Penguin, in agreeing to withdraw Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: an alternative history, has signaled its willingness to do business with the ultra right in India. The venerable Oxford University Press has already been doing this for some time: the fate of the book on Shivaji by James Laine and the anthology of essays by AK Ramanujan is still fresh in memory. The trend is not confined to just the big boys of multinational publishing: even the organisers of India Art Fair, year after year, cowered at the thought of displaying the work of MF Husain, whose art had become anathema to Hindutva camp, resulting in his long exile before his death in London.
In Mumbai Shiv Sena decides what plays are to be performed, which films to be shown, and, of course, whether artists from Pakistan are to be allowed in at all. In Maharashtra and Gujarat, and quite a few other places as well, the Hindutva outfits are able to impress, even overwhelm, the intelligentsia and the media to leave the task of critical interpretation and analysis to them. For all one knows Ambanis may even consider taking over Bertelsmann, the infamous corporation with a Nazi past, that now owns Penguin Random House.
At the same time, the state with its key institutions, ‘recuses’ itself at will from the matters of freedom of expression, regulation and censorship; it is happy to outsource the responsibility to all and sundry as part of the ongoing privatisation drive – as it is with regard to defense of secularism, pluralism and other constitutional imperatives.
