The penny dropped. People started rushing up from the crowded courtyard to the relative safety of the elevated stage. Couples hugged. Some shook with utter terror; many cried. The fest, the organizers could have claimed in all earnestly, had come to an earth-shaking end. The ongoing Jaipur Literary Festival has been no less eventful. The stalls at the annual event were jam-packed on Sunday for the American TV Queen Oprah Winfrey.
Many believe Oprah’s appearance to a degree compensated for the absence of the ever-controversial Salman Rushdie, who apparently had to cancel his Jaipur sojourn on being tipped by Rajasthan Police that Muslim extremists might have been plotting on his life. A day later, there was enough evidence for the unbemused Bombay-born writer to accuse the police of cooking up the extremist story to prevent unnecessary hassles of hosting him. The equally controversial Tasleema Nasrin wasted no time in calling Rushdie a ‘coward’ for chickening out at the last minute.
Nasrin, incidentally, had cancelled her scheduled appearance in a literature festival in Nepal for ‘security reasons’ late last year, sending the Nepali blogosphere and Facebook aficionados into an overdrive. Apparently, in one reading of Nasrin’s Tweets, the writer didn’t believe she needed a passport to come to Nepal. A section of Nepali online community erupted in fury.
For them Nasrin’s statement amounted to no less than an open admission that she didn’t consider Nepal a sovereign country. This latent fury among a sizable section of Nepalis tends to bubble over at the slightest provocation. How misplaced nationalism can be used to whip up a murderous frenzy was amply illustrated by the Hrithik Roshan scandal in 2000.
The latest Rushdie incident is a proof, if any more was needed, that fanatics exist on either side of the border. Painter MF Hussain was forced into self exile from India after being charged of ‘impropriety’ towards Hindu religion in his paintings. As Rushdie hinted, his Jaipur trip had to be put off, in all likelihood, because the Indian authorities believed themselves unprepared for the fallout of letting the author of The Satanic Verses attend a literary festival, no less.
There can be no two ways about it: A place where freedom of expression is curtailed has no freedom at all. Only free and open competition of ideas can enrich the fabric of a true democracy. George Orwell believed ‘nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception’. The price of this self deception, as we see in conflicts all around the globe, can extract a heavy toll.
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