The Muslim Leadership In India - The Ultimate Sham - 5
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| Members of Islamic organisations holding a protest against the film "Innocence
of Muslims" on Anna Salai in Chennai - The Hindu |
5.
Protests against “Innocence of Muslims” in
India.
This is a current issue which has brought to fore front questions
of censorship and limits of freedom of speech. After having seen the
unremarkable piece which exemplifies the essence of lack of talent and waste of
time and after witnessing the resulting riots which puts civilised women and
men to shame I have made substantive changes in my views on what freedom of
speech constitutes. Freedom of speech is as much as the phrase implies. It is
the freedom to tell any bullshit and yet not be persecuted for it. In fact, I
would so far go and say that even defamation and misinformation is allowed in
the name of freedom of speech. What is important is the real impact this free
speech has on the psyche of the general public. An offensive portrait, a
blasphemous book, a distasteful movie, a baseless accusation - how serious an
impact these have on a concerned community’s / individuals’ lives and on those
who surround them determines the limits of freedom of speech. And only that
limits the freedom of speech and nothing else, nothing should. An idea is only
as credible as its source is.
Hence if
someone influential, personality say the Prime Minister of the Republic of
India, declares that all Muslims are fundamentalists then we have got a problem
at hand, since the PM is the most important person in India, at least it used
to be like that, and the idea he or she espouses will have a definitive
impact. If Salman Rushdie has said
something blasphemous according to Ayatollah Khomeini and in turn declared so
by several little Khomeinis of the world, what is to be examined is how far an
impact his work is going to have on Muslims and how far the perception about
Muslims is going to change in the eyes of a non-Muslim. Are Muslims going to be
looked down upon because Rushdie wrote what he wrote in his book? Rushdie’s
should have been an old issue which ought to have been buried. But thanks to
the secular leaders in and around the world we see the issue rising up every
now and then, there by providing arena for these very leaders to prove their
secular credentials. It is a goose that lays golden eggs and this time over the
owner is not dumb enough to kill it at one go. It is in this context that Innocence of
Muslim is to be examined. Is the average Muslim going to be denied his or her right
to live freely with dignity and honour because a nameless faceless person made
a tiresomely boring movie? Unlike Rushdie’s book which was popular in literary
circles, the movie was and still is not a critical or commercial success. The
gentlest of criticisms describe it as a painfully mind numbing experience
while, of course, the harshest critics assassinate human beings with missiles.
- Protest in Tamil Nadu
For Muslims to display acts of such feigned sense of insult
was a first in Tamil Nadu where religions have been coexisting peacefully. We witnessed
a 5 day long protest in Chennai against USA at its Consulate in the city which
included 2000 men representing 23 different Muslim groups. Similar protests
were organised in Trichy Tirunelveli, Ooty and other parts of the state also.
These peaceful protests involved pelting of stones, breaking of CCTVs, damaging
buses, blockading railway routes and similar extra-curricular activities. Here
also, as in the case of Ghaziabad violence, the police reported how the crowd
suddenly swell to thousands of numbers in a few minutes. The claim of each such
protest rally is to show the “strength of Muslim community”. In other words,
these protests were nothing but futile show of muscle flexing there by
affecting the day to day lives of people, for example the visa process in US
consulate. What is ironical is how the leaders of these very people sent off
their children to study in all fancy locations in USA, Germany and UK. That
budding terrorists were nabbed from the south only a while ago and that only a
few days ago an alleged ISI module in south India was busted with the arrest of
Thamim Ansari, and that exactly in the same time period, protests of these
kinds which have not been witnessed till date in Tamil Nadu are being displayed,
raises serious questions as to how sincere these alleged show of strength is,
and if there is not some sinister motive behind such sudden spurt of non-existent
sentiments getting hurt enough to cause injuries to 19 police men, to bring
cities and towns to a halt and subsequently causing transfer of a hapless IPS
officer from Chennai.
The fact that these nth wave of
radicalised protests happened immediately after the passionate rallies by these
very same men who conducted “peaceful” protests in solidarity with the Muslim
“victims” of Assam and Myanmar reaffirms the doubt that these are people who
are in the lookout for anything which will allow them to get offended and who
later on seek solidarity for imaginary victimhood and blasphemy. It is like
deliberately going and smelling a pair of foul socks in a home two blocks away
and complaining to the owner of the socks that he had intentionally kept the
foul smelling sock there so that the offended person would go there and smell
it. Nor has it got any logic, neither has any one the guts to infuse logic into
it.
