A Jaipur Literary Festival audience

It was yet another victory for Trump. The reports of America’s decline are exaggerated. The Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) proved it. POTUS – President of the United States – matters. Donald Trump got mentioned in several sessions. Hovering as a spectre over a literary festival in a distant land is a great achievement, beyond the President of Mongolia and the Supreme Leader of North Korea.If Donald Trump did not tweet about the Jaipur Literature Festival, it was because he was too busy with his inauguration. India got ignored because the good women of this civilisation did not join the international march against the new POTUS.

At JLF, all references to Trump were critical and every scathing remark about him was greeted with derisive laughter by the audience. But Trump derives oxygen of publicity from critical comments. These energise his cultish constituency. His fans, like the devotees of all cult heads, are ever ready with an abusive and intimidating response to the leader’s critics. A quick response team goes into battle on the social media.

Soon after moving into the White House, Trump phoned the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a fellow populist leader, and invited him to visit the White House. Trump could hardly complain to Modi against those in Jaipur who misjudged him. They were mainly Americans, Britons and Non Resident Indians.

A big nuisance

Political leaders get implicated in literary conversations because the ills of the world are felt most acutely by the sensitive souls. Poets and playwrights spot the emerging dystopia even while politicians falsify a given situation as per their set partisan agenda. That is why the politicians in power consider the writers and poets to be a big nuisance.

A democratic leader lets the writers speak even if she is unable to build a nation of their dreams. Another kind of leader, whether elected or unelected, unleashes on writers and other dissenters either the oppressive state machinery or his party’s storm-troopers. The use of the non-state actors is a preferred option because it protects his own “democratic” credentials and no questions are asked by some US-based Freedom Forum established during the cold war.

The prominent Indian writers who had retuned their awards protesting against rising intolerance and intimidation of writers and rationalists were not invited to the Jaipur Literature Festival this time but some of those who came pointed a finger at the ills afflicting the contemporary India. A famous poet from the Hindi film world “barked” and celebrated his “freedom to bark”. So what if he cannot bite he said, acknowledging the failure of poetry to influence politics! He knows we are not in the romantic age and poets are no longer unacknowledged legislators of the world. Hovering as a spectre over a literary festival in a distant land is a great achievement, beyond the President of Mongolia and the Supreme Leader of North Korea.

“Terrible inauguration”

The attack on Trump began at the opening session of the festival. American poet-performer Anne Waldman, in her keynote address, referred to the “terrible inauguration” in Washington DC. She went further than Meryl Streep, shouting in solidarity with her sisters, daughters, children and all women marching towards Washington to protest against the impending inauguration of Trump as President.
 

Anne Waldman reading, 2015. Flickr/kellywritershouse

That was just the beginning. Trump kept coming in for dishonourable mention and those making snide remarks included eminent speakers and moderators. A British writer said he would not even utter the name of the new American President. He didn’t have to. American writer Paul Beatty went further in an interview saying there is a reason that people picked this guy (Trump). “He is an apparition, but he is both real and unreal, and people see something in him.”

A Jaipur newspaper quoted a state minister belonging to Modi’s party. The eight-column headline said “PM Modi has some divine power: Kataria”. No devotee of Trump has gone that far.

Another English daily carried a long opinion piece arguing that both Modi and Trump are textbook populists. The writer said that Modi matched all the characteristics of a populist leader as defined by Princeton Professor Jan-Werner Muller in his book “What is Populism?”

Both leaders are polarising figures and both do not sit idle for a moment. They tweet and they tweet. They are not afraid of making politically incorrect remarks and very simple statements. They take on the elites fond of articulating complex thoughts. Modi and Trump know what an American columnist said: In tough times, people want someone who can make a compelling pitch and inspire a sense of urgency. Integrity and intelligence are not what the voters are after.

Apart from the stray comments by individual speakers, the entire final session of the festival referred to Trump as it was titled: “Debate: We are living in a Post-Truth World”. It was a topical subject but the debate only proved what some writers have been saying: “There is no space left for a real public discourse.”

The organisers had framed the issue mainly in the context of Trump and Brexit since lies were used in the two campaigns. As the debate progressed, the spectre of Narendra Modi came to haunt it. Since Prime Minister Modi has been blamed for not being truthful while electioneering and while selling his demonetisation decision, his supporters suspect words such as “Post-Truth World”.

In India, the list of “provocative” words keeps expanding. Politicians hijack words and phrases to make them seductive or repellent. The frame of reference matters. In contemporary India, anyone uttering the words “intolerant” or “inclusive” or “secular” is branded as a critic of Modi.

Slippery slope

Trump is cited most by those commenting on the post-truth world. Of course, the argument about the rise of passion as the prime instrument of winning power has been validated in the recent years in India, America and Europe.

