In a fight with a major company, a frail 84-year-old retired headmaster would seem to be the David to India's publishing Goliath, Penguin Books.
But this week the headmaster, Dinanath Batra, achieved the crowning victory of his career as a right-wing campaigner, forcing Penguin to withdraw and destroy remaining copies of a scholarly work on Hinduism by an American professor that Batra has called "malicious," "dirty" and "perverse."
Batra's assiduous legal filings in defense of his religion had sometimes paid off in the past, but never like this. India's intellectuals actually stopped in their tracks this week, wondering what had frightened Penguin Books India into settling out of court with what one writer termed "an unknown Hindu fanatic outfit." The Times of India warned of "Taliban-like forces," and a prominent columnist decried "the pulping of liberal India."
The announcement has rippled through a city bracing itself for big change. Three months remain before general elections, in which the secular Indian National Congress Party is expected to suffer one of the worst losses in its history to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.
The BJP's leader, Narendra Modi, has campaigned on his economic policies, appealing to the frustrated expectations of India's new middle class and staying far away from the divisive language of the Hindu right wing, despite his lifelong involvement with its organizations and causes.
Meanwhile, the ruling Congress party's record on freedom of speech is hardly stellar, as evidenced by India's sliding ranking in the World Press Freedom Index. Even Salman Rushdie's book "The Satanic Verses" was banned in India by a Congress party government led by Rajiv Gandhi that was fearful of offending Muslims.
But now many scholars and intellectuals are worried that an ideological shift is on its way, noting that Modi has a decades-long association with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu right-wing organization. Past Hindu nationalist governments have been marked by battles over religion and history. Artists tackling religious themes have been targeted by fringe groups, with an amorphous threat of violence never far.
Batra he said he had no links to the BJP but expected efforts like his to pick up steam after the elections.
"Good days are coming, boys - I see the signs of a change in political atmosphere," he said. "Congress is coming down and the third front is coming out and Modi is also coming out. The 60-year rule is coming to an end."
Penguin Books India has offered no explanation for its decision to withdraw its book, Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus: An Alternative History," which was released five years ago in India and the United States. Before filing a lawsuit against the publisher in 2011, Batra sent a notice warning that the book had "hurt the religious feelings of millions of Hindus," in violation of Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, which carries a punishment of up to three years in prison.
There is no evidence that Penguin's concession, four years later, is in any way linked to the coming election, but for some commentators this week, the two things converged.
Arundhati Roy, the leftist writer and activist, addressed a letter to Penguin, her own publisher, asking why the company compromised "even though there was no fatwa, no ban, not even a court order."
"What was it that terrified you?" Roy wrote in a column for the Times of India. "The elections are still a few months away. The fascists are, this far, only campaigning. Yes, it's looking bad, but they are not in power. Not yet. And you've already succumbed?"
Some observers argue that it is too early to assume that a BJP-led government would be interested in wading into ideological disputes.
Ashok Malik, a popular Indian columnist who has written extensively about Modi, called it "scaremongering." When BJP last took power, more than a decade ago, he said, "the cultural warriors got very excited about history textbooks, which, unfortunately, are written by the state."
But he said the party's current leaders - among them Modi - "believe that debate is over," and are focused on goals that matter more to BJP's target voters, like building capacity in the higher education system.
"His mandate is an economic mandate, and he has to be true to that mandate," Malik said. "Twenty or 30 years ago, Modi may have believed a lot of those things to different degrees, but Modi's experience as a chief minister for the last 12 years, especially in a state like Gujarat, has proven an enormous learning process for him."
He added, "Modi may, in his heart of hearts, be a cultural warrior, but if it's not germane to his political appeal today, he's going to be practical."
There is little dispute that India's reputation for tolerance is fraying. Doniger's book is only the most recent book to be withdrawn when faced with the threat of costly litigation.
In January, Bloomsbury India withdrew copies of "The Descent of Air India" against its author's wishes, and published an apology to a Congress-allied government minister who came in for heavy criticism in the book. In December, the Supreme Court granted a stay of publication of "Sahara: The Untold Story," an investigation of Indian finance and real estate conglomerate Sahara India Pariwar, until a lawsuit filed by Sahara Group's head was resolved.
After a decade in power, the Congress party bears much responsibility for this decline, said Nilanjana S. Roy, a journalist and literary critic.
"The Congress and the left way of chilling free speech was by and large to tangle people up in legal battles, and to withdraw or not offer support," she said. "The Hindutva right-wing is closer to other religious fundamentalists in the sense that the attempt is to drown out other people's voices, sometimes with the use of aggression, abuse or even direct threats."
The partisan clamor has increased in volume as elections approach, sometimes crossing a line into bullying. Modi's supporters are especially aggressive on social media; Karuna Nundy, an attorney at India's Supreme Court, said after one Twitter posting that she received 200 responses that included physical threats to her and her family.
The withdrawal of Doniger's book has provided a focus for all this frustration. A petition circulated Thursday by a group of prominent scholars, several of them based in the United States, demanded changes to India's penal code that would protect serious academic work from frivolous lawsuits, and said that "academic, intellectual and artistic expression of any kind is becoming increasingly hazardous in India."
But in Batra's modest office this week, the mood was bright, even celebratory. He offered biscuits to a procession of journalists who came and went all day, and ticked off the well-wishers who had written to congratulate him, including the vice chancellor of Gujarat University.
"I will just give you the observation of a judge in the case, who said 'I started to read it, but I stopped halfway because it was so vulgar and dirty,' so the judge had given his opinion," he said. Now, he said, "this society will change, and at the same time there will be a warning not to publish such rubbish books."
Asked to recall the experiences that shaped his ideas, Batra said he had attended Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh meetings for 12 years, starting when he was 14. The wall behind his desk was bare except for the portraits of two of the right-wing group's founders. He said he met regularly with RSS officials.
Penguin's concession had put a spring in Batra's step, and he said his next target was another of Doniger's books, "On Hinduism," which he had festooned with bright green Post-It notes. He dreams of creating a panel to review textbooks for the first 12 grades of India's government schools. Asked how many he would like to replace, he waved a hand: All of them.
"Alternate books will come out," he said. "We shall give them guidelines."
source The New York Times.
