicted the life of Nathuram Godse. But the ban brigade chose not to descend on Kamal Hassan’s Hey Ram, a film that took a radical stand on the same subject.

“I found the movie Hey Ram much more subversive, but that wasn’t banned. How does one explain that?” asks Butalia the publisher of Zubaan. Trying to look for a pattern in the demand for bans on creative arts and literature is a hopeless exercise. From upsetting religious sentiments to breaking moral codes, an array of reasons have been pulled out to get books off the shelves and movies out of theatres.

Last week, the Bombay High Court upheld the ban on RV Bhasin’s book —  A Concept of Political World Invasion by Muslim - because it contained an “aggravated form of criticism made with a malicious and deliberate intention to outrage the feelings of Muslims”. It maintained that Bhasin’s book has not been banned because it criticised Islam - but because it did not find criticism to be “bona fide or academic” and with malicious intent.

But on what grounds are ordinary Indians being deprived of the right to make a choice: to read a book and like its contents or read it and disagree with it? How does one group of people make that choice for an entire nation?

“Let’s attribute common sense to our people, shall we? Banning a book denies me the right to know about an author’s view, a right I must enjoy as a reader. We’ve been denied that too many times now,” says PA Sebastian who, in 2007, represented lawyer
Sanghraj Rupawate, documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan and rights activist Kunda Pramila when they filed the current petition in the High Court following a government notification banning the James Laine book Shivaji - The Hindu King in Islamic India.

Sebastian is of the belief that bans are politically motivated because malicious intentions are hard to pinpoint. “I had read Shivaji’s book and it certainly did not suffer the ban because its content was malicious - it was the politically driven furore against the book that was malicious,” he says.

Butalia points out that a lot of reading material could offend different sets of people for different reasons. But it hardly ends in a demand for a ban. “You know, I find more than 80 per cent of what I read these days offensive to women - but that doesn’t mean I ask for a ban. So, you find some content objectionable and go ahead and ban it outright? What happened to using the weapons of media to express discontent and having a dialogue like adults do?” asks Bhutalia.

Few know what made intervenors like the Indian Union Muslim League, Maharashtra Muslim Lawyers Forum, Islamic Research Foundation, Jamat-e-Islami-e-Hind and Bombay Aman Committee see red. Some wonder whether people have found a Hindu criticising Islam blasphemous. However, Sami Bubere, chairman of the Sahyog Cultural Society who has read most of the book, disagrees. “Islam is a tolerant religion. But when I read parts of the book, I could see that the man (Bhasin) has no understanding of the fabric of Islam,” he counters.

Advocate Puneet Chaturvedi feels every right comes with a responsibility towards people’s sensitivities. He believes that people understand the fine line between honest criticism and deliberately provocative material. “The cult making film Jaane Bhi do Yaaron spoofed scenes from Mahabharata but there were no cries of indignation. No Hindu asked for a ban,” he says.