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A Talibanesque Indian attitude Published on February 13, 2007
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A Talibanesque Indian attitude
Published on February 13, 2007
In recent weeks, we have seen the pillorying of South Indian actress Khushboo (she earlier spelled her name as Kushbu) for a statement where she said that it was her view that when men were not virgins at marriage they could not expect the same from their wives. Two caste based political parties in Tamilnadu not only held demonstrations outside her house, they also filed several lawsuits against the actress in different courts at different locations in the state in what was a clear attempt at using the law to bully her. After the outcry against the injustice administered to the actress by almost the entire political spectrum (considering that only the Communist Parties reluctantly rose to her defence after keeping mum over the initial furore) in association with the so called lower �justices� in Tamilnadu became public before the world, the Chennai High Court struck down all the cases against the actress in the lower courts. This, too, was a belated decision as the actress had approached the High Court first and had been turned away. She had to then endure a trip across the state to a lower court where she was fined Rs 5000 by a lower level judge while mobs outside the court threw tomatoes and eggs at her car and had to endure the judge�s strictures not to talk about the incident again. The whole spectacle was of a Talibanist system gone amok and when this was found to attract too much detrimental attention, the defenders of the action came out with a series of convoluted �explanations� about why the system had gone mad.
It was now suggested that the actress had some kind of altercation with an actor and that this had spilled over into the public arena. That the actor who had been �insulted� by her had his fellow caste members enraged into committing the actions that turned the state into a near example of Afghanistan. The nonsense that was bandied about suggested that �anyone had a right to file a lawsuit and that Khushboo had a right to fight this in the courts.� Nowhere was it suggested that the courts had the responsibility of throwing frivolous lawsuits out lock, stock and barrel. But Tamilnadu is no stranger to this kind of madness, and, neither for that matter, is India. The state had earlier banned a performance of Eve Ensler�s celebrated play, �The Vagina Monologues� while the other metros in India had applauded it. The state had allowed a police force gone amok to arrest hundreds of adult couples in Chennai�s Anna Nagar Park and published their pictures in a local newspaper as if they were in �Most Wanted� mug shots. And while two newspapers, the morninger The Hindu and the evening News Today had protested this madness, the rest of the media had conspicuously remained silent through all of it.
India is no stranger to a muttawa/Talibanesque attitude to sex and sexuality. The noted film director Deepa Mehta had been hounded out of the country for making a film on the plight of widows in Hinduism. For many years, the Central Board of Film Censors, a body that was supposed to insulate the Indian public from anything �obscene,� allowed Indian films to show bloody rapes and the savage beating of women but not scenes of couples kissing affectionately. It was an attitude that suggested to anyone who cared to think that the whole system was perverted and insane to boot. And it was also something that showed Indians as a people who were as hypocritical as the mad mullahs of Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan whom they liked to criticise. Here was a nation that laughed in secret at people who were not really different from itself and made millions selling it�s perverse films to them to boot. The spectre of a pimp talking morality was the closest parallel to what was happening in a land whose national motto was �Satyameva Jayate� or �Truth Triumphs.�
India is a country that some say is on the verge of an AIDS explosion. It has been suggested that millions could die from this and experts have been requesting, for some years, to start serious lessons in sexual education to school children. This is something that has been resisted by the �moral brigade� that has openly approved of the actions against the actress calling her an �insult to Tamil womanhood.� Khushboo�s comments came in a survey in the Tamil language edition of India Today magazine which focused on adolescent sex. In their thrust to �make an example� of the actress, the Tamil muttawa also filed lawsuits against the publishers of India Today and asked for it�s Editor in Chief to be brought to court, but the thrust was on savaging the actress, a public humiliation like you would see in an Indian film of an �un-chaste� woman. The Taliban had shot women in football stadiums in Afghanistan after subjecting them to �trials� in their kangaroo courts. The Indian judicial system became a giant kangaroo court to pillory Khushboo in a perfect re-enactment of Talibanist thuggery. The spectacle of thousands of frenzied people outside a court throwing trash at the actress� car as she drove in to be reprimanded by a judge must not have been any different from the sight of the bloodthirsty madmen who derived a sadistic pleasure watching women shot in Kabul. Perhaps, one saving grace was that there was a token police presence that saved the woman�s life for there is no doubt that she would have been lynched had she not had this to save her.
This happened in a country whose Prime Minister did not speak a word about this incident while it took place or afterwards. It happened in a country where the Minister for Health happens to be the head of the party that was most vocal in orchestrating this madness. Dr Anbumani Ramdoss also gave an interview after the Chennai High Court exonerated the actress telling the press that he had been wronged and that his party had no real role in the thuggery that had gone before. It happened in a country that calls itself the world�s largest democracy and which is never tired of flaunting its �democratic� credentials at international conventions. It happened in a country where some years earlier, a woman, Bhanwari Devi, had been raped by several higher caste men in public for speaking up against them and where the Rajasthan State High Court had released all of the rapists because it believed that people from higher castes could not rape a woman belonging to a lower caste. You may call Rajasthan a backward state but the Khushboo episode and the ones before it that I have mentioned happened in a wealthy Southern state - a state whose leaders call it �the Detroit of South Asia� because of the large automobile plants located there. It happened in a state that has the world�s largest atheist organization, the Dravidar Kazhagam with more than half a million members. It happened in one of the most literate regions of India making one wonder what horrendous lives women in the less educated �cow belt� live day after day, month after month, year after year. An India that cannot protect its citizens� right to speak freely and which allows its government machinery to be used in persecuting individuals for saying what is on their minds is a disgrace to every decent Indian. It is little more than a nightmare of Orwellian proportions, a nightmare that 1.2 billion people are doomed to living through.
Mehul Kamdar from Chicago is currently moderating Mukto-Mona forum. He was the editor of The Modern Rationalist under late M D Gopalakrishnan and associated with various rationalist movements. He can be reached at [email protected]