Pope Franciss recent statement that he would punch anyone who insulted his mother reminded one of a heated discussion on Salman Rushdies The Satanic Verses by a group of train passengers. As the dispute got animated, a Muslim youth enraged a Rushdie supporter by making offensive comments about the latters parents. Then, apologising for the outrage, the young man said: I did this only to give you a sense of the outrage that Muslims feel. What I just told you is a passage from The Satanic Verses, replacing the names of the Prophet and his wife with your fathers and mothers. For a Muslim believer, the Prophet and his wife are manifold more respected than his own parents.
However, what is offensive is a matter of subjective feelings, and therefore, cannot be a reason for restricting an individuals freedom of expression, which must be absolute, the liberal opinion concluded, after the massacre of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists who drew offensive cartoons.
My right to free speech has to be absolute, and if you are offended, you have the right to respond. But if we start placing restrictions, we are shaking the foundations of tolerance for views that one finds disagreeable, and tolerance has to be one of the foundations of a true democracy, Rakesh Sharma, documentary film-maker, says.
The cartoonists apparently drew with the purpose of making Muslims immune to the ridicule heaped on the Prophet. Around the same time, in yet another episode in India, the writer Perumal Murugan has been forced into a creative exile as a section of society felt hurt over one of his works.
Both events have been debated primarily as a question of freedom of expression, but the more fundamental issue at stake is the terms of engagement between various cultures in a multicultural society. That similarity apart, the two incidents highlight divergent challenges in their respective contexts of France and India. In France, the cartoonists were promoting a French culture in which individual freedoms are absolute and collective sensibilities overlooked. Murugans case is part of an ongoing political project to eradicate multiple voices for the sake of a grand cultural narrative, a claimed collective hurt shutting out an individual.
The Charlie Hebdo episode questions the desirability of an assimilative approach to diverse cultures; Perumal Murugans literary suicide represents the dangers that lurk behind Indias multicultural existence.
Inclusive state, inclusive society
While in most Western societies, individual rights are absolute and community rights limited or non-existent, in India, the situation is the opposite. While individual rights are not respected, community is valorised and glorified in India. Individual rights still do not command social legitimacy as opposed to the sentiment of collective hurt. The hurt sentiment phrase is often quoted to define or represent the feelings of a larger group and rarely of an individual, when outrage is created. And this is when vested interests can latch on to hurt sentiments to accentuate any act that supposedly critiques a group or tradition or culture as it has happened in the case of Murugan.
Experts say there is a clear exploitation of religiosity in projecting hurt sentiment. Whose hurt sentiments, the question is. Individual right is not established while community rights, which are valorised and glorified, are easy to manipulate, says Subhash Gatade, author.
It is not that the individuals right to criticise others, including communities and religions, should be made absolute. Criticism should be given space, but it should be done under a certain sense, under a limit. There are no two views to blocking out inflammatory material, but a censure to all forms of criticism is not the solution. We must give soft directions to people and not merely censure, says Badri Narayan, Professor at the G.B. Pant Institute of Social Sciences, Allahabad.
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Freedom and restraint
