Poke Me: Why India is now a hedgehog nation

Abheek Barman

This week's " Poke Me", invites your comments on "Why India is now a hedgehog nation". The feature will be reproduced on the edit page of the Saturday edition of the newspaper with a pick of readers' best comments. So be poked and fire in your comments to us right away. Comments reproduced in the paper will be the ones that support or oppose the views expressed here intelligently. Feel free to add reference links etc. in support of your comments.


Sociologist and political analyst Ashis Nandy enraged many people when he seemed to suggest, at the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), that most visible cases of corruption were against Dalits and lower castes. Around the same time, actor Kamal Hasan’s new film, Vishwaroopam, could not open for screening in many theatres because some people felt that it was biased against Muslims.

Some time ago, two young girls were arrested by the Maharashtra police for a Facebook post about the inconvenience created by thousands of mourning Shiv Sainiks after the death of Balasaheb Thackeray. Last year’s JLF was notable, not for the people who attended, but for the fact that author Salman Rushdie was not allowed to attend and for the subsequent public hounding of a few writers who read passages from his novel The Satanic Verses at the venue.

While Muslim extremists rail at Rushdie, Hindu fundamentalists agitate for bans on historically researched biographies of Shivaji or Aurobindo. When it was in power, Bengal’s Left professed to care little about caste or communalism. But it was perfectly willing to be the cat’s paw for Muslim extremists, refusing to let Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, whose books are critical of Islamic orthodoxy, take up residence in Calcutta.

Probably the most absurd episode among this sorry lot was the arrest of Ambikesh Mahapatra, a professor of Calcutta’s Jadavpur University, for forwarding a cartoon of Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on email. Any other politician would have been toe-curling embarrassed at this attack on freedom of expression, but Banerjee insisted that the cartoon was the tip of a vast, dark conspiracy against her and her regime.

India is becoming a nation of hedgehogs, bristling at any real or imagined slight on religion, caste, political affiliation, community and language. We are offended by anything; and by its opposite, too.

Several things are responsible for this. One, television and the internet have profoundly changed the nature of reported news. Anything blurted out in a fit of anger or irresponsibility, in front of a camera is looped on air and can become the focus of nationwide anger. On the positive side, in the era of 24X7 on-camera coverage, it has become impossible for public figures to say they were misquoted. The price paid for this loss of deniability is the shrinking of editorial mediation to sort out the reckless, the absurd and the mischievous from what is news.

A few months ago, Assam was convulsed by violence between Bodo tribals and local Muslims. Then, gruesome photos of people dressed as Buddhist monks standing next to what looked like mass graves, were circulated on the Net with captions that suggested that Buddhists were murdering Muslims in the Arakan district of Burma, and exhorting the latter to rise in protest. This caused a panicky exodus of north easterners from all corners of India, back home. Actually, the pictures were not from Burma at all, but were shots of Buddhist monks helping bury the dead after an earthquake in China.

Two, we will have to distinguish between freedom of expression and its abuse to create trouble. Thackeray made a political career out of the latter: his targets ranged from Tamils to Sindhis to north Indians – whoever he could characterize as an outsider and unleash his Shiv Sainiks on. India has laws against this sort of hate-mongering, many of them were invoked against Thackeray, but the dynamics of Mumbai politics kept him out of jail all his life.

It is impossible to invoke the right of free expression to defend the Thackerays, or Owaisis or the people who spawned the fake Arakan campaign on the Net. These are clearly directed to provoke panic and violence, and deserve to be punished as hate mongers.

The reaction to Nandy’s comments, to Vishwaroopam, Rushdie, Nasreen and so on, fall in a different category. Just because someone is offended by a remark or book or film doesn’t mean that the person making the remark or the film must be jailed or the book withdrawn from circulation. Whoever disagrees with Nandy is as free as Nandy to air her disagreement; if you think Vishwaroopam could hurt your sentiments, don’t watch it. Nobody is forcing Rushdie or Nasreen down your throat.

Finally, the biggest culprit in turning us into a hedgehog nation is the state. Governments at the centre and states are spooked by every bully that comes along and moved by any absurd appeal to sentiment. If governments don’t react, opposition parties make sure that the issue is magnified till it does. Cravenness and authoritarianism are both on display when the Indian state reacts on issues of expression.

The government of Rajasthan heaved a sigh of relief when Rushdie chose not to come to the JLF. For decades, successive governments of Maharashtra put up with the bullying of Shiv Sainiks. When Hindu fundamentalists attacked poet A K Ramanujam’s essay 300 Ramayanas, state-funded Delhi University cravenly yanked it from the curriculum.

Banerjee’s paranoid regime in Bengal arrests professors forwarding cartoons. The chief minister herself brands university students as Maoists when they ask an inconvenient question on live television.

People get the governments they deserve. The hedgehog nation can change into something less prickly only if we change our attitudes – and force our elected representatives to change theirs.