SATANIC INTENTIONS

The recent controversy surrounding Satanic verses and Rushdie's inability to attend the Jaipur Literary Fest owing to threats by Muslim fundamentalist groups has exposed the farce that is happening in the name of freedom of expression, as it may only lead to an up-sell of this book, a cashing in on religious sentiments by the political parties and setting an example of modern journalism by the controversy-hungry media. 
This controvesry has arisen in India at a time when free speech is under threat. Recent attempts to institute ‘pre-screening’ of internet content by the Government, and bans of books such as Joseph Lelyveld’s biography of Gandhi, show that these are not good times for those who wish to say unpopular things in India. It is funny how the Information and Broadcasting ministry okays a show casting famous porn-star on prime time Indian TV but screens Google and Facebook for any content even slightly in contravention to the law.


SATANIC VERSES- The book and the controversy

The Satanic Verses primarily contains three stories. The first story concerns two Indians (Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha) who fall out of a jumbo jet and miraculously survive.
The second story is a dream about aspects of the story of Muhammad (called Mohound in the book), the prophet of Islam. It is partly historical fact, partly the novelist's imagination. The third story concerns a Muslim village in India whose whole population follows a holy woman into the Arabian Sea, expecting the waters will part for them to walk to Mecca. But the waters stay unparted, and finally the whole village perishes.

Before understanding the Satanic Verses episode, we need to know that Islam's core lies in acceptance of the Qur'an as the Word of God. It means accepting the faith that God (or Allah) sent His message to mankind via the angel Gabriel who passed it along to Muhammad; and that the Qur'an is unerring. To doubt the Qur'an is to doubt the exact message of God, and is seen as an act of apostasy.

The Satanic verses episode concerns the fact that Muhammad was born and lived in Mecca, long a major center of the polytheistic Arabian religions, and the leaders of Muhammad's own tribe- 'Quryash', suggested to Muhammad that if he adopted a flexible attitude toward their idols, they in return would adopt a more friendly attitude toward his preaching.

At this point, according to the holy book, Satan distorted the words of Muhammad so that he accepted  three goddesses of Quryash and confirmed the validity of their intercession between man and God. Quryash was delighted by Muhammad's acceptance of the three Goddesses. 

But then the angel Gabriel (the normal source of the Qur'an) came to Muhammad and revealed to him that the devil had deceived him into uttering the last two lines. Gabriel revoked these lines by Muhammad and replaced them with verses denouncing the three goddesses.

However in  Rushdie's novel, it is implied that the prophet spoke the false verses not because Satan put them in his mouth, but because he saw an opportunity to further his own cause. 

To cover his deceit, Mahound (analogous to Muhammad) adopted the notion, put forward by one of his followers, that the devil made him do it. If what is implied in the book is true, then the Qur'an becomes a human artifact, destroying the very sanctity on which it is built.

But that is not what Rushdie actually implied- according to him the whole sequence, is the part of a dream, and the dreamer, Gibreel Farishta, is a man who suffers from "paranoid delusions" of being the Archangel Gibreel. So this places Rushdie at fair distance from the story of the book.


The Protests and Death Sentence

Rushdie and his book provoked the Muslims of England and South Africa, the Saudi authorities, mobs in Pakistan, India and in many other parts of the world. The most interesting part to note is that almost no one who protested against the book had read more than few excerpts of it. The only thing they were aware was that an author named Salaman Rushdie wrote a book called Satanic Verses, defying the Qur'an in some way.

Finally Ayatollah Khomeini, of Iran, declared Satanic Verses in opposition to Islam and pronounced a death sentence for Rushdie and his publishers and anyone who was aware of the content of the book, calling Muslims of the world to find Rushdie and his publishers and execute them as soon as possible, and promising martyrdom to those who would carry it out.

Political critics nearly unanimously saw this act in political terms. Former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr saw the event as "a political affair and not a 

religious one," and the leader of the main Iranian opposition group, agreed.

Some emphasized the domestic political tensions in Iran and that Satanic Verses was an "an issue likely to engage the imagination of the poor and illiterate masses". Harvey Morris saw it as an attempt  intended to deflect from the Iraq-Iran war. Others saw it mostly in terms of foreign policy. Youssef M. Ibrahim explained it as Khomeini's bid "to reassert his role as spokesman and protector of Islamic causes." William Waldegrave of the British Foreign Office blamed the incident on "radical elements in Iran, which did not want their country to have normal relations with the West. 

Whatever be the real reason, the protests took place in many countries of the world, taking the lives of many ignorant and misguided protesters.