Thus the debate in the JLF reflected the polarisation between the supporters of Modi who saw the slippery slope. If you light a verbal fire around Trump, it will soon reach Modi, they feared. And it did. One speaker devalued the very term “post-truth”. He detected in it a conspiracy by the liberal media. He told the British critics that what Trump does is not their business. He wanted the audience to pay respect to the wise voters of America. He pointed out with satisfaction that women of India did not join the global protest against Trump! He was not upset by the attack on a fellow journalist launched by Trump at his press conference.

Since the expression “post-truth” is not as simple as “lies”, there was considerable scope for philosophical musings. What is truth, it was asked and no one was prepared to wait for an answer. The meditation on the nature of the truth involved words such as “my truth”, “your truth”. A writer found it necessary to quote Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

In a literary festival, Trump could have even been lauded for his power of imagination and for creating fiction to fight a political battle! Emotion-based politics is closer to literature than fact-based rhetoric. A professor of literature would say that literature is important precisely because it is not bound by facts. “It is important because it is not bound up in issues of law, science, medicine or business.”
 

Entering the Jaipur Literary Festival.Manish Swarup/Press Association.

It is said that one can gain more understanding about the human heart from Shakespeare than from Freud. Myron Magnet asks in an essay: "Can anyone think that the studies of Margaret Mead or Alfred Kinsey tell us anything nearly as true as Ovid or Turgenev?"

Conclusion

Since both Trump and Modi excite hearts rather than minds, they ought to be invited to the next Jaipur Literature Festival. Modi’s book of poems could be among the scores of books that are released at JLF.

It will fit into JLF’s intellectual agenda since the organisers say that the festival should not just be a bubble in which the liberals talk to liberals. Going by this policy, this time they invited two leaders of the RSS, a right-wing cultural organisation that mentors the ruling party. Modi was groomed by the RSS from a young age.

Participation by Trump and Modi will fit into JLF’s commercial agenda also. It will gain significant sponsors as the American Embassy and the Indian Ministry of Finance.

If the Modi Government accepts the suggestion made at JLF by a noted TV journalist, it would set up a Ministry for History. That ministry could sponsor presentations by two non-Marxist historians. Like the truth, there is also “My History vs. Your History.” That may be a topic for the next JLF. Rival historians can then come and fight outside the Groves of Academe!

(L K Sharma has followed no profession other than journalism for more than four decades, covering criminals and prime ministers. Was the European Correspondent of The Times of India based in London for a decade. Reported for five years from Washington as the Foreign Editor of the Deccan Herald. Edited three volumes on innovations in India. He has completed a work of creative nonfiction on V. S. Naipaul).

This article was first published on openDemocracy.
 

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This came after Nasreen made controversial remarks supporting Uniform Civil Code at a session at the festival on Monday causing protests from the audience.

“They expressed their anger…. I heard them out. Explained we supported minorities in every way. Underscored that we are a platform for all points of view. Agreed that we should consider their request not to reinvite them,” Sanjoy K Roy, Producer of JLF, was quoted by PTI.

Among those who protested her comments were Rajasthan Muslim Forum, All India Milli Council, Jamaat-e-Islami and Muslim Personal Law Board. The Muslim bodies had said on Tuesday that Nasreen was a disputed personality.
The controversial writer has been living in exile since 1994. During her stay in India, she has been made anti-Islam comments both through her social media pages and other public platforms.

They demanded that no invitation must be extended to the writer again.

“Nasreen is a disputed personality. JLF organisers did not name her in the schedule in JLF booklet. Organisers played hide and seek game and police administration too supported her and allowed her in a session. So we had gone to protest.

“We had a meeting with organisers where producer Sanjoy Roy promised that they will not provide platform to Salman Rushdie and Nasreen from next year,” Mehrunnisa Khan, state president of Women India Movement, had told PTI yesterday.

Taslima participated in a surprise session titled, ‘Exile’ at the festival yesterday, the speakers for which were not revealed until the morning of the concluding day, presumably to avoid the sort of protests that rocked the pink city 10 years ago, when the writer was refused shelter in the city after being driven out of Kolkata by the West Bengal government.

Last evening, the festival’s co-director William Dalrymple appeared unwilling to disclose much.

“I vaguely knew that she was coming,” was the most he would offer when asked by PTI.

During her session, Nasreen batted for a Uniform Civil Code as a tool for “empowerment” and said the Islamic society needed to be more tolerant towards criticism to make progress.

“It is necessary for Islamic society to be tolerant and accept criticism without which they cannot progress. Uniform Civil Code is urgently required for empowering people with human rights,” she had said.