If any Hindu complaints about Muslims
being so touchy about the issue, the first counter is about how M F Husain the
celebrated artist, “the jewel of India in the world of paintings”, had to
suffer at the hands of extremists like RSS and VHP and BJP just because they
found his depiction of the Indian gods to be offensive. But is it only as much
as it looks like on the surface? Does that mean any one who offended the Indian
gods were banished from India? Why it is
then that Zakir Naik proudly displayed a poster in Facebook asking Hindus to
prove Ganesha to be a god and yet none of the ambassadors from any Muslim
nation to India was killed? Why is it that year after year the great benevolent
asura king of Kerala, Mahabali, is depicted as a pot bellied bumbling uncle
next door and still no one even raises a finger against it? Why is it that
there is a constant insinuation about Babas and Swamis and Matas being
fraudsters and yet there is no casualty? Why are secular politicians like Lalu
Prasad Yadav who proclaim “These babas
are the real terrorists” still survive to tell the tale? So what is so
horrifyingly special about M F Husain’s painting which irritated the Hindus,
who generally are not so touchy about their own religion, to the point of
asking for a ban on the secular artist and his secular paintings?
Fact of the matter is that people disliked the patronisation
of M F Husain’s offensive paintings than the paintings themselves. You cannot
have selective freedom of speech for different sets of people. It is disgusting
and akin to prostituting your soul if you do so. You can’t just sit there and lecture
the majority of the public that, “Look
here people; this is a very important painting by a very very important artist
from a minority community. Hence you must bear with it. We will celebrate it to
be a masterpiece, will call it as an unparalleled work, will counter you by
saying that there are sculptures in Konark temple which are way more vulgar
than what our celebrated artist from the minority community has painted, will
allege that Kamasutra and Hinduism are one and the same, and not only that we
will repeat this in every news paper articles, every editorial, every TV
interviews, every political rallies, and will repeat it until people believe
this to be true, but yet you should not utter a word because freedom of speech
is more important than anything else.” You just cannot do that and now keep
quiet and make your silence credible with arguments about the necessity for a
limit to freedom of speech just because “a particular community” is too touchy about
criticism, because some XYZ religion is not ready for scrutiny by outsiders.
Things do not happen this way usually. It was this tendency which demanded
provocation from the majority of the Indians which resulted in such a drastic
incident where in Husain was sent de-facto in exile.
But unlike the paintings, a majority had
not known and still many do not know the contents of Rushdie’s book, an
overwhelmingly large percentage of population from the non-Muslims find the
movie Innocence of Muslims offensive, no one has supported the views espoused
by it, nor has any one hailed it to be a masterpiece. It will not take more
than a day for an informed critic to dissect the movie scene by scene and quote
from Quran to substantiate a large chunk of what has been depicted in the
movie. No one did that only because the OH-I-AM-SO-TOUCHY Muslim leadership
were up in arms and people were rational enough not to add fire to the
incident. On the contrary, everyone was unanimous in their condemnation. The
movie was not declared a must – watch, it was not listed in any top 10 lists
(assuming the lists were not about controversies), the movie was not given any
positive publicity anywhere by any credible source in the entire wide world. And
yet, in spite of all this solidarity and support provided by the unaffected men
and women to the so-called affected group, Muslim leaders were already lining
up in UN demanding that anything which offends religions should be made a
crime. In spite of all this, there was
staunch silence from champions of free speech; we heard sermons about what
constitute free speech and what does not. Even the United States of America, a
country which very dearly holds its prestige, which treats every attack on them
in the harshest possible manner, faltered. The President of the United States
of America began his response to the tragic murder of the US Ambassador to
Libya with an apology. As a person who believes in free speech, this shook my
belief on what this world has come to. A country like theirs, which supposedly
is the “Mecca” of free speech, has been
reduced to a level, where instead of condemning such acts of incurable madness,
the first thing the leader of that nation utters is an apology. Is offending a
religion a greater crime than taking away the life which has been supposedly
given to us by the very same God / Allah?
Written on 2nd October 2012
Links to other parts
Part 1 - Muslim Leadership
Part 2 - Assam Riots
Part 3 - Ghaziabad Riots
Part 4 - Muslim Youth Radicalisation
Part 6 - A Chance for Indian Muslims
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