Darul Uloom and the ban in India

A spokesperson of the Darul Uloom Deoband – a staunch Muslim institution in the state of Uttar Pradesh (a state where elections are due!) made a statement saying that Salman Rushdie, ought not to be issued a visa for entering India to attend the forthcoming Jaipur Literary Festival.

Amusingly, he ignored the fact that Rushdie does not need a visa to enter India as he holds a PIO (‘Person of Indian Origin’) Card that entitles him to enter and exit India as and when he wishes, and that he has come to India several times in the last decade, and his would-be presence in the fest had nothing to do with the controversies around the book.
Howsoever, Darul Uloom strictly forbade Rushdie's arrival in India this time, banning his appearance in any way in the Festival.


Political Agendas

The manipulation of religious sentiment for political mileage has a long-standing history in India, and this was a particularly typical example of a traditional election-time vote-seeking activity. Rushdie controvesry seemed to become a mighty 'election campaign' issue in the state of Uttar Pradesh where many big political contenders - Congress, SP, BSP- have their eyes set on the bloc of the Muslim Vote (If the already promised, additional 4.5% Muslim OBC reservation in the state was not enough!). 
So the Congress, a.k.a the UPA Government, in its effort to win the benediction of the Darul Uloom Deoband and the fundamentalist muslim votes in UP, failed to guarantee protection to Salman Rushdie, on his coming to India. It is appalling how the largest democracy in the world, that promises to be a world superpower one day can not guarantee protection to one single individual.

Who is responsible!

Is Salman Rushdie the innocent victim here? Satanic versus has never been touted as his best work by literary critics, but gave him more fame than any other book, only because of the steaming controversies and fatwas engendered by the dangerously indelicate ideas expressed in the book. The characters Gabreel and Mahound are obviously not pure fiction but cleverly and subtly analogous to the characters from the holy book. The slander and protests gave him much more fame in the west than east, and only took lives of many gullible and misguided protesters.

Freedom of expression is the most fundamental- on which all others depend. But it is tricky as it gives the people a tendency to abuse it blatantly, often mistaken by people as a right to express opinions without responsible self control or consequent social implications. 

Against every right conferred upon individuals, stands a responsibility to be exercised, and freedom of expression easily carries the heaviest of responsibilities. Those which are being neglected by many, including those who lead us today.

AFTER OSAMA

The world’s most wanted man, public enemy number one- Osama Bin Laden is dead.  There are few who believe that Bin Laden died in 2002 of some disease and since Obama was worried about the upcoming US Presidential elections in 2012, the billions of dollars being wasted in Afghanistan (The cost of running the war in Afghanistan is $400,225,824,340 and the cost of running it in Iraq was $787,878,147,208 totalling almost 1.2 trillion dollars) and finding a face saving solution to the problem, he declared Bin Laden's death now, (and buried his body hastily in the sea!) Regardless of whether Bin Laden died in 2011 or 2002, one thing is for certain, that he is dead or else, the world's most powerful man would not have taken the liberty of making a claim that he knew was false.

The jubilations on the streets of USA, ecstatic tweets and posts celebrating America’s revenge for 9/11 certainly sing of justice and retribution. But saying that USA has killed the world's most dangerous man, and in doing so, completely smothered terrorism, is way too far-fetched. Here are a few things that will not happen as a consequence of Bin Laden’s death -

             1) Terrorists across the world will give up their violent ways due to the loss of their supreme spiritual leader.

2)    Al Qaeda will be completely incapacitated as Bin Laden was personally instructing each and every terrorist across the world.

3)    The ‘random’ airport passenger searches will now be actually random.

4)    Democracy will be instored across the middle-east.

5)    President Obama will resist the urge (and succeed) to use this accomplishment during his 2012 presidential campaign. (going from far-fetched to dreamy)

Simply killing Osama bin Laden does not end Al Qaeda. Ayman al-Zawahri, the Egyptian No. 2, has long played a crucial role as Al Qaeda’s COO. And Al Qaeda is more of a loose network than a tightly structured organization. AQIM, the version of Al Qaeda in North Africa, is a real threat in countries like Mali and Mauritania, and killing bin Laden will probably have negligible consequences there. The AQIM terrorists may admire Osama and be inspired by him, but they also are believed to be largely independent of him. And Anwar al-Awlaki, the Qaeda-linked terrorist in Yemen, likewise won’t be deterred by bin Laden’s killing. With Osama being gone, it might be a moral-buster for the Taliban, but it leaves a big, open hole in their chain of command, one that will be too easily and eagerly filled by another.

