Taslima as litmus test

of our people”. In other words, Taslima Nasreen is welcome — but. This is disappointing to say the least, and mean-spirited in fact.

It is an ironic fact of India’s democracy that questions of individual liberty and freedom of expression have never quite attained primacy. Examples abound of governments resorting to censorship and bans and of political parties condoning and even colluding in the erosion of individual freedoms whenever the moral police has loomed large or a vote bank is presumed to be under threat. The attack on a graduate student at the Faculty of Fine Arts in MS University in Baroda happened in Modi’s Gujarat. But the ransacking of the Bhandarkar Institute during the controversy over James Laine’s book on Shivaji happened under the watch of the ‘secular’ NCP-Congress regime in Maharashtra. The Left’s abject surrender to the politics of petty pragmatism on Taslima Nasreen is in keeping with a general lack of commitment to the democratic ideal of individual freedom. The BJP’s hectic championing of Nasreen’s cause only reinforces the impression of expediency trumping principle — the party’s singular driving force is to embarrass the UPA.

Yet this could have been an opportunity. For the UPA to make amends for past abdications. And for the Indian state to reaffirm the idea of India in its most plural version. Instead of shunting the writer from place to place and then offering her conditional shelter, India could have been the gracious host.