By Rahul P Kashyap

 
Even in a world enmeshed by the internet information regarding the perpetrators of hate – communal or otherwise – and the content meant to offend cannot travel far without the express freight service provided by those whose vested interests it serves to disseminate such material and excite peoples’ hatred. Ordinary folks do not, normally, scour the net in search of material which will offend them. Even with the power of the internet at his disposal a potential agent provocateur, left to his own devises, will do no more harm than a known crank at the kerb that shouts obscenities at passers-by and is fittingly ignored. The trouble starts when self-anointed keepers of public morality pick up and propagate the hurt that the offensive material is meant to inflict. These are the people who act as surrogates who bear and nurture offense on behalf of the constituencies they claim to represent.
 
A perennially glaring case in point is the attack on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, its publishers (Mads Wiel Nygaard  was non-fatally shot in October, 1993) and translators (Hitoshi Igarashi, the book’s Japanese translator was stabbed to death in 1991). Rushdie’s book continues to be the most famous (or infamous) example of a work of art-that-caused-offence twenty-four years after of its publication. It was perhaps the first time that hate against a person and/or his work was exported through the internet. Secondly, it was also one of the first instances of consecrated efforts made to mobilise public anger against what a person or his work had seemingly come to symbolise. Millions of Muslims across the world took to the streets only because they were told that a person had insulted their religious faith and it was their duty to defend the faith and its progenitor. A majority of them never laid eyes on Rusdhie’s book, except on occasions when they were fed to roaring flames.
 
The controversy around Rushdie refused to die down even after surrogate-in-chief Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, the person who declared the fatwa against Rushdie, died in June 1989 – three months after he pronounced the edict against the author. With the publication of every subsequent work by the novelist the threat to his life was renewed. Just a few days before his latest book Joseph Anton, a memoir which among other things talks of the “fatwa years”, the bounty for the murder of Rushdie was increased to $3.5 million by another Iranian cleric – Ayatollah Hassan Saneii.  
 
Had the hard-liners not amplified and then transmitted the offence that the novelist may have caused, The Satanic Verses would have been just another novel that millions would never even have heard of. It would have died the death of a novel. Khushwant Singh, who was an editor at Penguin when the book was banned in India, reportedly said it was written in bad taste. And that should have been that. Instead, the protests made it more than just that: a symbol. The same is true for the recent anti-Islamic video.
 
Insecurity
Overblown reactions are not limited to religious heads of communities. Political outfits regularly resort to extra-constitutional means to make their resentment against “objectionable” content known. The attack on an art exhibition at M.S. University’s Faculty of Fine Arts by members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad at Vadodara in 2007, a homophobic attack on artist Balbir Kishan whose work was on display in Delhi’s Lalit Kala Academy and the manhandling and molestation of women who went to a pub by hooligans of the Ram Sene in southern city of Mangalore all point toward a growing sense of insecurity among people who claim to be defenders of “culture”.
Political parties – irrespective of their ideological or chromatic affiliations – are only too willing to mint populist coins, even at the risk of jeopardising people’s fundamental rights. No perpetrator of hate-crimes or vandals who attack artists or their work is ever charged or arrested for fear of antagonising the community that the artist has supposedly offended. It is rather the artist who is persecuted for ‘crossing the limits’. Politicians themselves are rather touchy about the criticisms that come their way. By charging the cartoonist Aseem Trivedi with sedition, the government has made a martyr out of an angst-ridden, ordinary artist. It suits self-appointed representatives to first make people insecure about their own identities: religious, ethnic, sexual or social, and then feed upon this insecurity by positing themselves as its staunchest defenders. The government, both at the central as well at the state level, needs to combat insecurity. “Freedom of opinion,” according to Bertrand Russell, “can only exist when the government thinks itself secure.”