A second Halla Bol

Nilanjana S Roy

Surely you remember that January? Perhaps like me, you were too young; just a student, or you were born later, or you were never told of the events that happened on January 1, 1989 in Jhandapur, Sahibabad.

Jhandapur is not far from Delhi, to use a phrase made famous by TV anchors, just 18 km away from the city's theatre hub. Safdar Hashmi and his Janam troupe were performing Halla Bol as part of their campaign for a CITU candidate in the municipal elections when Mukesh Sharma, the Congress-backed independent candidate, arrived with a band of armed goons.

He demanded passage through; Hashmi asked him to wait till the play was done. They attacked Hashmi with iron rods. When he was taken, injured, to the CITU office, Sharma's goons followed him. Hashmi, just 34, died on January 2 of multiple injuries. Ram Bahadur, a worker who had come to see the play, was also killed.

A few months later, Simran Bhargava wrote about the tragedy in India Today; the mourning for Hashmi had united the creative community in Delhi and far beyond in a way that was memorable even for those who, like me, were just university students. She quoted Habib Tanvir: "There has been no coming together of this type. A great force of artistes, intellectuals and painters has gathered spontaneously." She also quoted Javed Akhtar: "When my art becomes inconvenient to you, you don't argue. You kill me."

Some criticisms were expressed at that time that may seem very familiar, in the wake of the protests by over 300 writers, academics and theatre artistes recently. In 1989, some argued that the protests were too strongly driven by Leftists; some felt that the protesters were too diverse in their political beliefs to be effective; Bhargava mentions the fear that fashionable elitism might hijack the wider cause.

Why had these writers and artists not been as vocal about other atrocities, other deaths, some asked then. It is the same question addressed today to those who have expressed their anguish at the silencing of the writer Perumal Murugan this January, the killing of the rationalist politician Govind Pansare this February, the murder of the scholar M M Kalburgi this August, the mob lynching of a blacksmith, Mohammed Akhlaq, this October.

And it has the same answer: because there comes a time when one murder, as senseless and inhumane as all the others, allows you to mourn openly all that you have been mourning silently. Sometimes one loss, no different than the others, lets you acknowledge the many wounds and losses inflicted over time.
The year before Safdar Hashmi was battered to death, the poet Pash and his friend Hans Raj had been shot by Sikh extremists. In October 1988, the Indian government had placed an import ban on Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, becoming the first country in the world to do so, months before the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced the Valentine's Day fatwa against Mr Rushdie.

There had been a sliver of good news; bowing to intense pressure from the print media and the creative community in India, Rajiv Gandhi had withdrawn the Defamation Bill, which would have placed intolerable curbs on the freedom of the press. But there were other challenges: in 1986, P M Anthony's The Sixth Holy Wound of Christ was banned in Kerala after pressure from Christian groups; in 1987, the Maharashtra High Court banned Dr B R Ambedkar's Riddles in Hinduism despite protests from Dalit groups. In April 1989, India Today reported, "religious zealots" from the Lingayat community had forced a scholar to recant his research on Basaveshwara. M M Kalburgi lived with death threats, and said of his recantation: "I committed intellectual suicide on that day."

But Dr Kalburgi continued to write; his critics did not silence him, the assassin's bullet did. India changed; the fears that many had shared when Safdar Hashmi was murdered came true. In 1996, the attacks on M F Husain by rightwing groups began and they didn't let up until the artist had been forced into exile.

The Shiv Sena attacked cinema halls and disrupted screenings of Deepa Mehta's Fire in 1998; in 2000, Hindu nationalist protesters wrecked the sets of Water, issuing death threats against her for being "anti-Hindu". From bans on Taslima Nasreen's   Dwikhandito to D N Jha's The Myth of the Holy Cow, the withdrawal of James Laine'sShivaji for "insulting" Hindus, the upholding of a ban on Jesus Christ Superstar, the fear of causing religious offence strangulated writers, and other citizens. Many protested these assaults on freedom; others fell silent, some argued in favour of religious offence laws and now reap the bloody harvest.

This is how we have arrived at this moment. Each generation finds its own flashpoint. As in 1989, there is an unlikely coalition of writers and academics across regions, languages, a rainbow of political beliefs represented from Uday Prakash and Champa to Arvind Malagatti, Shashi Deshpande, Nayantara Sahgal, Surjit Patar and all the rest.

How strikingly different it is, the returning of awards, the writing of letters, from the anger of the privileged Hindu nationalists on social media, the jeering of politicians who tell writers not to write.

By the weekend, Hindu nationalists were attacking Admiral Ramdas and the lyricist Gulzar for daring to agree that religious intolerance and the systematic attempt to impose a Hindu Rashtra are placing Indian democracy in jeopardy. But though they are eloquent with the anger of entitlement, Hindu nationalists have not said a word about what they plan to do to safeguard the freedoms and the democracy that are under threat, yet again.

That job is left to the rest, not just writers, or liberals, or leftists, but in Mr Gulzar's phrase, all "conscience-keepers". There may just be enough of them, this time.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com

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