Kolkata’s silent media
Some pelted stones, some others cried for blood. And some tried to storm a 134 year-old newspaper office for publishing an op-ed article on secularism which most of them were incapable of reading. For three days, an angry crowd comprising of overtly Islamic young men in their twenties laid siege to one of the busiest junctions of the old colonial capital of
If you are wondering why people in this part of the world missed this piece of "news", you aren’t to blame. Reports of this strange and ridiculous siege I found appearing only in The Statesman, and after googling, in a Reuters news dispatch, that every thinking head in every Indian media concern must have surely seen. But all those byte-collectors with their booms, all those camera crew with their speedy OBs and gizmos, all those press reporters obsessed with Paris Hilton’s make-up in sweating Kolkata city; they never cared to appear. It was a total and deliberate media black-out of "sensitive" news happening right in the middle of the sprawling city, and in broad daylight. Yes, if you haven’t noticed, we’ve got a "secular" media here.
So what was the "deliberate act with malicious intent"? Well, for those who have come in late, the newspaper had republished on February 5, an article by Johann Hari that appeared in The Independent on January 28. It was titled: "Why should I respect these oppressive religions?"
Stupid of them to publish it! You always know it’s better to stuff your ears with wax in Kolkata city when you’ve got those pusillanimous loudspeakers continuously blaring bawdy songs out in the middle of the night, for occasions when kids and believers could have simply thought of their books and invoked in silence their Hindoo goddess of learning. And you know "religious sentiments shouldn’t be hurt" even when worshippers of Marxist persuasions force you to donate money for their goddess worship, while together with underwear companies, different newshouses jump in to sponsor and showcase the big religious shows of every year. You know why an illiterate bunch of protestors can hound away a writer who had asked for shelter in this city (yes, I’m speaking of Taslima), and why the "secular" media never cares to question the state government’s decision. Yes, you can always go and read a copy of Bhagat Singh’s "Why Am I An Atheist?" on the sly. That guy wrote this fiery monograph back in the early 1930s, and it’s contains one of the most cogent arguments on atheism written by an Indian (biblioclastic clerics, please take note). But across the new century, you can never call yourself a non-believer, and discuss that in public.
The "controversial" Johann Hari article begins like this: "The right to criticise religion is being slowly doused in acid. Across the world, the small, incremental gains made by secularism – giving us the space to doubt and question and make up our own minds – are being beaten back by belligerent demands that we "respect" religion." And it goes on to question instances of Islamic intolerance, particularly those emanating from
Do we agree? Do we disagree? But do we recognise the right of people to say the opposite of what we want to hear?
In Kolkata you’re less sure. You wake up in the old science-fiction dream where you have those matchbox-shaped brick habitats where the human settlers live, cultivate, and read, and try to contact their missing earth-bound spaceships, while innumerable aliens of antiquarian shapes loom large. You realise you’ve stranded on a spinning mad planet, and the planet’s name is Earth. But you wish it were Solaris, or something like that. Nothing harmful in wishing, I guess?
[The link for "Why should I respect these oppressive religions?" is:
The writer is a SYLFF Fellow at