Dasu Krishnamoorty
Newspapers, long used to sticking labels and stereotypes to communities, are struggling to dodge labels that they might attract in the tricky job of analyzing the publication of Prophet Mohammed’s cartoons and the religious wrath that it released. The fury that Middle East has witnessed is not new. What is new is that the violence sweeping the region is a response to an injudicious exercise of freedom of expression. Most newspapers in India, Britain and the United States that decided against publishing the cartoons unequivocally asserted their right to publish or even blaspheme but questioned the timing of such publication. There are occasions when silence is golden and that seemed to be the consensus among newspapers that desisted from publishing the cartoons, without at the same time surrendering their right to free expression. Free speech, though a basic value like faith, has limits not only the state but also society imposes.
The cartoons have created an avoidable tussle between the religion of free expression and the religion of faith, a clash of cultures. Free expression is not negotiable because it is precondition to a democracy. From Joan of Arc to Salman Rushdie, it has been a long and troubled story of religion pitted against free expression. Some editor in Denmark trying to reassure himself of the health of freedom of the Danish press published cartoons depicting Prophet Mohammed in a manner not acceptable to civilized society. Adding fuel to fire, many European newspapers followed suit. The anger also spread to India and Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim populations, though in a low key.
It is a tragedy that the London bombings that claimed 55 lives have failed to persuade the Danish newspaper against its unbridled devotion to free expression. As a result, riotous mobs burnt down the Danish consulate in Beirut, the consulates of Norway and Denmark in Damascus, and burnt Danish flags in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, hundreds of students and teachers took to the streets of Lahore, calling for those responsible for the publication of the cartoons to be beheaded. Demonstrations against the caricatures also occurred in Baghdad; Khartoum, Sudan, and the Palestinian territories. Jordan`s leader, Anger boiled over in the Gaza Strip, where gunmen from Islamic Jihad occupied the office of the European Union. Danish goods were boycotted. Three people were killed on Monday when police in Afghanistan fired on protesters after a police station came under attack. In Somalia, a 14-year-old boy was shot dead and several others were injured after protesters attacked the police.
The cartoons furore generated cautious and often confusing media responses in India, Europe and America. Of the bigger newspapers, only the Times of India and Pioneer thought it fit to editorially make a comment. The outspoken Tavleen Singh opened the account for the Indian Express asking media not to meekly submit to religious intimidation. Pioneer took a view that readers generally do not associate with the BJP. Even if we agree with Pioneer that ‘the raging protest by Muslims against the publication of cartoons lampooning Prophet Mohammed in some European newspapers underscores the danger of being insensitive towards religious faith and belief,’ the assertion that the cartoons are a shameful attempt to foist cultural hegemony by the west is not a correct reading of the situation. Indeed, Pioneer need only to check the status of non-Muslim immigrants in Muslim countries to realize that it is the latter that deny cultural rights to the former. On the other hand, Muslim immigrants in Europe demand privileges that their own countries deny to non-Muslim immigrants. This irrationality, however, cannot be a ground for media to ignore boundaries of free expression before violence forces them to respect these.
The Times of India published a lengthy leader article pillorying ‘self-appointed’ champions of democracy and freedom of expression for challenging Islam`s fundamental compatibility with an open society. The Times almost justified one kind of fundamentalism by juxtaposing it with another: the protest against M.F.Hussain’s portrayal of a nude Saraswati. The Times perhaps does not remember that crowds had attacked the Deccan Herald office for publishing a short story that some Muslims thought had hurt their sentiments. For the editorial writer the Hussain incident has greater significance than the fact that the country has a third Muslim President. The Times article is an extremely poor specimen of editorial writing that seeks to forget history and wrap rank communalism in secular garb.
Hasan Suroor’s article in the Hindu, which shares Guardian’s perceptions on major issues, points out to islands of peaceful protests outside the Islamic mainland. If Suroor thinks that Muslims seem to have forfeited their right to be offended, he need to look at Indian media which stereotypes Hindu dissent as the Hindu Right. Suroor should have questioned the media right to free expression to include stereotyping of communities by race or religion.