The only sure-shot repercussion of Laden’s death,  is a bump in Obama’s poll numbers, and a spate of articles, blogs and pieces in the media celebrating the president for heroically keeping the promise of killing the diabolical Osama. Although Obama’s cashing in on this operation for a re-election boost is funny, since the intelligence that led to this raid was directly tied to Guatanamo bay, enhanced interrogations and water-boarding; while Obama has been trying to shut down guatanamo bay for three years and he has been a vocal critic of enhanced interrogations. Also the fact that Obama was unsure of the military operation undertaken to kill Osama Bin Laden, and had to sleep on it for 16 hours- to make a decision any American would have made in a heartbeat.

Yet the political mileage gained from Bin Laden’s killing could be short-lived for Obama, because in America, it all comes down to the economy. (Case in point: George HW Bush was a hero after the victory in the gulf war in 1991, but was defeated in Nov 1992 by Bill Clinton, owing to economic downturn) With the nation’s economy still ailing, higher prices at gas pumps and grocery stores, unemployment still at 9%, unpopularity of the new Health-care bill and billions of nation’s wealth still being spent in waging (meaningless) wars, Obama would have to do much better than winning a Nobel prize, claiming the spoils of Bin Laden’s death, giving another canned speech from a teleprompter, and running an interesting social media campaign.

Speaking of social media, the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death may have been first spotted on twitter, even before the official announcement. One man even live tweeted the raid which killed the Al Qaeda leader, not realizing the monumental news at hand. Some were as usual clueless about such happenings like @parishilton who tweeted- “Can't wait to get home to my pets. I miss my babies," as the world watched, celebrated and tweeted about Osama’s death.

End of terror or not, as a final act of terrorism, Osama certainly blew up the news feeds, posts, tweets and Obama’s ratings!

Common"wealth" and Delhi

A very catchy Commonwealth Games poster read- “24 flyovers, 75 aerobridge airport, 1285 kms of better roads, 80 new metro destinations, 59 hectare games village, 11 world class sport venues, 5000 low floor buses, and thousands of Job opportunities.. For you..for decades!” What a dream to sell to the Indians! I’m hugely baffled and appalled, by the baleful irony draped in this dream. There is an ulterior lie being sold to Delhi, and the country, at a very high price!

The Commonwealth Games will showcase Delhi to the entire world, so our government has started taking measures to embellish the city, though a little late in the day! The Delhi “Clean Up” crusade has landed the city in a complete mess. All major roads are dug up for flyovers or metro, and others not affected by it can thank the substantial material used in road building for giving them a uniform experience. It takes 1-2 hours just to traverse 8-10 kms, Delhi now measures its distance in hours and not in kilometers. For those who call it a temporary hassle for a world class city tomorrow, there is irreversible damage being caused in this rush-up as well. Besides the enormous deforestation done to build and support the new infrastructure and transport system, the Games village being built on the floodplains of Yamuna ( which has already turned into a dirty drain) is reducing its surface area considerably, making way for easier flooding of the city.

Far more worrying than the possible threat to the lives of few privileged foreigners, should be the eviction of 1,40,000 families from their (kuccha) homes to clear space for the lavish facilities for these events. These families have been “re-settled” for their own good. (I wonder what a vendor in Munirka would do resettling in the 'slums' of Najafgadh!) The authorities seem to be following a very smart mantra- “If you don’t see it, it does not exist.”

Commonwealth is the biggest sporting extravaganza to have ever been held in India. Keeping in mind the high stakes of its international reputation, and its love for mediocrity and corruption, our government has comfortably increased the expenditure to 20 times the original estimate, making it over 2 Billion dollars. Needless to say 10's of millions meant for poverty alleviation and other developmental schemes have been diverted here.

Along with the usual accidents of the workers, leading to both death and disablement, and denial of basic minimum wages to them, this Commonwealth also gives children a chance to contribute to this memorable sporting carnival. The workers are promised extra food and wages if they get their children and families along, to work with them on the construction sites.

Now we share this burden of Commonwealth too. The recent budget hiked oil, LPG, CNG and other commodity prices. So what do we get in return? We get the promise of economic boom for decades to follow. This dream being sold to the rest of us doesn’t seem credible either. After all, we don’t have many good precedents to look up to. When the Greek capital won the right to stage the 2004 Olympics it was touted as an opportunity for renewed wealth and glory. But the legacy is a Greek tragedy of immense financial debt. Up to 21 of the 22 stadiums built for the Olympics now lie abandoned. The Athens Olympics cost a reported £9.4bn, and left a debt of €50,000 for each Greek household. Six years later, Greece is on the brink of utter economic ruin.

Have we bitten off more than we can chew? Or is it just bad organization, corruption and inefficieny standing in our way again?

Whatever may be, this commonwealth will only increase prosperity of a handful of globalised partners, make few rich even richer and leave behind very costly facilities for elite sport, only to be stared at by those whose homes and lives have been destroyed to make it possible.