Editorial, INDIAN EXPRESS 

West Bengal’s lajja

The ban order against Nasreen’s book is neither democratic, nor a recipe for social order
   

You have to applaud the irony when a communist government bans a book for its potential to outrage religious feelings. On Friday sale of Taslima Nasreen’s latest book, Dwikhandito, was finally prohibited, with the government order invoking fears that it could “promote enmity, ill-will and hatred between different groups on grounds of religion”. Maintenance of communal harmony must be an abiding pursuit for every administration, but some questions have to be asked: is banning books like Dwikhandito, and more famously The Satanic Verses, really the way to go about it? Isn’t clamping down on the right to freedom of expression too high a price to pay for appeasing a few outraged readers? And in any case, may not the actual act of banning a text provoke communal tension?

 

 

Publication of a Nasreen book is always fraught with calls for censorship. Yet, what is alarming is that in this case demands for suppressing the book have been driven by fellow writers. Some have been alarmed by passages detailing relationships with some of Bengal’s leading novelists and poets. Others have cited extracts saying they could hurt the sentiments of Muslims. In the first instance, there are legal provisions for affected parties to seek remedy. They have the option to file defamation suits, as poet Syed Hasmat Jalal has already done. In the second, two points merit assertion. One, allowing a text to remain in the public domain in no way amounts to an official endorsement of critiques of any religion or its adherents it may contain. Nasreen herself has attempted to charge the issue by claiming that a previous instalment of her autobiography (Dwikhandito, or Divided in Two, is the third part) was more ‘‘anti-Islamic’’. But that book provoked no tension. It may have got plenty of bad reviews, but that’s where the matter stayed. Mahasweta Devi has wryly commented that this ban will in fact boost sales of Nasreen’s book. Certainly, there’s nothing like a good cause — freedom of expression — to make even bad art sell. Two, as The Satanic Verses episode showed, a ban can in fact itself create tension. By seeming to appease the forces of orthodoxy, bans can stifle larger movements for reform and open debate.

The West Bengal government’s move therefore is most unfortunate.

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