As was only to be expected, the Union government’s decision to ban Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses has provoked a fierce controversy in which, understandably, the writer himself has joined with a well-publicized letter to the Prime Minister. After all, Rushdie cannot, as a Muslim, accept that he has deliberately brought Islam and Prophet Mohammed into contempt and he cannot, as a writer, concede to any government the right to abridge his freedom of expression. But surely he cannot, despite his long stay in Britain, have lost touch with the Indian reality to the point where he would fail to realize that given the presence of men such as Syed Shahabuddin in the country, the susceptibilities of a substantial section of the Muslim community and the proneness of many of them to resort to violence at supposed provocations, even if these have nothing to do with the people or the government of India (the desecration of the Al Asq mosque in Jerusalem in 1969, for instance), New Delhi had no choice but to take a pre-emptive action. This would have been the case if communal tensions were not already acute in at least Western UP on the Ram-Janambhoomi-Babri Masjid issue. But as it happened, New Delhi has been facing a communal flare-up and its possibility in a number of UP towns. No, dear Rushdie, we do not wish to build a repressive India. On the contrary, we are trying our best to build a liberal India where we can all breathe freely. But in order to build such an India, we have to preserve the India that exists. This may not be a pretty India. But this is the only India we possess.
This statement is open to the interpretation that the government has, in fact, once again, as in the case of the Muslim Women’s bill, surrendered to blackmail and that we have endorsed this surrender. To be candid, there would be merit in this criticism of the government and us. The government has yielded to the threat of widespread riots and we have said that it has acted wisely. But this is what statesmanship is about. It is a leader’s obligation to anticipate danger and ward it off, as best he can. He cannot elect ‘a new people’ to quote Brecht’s famous phrase. He can try to guide them into new ways of thinking and behaviour, more appropriate to the times. But that everyone knows is an extremely slow process. Meanwhile, he cannot afford to allow a situation to arise in which bigots, fundamentalists and interested politicians can exploit the sensibilities of the people or a substantial section of them, to whip up emotions and provoke riots.
It speaks of the distance between the reality and some of our liberals that they should argue that since Satanic Verses is expensive (by Indian standards), lengthy (almost 600 pages) and difficult to read (a story within a story with long and surrealistic descriptions of imaginary scenes), it could not have created a law and order problem, because not many Indians would have read it. But no Muslim leader need have read it to conclude that it was blasphemy. And only some of them had to spread the word that Rushdie has dishonoured Prophet Mohammad and the government had refused to ban the book, for riots to break out. Implicit in what we have said is the proposition that the demand for the ban was unjustified. That in fact is our position. Satanic Verses is not a work of history. It is a work of fiction. A creative writer does not set out to establish or demolish historical truths. He distills what he knows and experiences through his personality. He may or may not have his eye on his potential reader. A great literary figure does not. He writes above all for himself. Indeed, he is helpless. He has to pour himself out in order to win a temporary truce with himself. A reading of Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, as of his earlier works, would convince any unprejudiced reader that he is engaged in a deep struggle within himself. He is caught between civilizations which themselves are no longer coherent and he is unable to choose. Rushdie is not only an Indian, he is also a Muslim. He is not only an Indian Muslim, he is a Kashmiri Muslim. A self within a self is struggling within the writer. No he is not a writer of pornography and blasphemy out to titillate inhabitants of a jaded West, if the West is jaded which it is not, by any reckoning.