In Britain, the Guardian recalled some old values of journalism that should be an eye-opener to English language newspapers in India that tend to display bias in reporting communal conflict by stereotyping entire communities. The Guardian said in an editorial, "Like other principles, freedom of speech is only absolute until it is shaped by its context. There are limits and boundaries -- of taste, law, convention, principle or judgment. All these constraints matter and cannot be automatically over-ridden by invoking the larger principle. In any case, the right to publish does not imply any obligation to do so. That is why the defiant republication of the cartoons in some parts of Europe (some of them with far less good histories of inter-communal relations than this country) is more questionable than it may appear at first sight."
The BBC had a dilemma that most media in the United States too encountered. It is this: should they publish the pictures and risk offending Muslim readers and viewers? Or by not showing them, would they be preventing the public from coming to informed opinions about the controversy? It simply played safe. Peter Horrocks, the editor of TV News, said "We`ve taken the view that still images that focus and linger on the offending cartoons would be excessively offensive so we haven`t used those in our television news pieces." While endorsing this view, the London Times editorial said, "The anger directed at these cartoons by certain Muslims would carry more weight if pictures that crudely insult Jews and Christians were not found regularly in the Middle East." Guardian countered this by writing, "It would not be appropriate, for instance, to publish an anti-Semitic cartoon of the sort that was commonplace in Nazi Germany." It perhaps did not know that the Arab media routinely print cartoons linking the Jewish faith to violence. The lesson for media is not to endorse one crudity to denounce another.
In the United States, charged with spreading anti-Islamic hysteria after 9/11, media chose to completely abjure First Amendment passions. Mainstream US newspapers including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune chose not to publish the cartoons. Their spokesmen said that the story could be told without cartoons that would hurt many. Most TV channels followed the same path. Only ABC showed cartoon.
For centuries, religion/church rode roughshod over the state and the fourth estate. Today, they are segregated everywhere except in Vatican and the Muslim world where the clergy interfere in the affairs of the state either directly or through fatwas. In the Muslim world, there is a growing demand, unfortunately even at the grassroots level, for overthrowing the rule of law in favor of the rule of Shariat. Religion is a purely private affair and the right to practice it is guaranteed by many constitutions in the world, including India’s. However, the Supreme Court has at least three times prescribed the limits to the exercise of such freedom. Similarly, the Constitution, even while conferring the right to free expression on every citizen, defined the legitimate space that is allotted for its exercise.
If we go by Danish law, the publisher of the cartoons broke no law. But it must be remembered that constitutions are basic documents that in their very nature define the superstructure or basic principles of fundamental rights and leave the details to the lawmakers and the courts. This arrangement is respected all over the civilized world. Even in the United States, where the media are oversensitive to attacks on their First Amendment Bible, they abide by the rule of law and where they disagree with judicial interpretation, they prefer jail to a surrender of what they deem is their constitutional privilege. The most recent case is that of the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s name in the media where the prosecutor fell back upon the law of the land and journalists invoked the protection of the First Amendment. This is the way fundamental rights are negotiated in democratic societies.
Indian media generally play down minority violence as a tribute to distorted notions of secularism. Communal riots that take place whatever party is in office claim not just the lives of the minorities but also the majority community. Media reports often convey the message that it is always the work of Hindu Right. This kind of skewed media coverage further inflames communal passions. As I have implied in an earlier article (Reporting) in The Hoot, the media and the NGOs have a lot to answer for widening the gap between the country’s two leading communities.
The media restraint that followed the cartoons-generated violence, even in Britain and the United States that witnessed 7/7 and 9/11, ought to guide the Indian media in times of future communal strife. Media fundamentalism cannot be an answer to religious fundamentalism.
Contact: dasukrishnamoorty@hotmail.com