Liberal gang-shaming is a thing now. Just like Hindutva army onslaught has been for some time. The manner in which Bloomsbury India was pressured to withdraw the book titled Delhi Riots 2020: The Untold Story by RSS-sympathetic lawyer Monika Arora, Sonali Chitalkar and Prerna Malhotra is an instance of this.
The manner in which big-ticket authors like William Darlymple weighed in makes it clear that liberals and progressives have entered a rabbit hole from which we won’t be able to extricate ourselves easily.
For someone who has always held close the idea that book bans and calls for book bans are inherently fascist acts, this moment of de-platforming of Monika Arora’s book is a deeply conflicting one for me.
I intensely disagree with the premise and politics of the book — blame the victim ‘Kapil Mishra style’ — at least from what I gather from social media. But this is when our long-held Voltairean values are tested severely when books you don’t agree with are denied the space to breathe. I agree it was easier to defend Salman Rushdie than Monika Arora.
I am convinced that the book will find a new home, a new publisher and a new platform. It is inconceivable that under Narendra Modi and Amit Shah’s government, this kind of a book would simply disappear. In fact, it will now become larger-than-life, which it most probably doesn’t deserve.
Can’t Do A Volte-Face Now
I am not a millennial woke. My politics were shaped in the 1980s when I was a teenager. That was when Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses was banned by the Rajiv Gandhi government.
If I disapproved of the ban on The Satanic Verses, if I disapproved of Dinanath Batra (whom I called “Ban Man” in my article in The Washington Post), if I disapproved of how Taslima Nasreen was hounded and attacked in Hyderabad by Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM, then I can’t suddenly do a volte-face and chest-thump today.
When you ban a book, it acquires a kind of cult status because of the market fuels curiosity. That is what happened with other banned books. In fact, there are books chronicling banned books by different regimes in history.
We don’t need Hindutva libraries of Alexandria — let them breathe, be ignored, challenged, die, and be forgotten over the ground.
