Acting Morally Superior
Shiv Visvanathan wrote this article saying that the killing of the writer, MM Kalburgi, and the lynching in Dadri strike at the “very idea of India”. He describes Nayantara Sahgal’s returns of her Sahitya Akademi award thus: “The idea of India is threatened when an innocent man can be lynched with impunity merely on the suspicion of cooking beef. ” Really? Is India so fragile an idea? He means that the “idea of India” could withstand the assaults of the Ghazni’s and the Aurungzeb’s, the savagery of Partition, the countless riots since Independence and the butchering of 3,000 Sikhs in 1984 but not the lynching of one man today? Really? Next, says Visvanathan: “The India of ideas is threatened when writers lose the right to creativity. ” I don’t remember such outpouring when Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses was banned. He goes on to say: “One sees a fascism that uses food, sexuality and books as targets of a philistine government. ” Fascism? What does he have...