Over 100 authors, including Salman Rushdie who is now recuperating from an assassination attempt in New York last week, have expressed concern over the state of democracy in India as it celebrates 75 years of independence, ruing that “a shadow lies upon the country we loved so deeply”.
The short statements by 113 Indian and Indian-origin authors, collectively titled “India at 75”, had been sought over a period of time by US-based free speech watchdog PEN America and uploaded on its website on Monday.
As many as 102 writers and supporters of PEN from across the world also wrote to President Droupadi Murmu on Independence Day, urging her to uphold the freedom to write in India.
Rushdie contributed to both efforts before the attack. The short texts of Mehta, Rushdie and Rajmohan Gandhi, historian and grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, are reproduced at the beginning of this report.
India was the first to ban Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988 and the author has faced resistance from public authorities and Islamist groups to visit the country. The Bombay-born Rushdie last visited India in 2013.
The introduction by PEN to the messages from 113 authors, among them Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Geetanjali Shree, Ganesh Devy, Priyamvada Gopal, Shobhaa De, Ashok Vajpeyi and Mehta, noted the retention of draconian colonial laws by free India, and the Emergency of 1975.
Suketu Mehta. File picture
It then said: “But the election in 2014 has transformed India into a country where hate speech is expressed and disseminated loudly; where Muslims are discriminated against and lynched, their homes and mosques bulldozed, their livelihoods destroyed; where Christians are beaten and churches attacked; where political prisoners are held in jail without trial. Dissenting journalists and authors are denied permission to leave the country.”
Rajmohan Gandhi. File picture
The PEN introduction said: “The institutions that can defend India’s freedoms — its courts, parliament and civil service, and much of the media — have been co-opted or weakened. In PEN America’s most recent Freedom to Write Index, India is the only nominally democratic country included in our count of the top 10 jailers of writers and public intellectuals worldwide. In recent years, India has seen an acceleration of threats against free speech, academic freedom and digital rights, and an uptick in online trolling and harassment.
“To mark India at 75, PEN America reached out to authors from India and the Indian diaspora to write short texts expressing what they felt. Together they make a historic document. Authors who were born in British India responded, as did India’s Midnight’s Children and grandchildren.
Geetanjali Shree. File picture
“Authors from around the globe sent us their thoughts, as did authors from India’s many languages, communities, faiths and castes. Some voices are optimistic, some prayerful, some anguished and enraged. Some suggest defeat, others venture hope, still others are defiant. The authors hold a spectrum of political views, and may be in disagreement about much else, but they are united in their concern for the state of Indian democracy.”
Jhumpa Lahiri. File picture
Pulitzer winner Lahiri wrote: “The plurilingual aspect of India, in particular, both inspired and consoled me, for it insisted on the need for ongoing communication and translation. The co-existence of more than one language generates curiosity, calls for interpretation, and subverts any notion of absolute power. Unravel certain threads, or snip some strands away, and the conversation is lost; we are left with a frayed society, with imposed silence, with banal and baleful notions of nationhood.”
Kiran Desai. File picture
Desai wrote eight haikus for the eight-year-old girl who was raped in a temple in Jammu’s Kathua in 2018. One of the poems said:
“As if a girl is what it takes to rape and kill it takes a village
It takes a policeman a temple custodian a tax man, a son
Who took the bus all the way from Meerut because it takes a village.”
The letter to President Murmu said that the signatories, including J.M. Coetzee and Orhan Pamuk, “are writing to express our grave concerns about the rapidly worsening situation for human rights in India, specifically freedom of speech and creative expression, on the eve of India’s 75th anniversary of independence”.
JM Coetzee and Orhan Pamuk, who are among the 102 who signed the letter. File picture
It added: “We write to express our grave concern regarding the myriad threats to free expression and other core rights that have been building steadily in recent years, since the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government has come to power….
“Authorities as well as private actors regularly use legal action and the threat of legal action against people expressing dissenting views, independent thought, and human rights advocacy. Writers and public intellectuals are subject to arrest, prosecution, and travel bans intended to restrain their free speech. Online trolling and harassment is rife, hate speech is expressed loudly, and internet shutdowns centred on Kashmir limit access to news and information for a significant number of people.”
The letter mentions the unpunished murders of rationalists Govind Pansare, Narendra Dabholkar and M.M. Kalburgi and journalist Gauri Lankesh, the arrest of seven writers in the Elgaar Parishad-Maoist links case, and the State persecution of journalists Mohammed Zubair, Siddique Kappan, Teesta Setalvad, Fahad Shah, Rana Ayyub and Aatish Taseer, and filmmaker Avinash Das.
