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The Ban on Pakistani Writers by Bombay’s Rightwing Has Dangerous Ramifications

by Neel Mukherjee, 7 January 2009

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The Guardian (UK)

As a response to the Mumbai terror attacks, this smacks of hysteria and has disturbing ramifications in the longer term

If fresh evidence were needed that books and writers are one of the greatest threats to bigotry, especially during times that are malleable enough to be twisted to serve their agenda of hysteria and fear, Mumbai provides an eloquently senseless example. Hard on the heels of the terror attacks in the city and the resultant "ban" declared on Pakistani artists and their works by Raj Thackeray, leader of the rightwing Hindu party, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), the Oxford bookstore in Churchgate in Mumbai has been asked to remove all books written by Pakistani authors from its shelves on the "friendly advice" of the police.

Is it possible to determine the "friendliness" of the advice? In the store manager’s words, "A policeman from the Marine Drive police station dropped in at our store and told us to be careful about a possible attack. He advised us to remove books and CDs related to Pakistan, as we may be targeted after the recent terror strikes. He reminded us of Thackeray’s ban." How diligent of the Mumbai police to be so proactive in protecting from possible vigilante attacks: the policeman in question denied having advised the bookstore against stocking Pakistani literature. He had dropped in to "check that everything was all right".

One wonders if this dutiful "dropping in" has anything to do with the MNS employee at the same store who warned his manager not to display Pakistani books. In righteous anger, the staff member explained to the Times of India, "After the recent attack on Mumbai, why should we have any Pakistani material in our bookstore?" Unlike the collusive and internalised censorship that saw french fries renamed "freedom" fries after 9/11, this is a more straightforward case of petty terrorising by apparatchiks. Let us not forget that these are the very people who attack Clinton Cards outlets just before Valentine’s Day every year for selling corrupting tokens of foreign cultures. The mirage of purity remains, as ever, the holy grail of the right.

But there are more disturbing ramifications to be reckoned with before we dismiss this as cultural illiteracy, anti-democratic intolerance of all kinds of pluralities, or rightwing "patriotism" (that massive holdall, which accommodates some of the greatest criminalities in history). It is all those things, but also something more. Like those who had never read a single word written by Salman Rushdie but bayed for his blood on the publication of The Satanic Verses and after his knighthood, these censors are terrorists in the purest sense of the term: playing at the politics of fear by manufacturing a terrifying Other to intimidate and to disseminate lies. By what crazy logic would one seek to have, say, Philip Roth or Joan Didion removed from bookstores if one finds the existence of Guantánamo Bay intolerable? And what do the MNS suggest we do with one of the greatest Urdu writers of the last century, Saadat Hasan Manto, who was born in undivided India in 1912 and only spent the last seven years of his life, from 1948-55, in the new country of Pakistan? Is he "Pakistani material"?

The Pakistani writers the MNS want to banish from bookshops would have been the first not only to condemn but also to understand, expose and analyse the intractable history of such acts. Now, more than ever, we should be rushing out and dedicating entire shelves and tables in bookstores to Pakistani writers. A culture that bans books, especially on the grounds of such dangerous nationalism, is a culture on the brink of self-destruction.