Upholding the freedom of writers around the world, she slammed religious fanatics, saying she did not believe in terms like “nationalism” or “religious fundamentalism”.

“I don’t believe in nationalism, religious fundamentalism.

I believe in one world. I believe in rights, freedom, humanism and rationalism. Until Islam accepts criticism, no Islamic country can be considered secular. Whenever I criticise, people want to kill me,” she had said.

Nasreen, an award-winning writer, is best known for her powerful writings on women oppression and unflinching criticism of religion.

Courtesy: Janta Ka Reporter

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Senior journalist Shekhar Gupta was right when he lambasted those opposing space for the right wingers. When you do so, he argued, it is the liberal space that gets shrunk. It was none other than the much-hated, anti-right-wing Prime Minister Nehru who rejected a suggestion by the editor of the weekly Blitz, RK Karanjia, to proscribe the RSS as it was opposed to the constitutional values of India. Banning ideological groups would only drove them underground where they could assume a dangerously subversive power, Nehru felt. Even a majoritarian ideology like that of the RSS needs to be fought out in the open.

Moreover, now it is not the prerogative of the liberal or the left to have a dialogue with the right. It is in fact the right-wing, which now has the authority to decide whether the obsolete beings known as liberals or leftists would be allowed in public spaces or not. Even those who earlier championed liberal democratic values seem to have started to examine what they say, keeping in view the sensitivity of the right-wing masters of the day.

We see it being done in the universities where your position should depend upon the recognition of your work by your peers in academia. But increasingly we find heads of academic institutions performing a balancing act by constantly creating occasions to give platform to the so-called “intellectuals” of the RSS. So, one should not be surprised or upset that the JLF is inviting such intellectuals belonging to the RSS.

Of course, the right wing voices should not be shunned. They need to be made part of a civil dialogue or conversation. One is only struck by the timing of this realisation by the organisers of the JLF. The RSS was always there but for the last 10 years of its existence, it didn’t qualify as a potential participant of the JLF. But a little reflection should show that the real problem is not the presence of the RSS ideologues at the event but the main sponsor of the JLF, whose name is prefixed to that of the festival. Perhaps some of the finest minds from India and abroad who are attending the event should be reminded that they would be hosted by those very people who were instrumental in vehemently mobilising and instigating lynch mobs against some of their peers.

Murderous campaigns
Let us not forget the murderous campaign last January against young student activists of Jawaharlal Nehru University. So effective was the vilification that the then president of the university students union, Kanahaiya Kumar, was almost killed in an attack on him by a group of lawyers in Delhi. In fact, so pervasive were the hate-campaigns, led by the very television news channel whose name is prefixed to the JLF, that they have made Kanhaiya Kumar and other student leaders permanently vulnerable to attack by people who have been persuaded by the propaganda that these young students are “anti-national”.

It didn’t stop there. Nivedita Menon, a respected professor and feminist writer, was targeted by the same news channel, inciting violence against her. Gauhar Raza, an Urdu poet and scientist at the government-funded Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, was declared a member of “Afzal-lover gang”, a reference to Afzal Guru, the convict hanged for his role in the 2001 Parliament attacks. These were not isolated attacks, as the tirade against these writers and scholars continued on the channel for many days .

People who have not thus been targeted would perhaps say that such attacks need not be taken seriously. They fail to realise that for those whose faces have been displayed on television prominently for days, and described as friends of terrorists or anti-nationals, it is matter of life and death. They are under mortal threat.

That we should leave our peers and young out in the cold and enjoy the company of hate-mongers is heartbreaking. It is nobody’s argument that merely by attending the event, those doing so become advocates of hate-ideology. But they do turn into their legitimisers.

Besides, it is not only about the insecurity of our own, those we meet in seminars and book readings. There is another section of our society, made friendless in India by the RSS. The channel, which would be hosting our writers and intellectuals in Jaipur, has been at the forefront of a propaganda war against Muslims. Its blatantly false reporting about Kairana in Western Utter Pradesh is only one such example. It has portrayed Muslims as a threatening presence for Hindus in Kairana and in Dhulagargh in West Bengal.

Or consider how this channel handled the 2015 case in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, when 50-year-old Mohammed Akhlaq was lynched by a mob because it was rumoured that his family had been eating beef. Writers, artists and scientists protested the killing and the rise of intolerance, which embarrassed the government and the party in power. But these very writers were attacked as being anti-national by the channel which is the patron of the celebration of creativity in Jaipur.

Unfreedom and fear
The organisers of the JLF were urged to come out of the patronage of the Muslim haters and propagandists of hate. It has been reported that they did try to look for alternative sponsors but failed to find them. It is being argued that the JLF, having evolved into a unique institution, could not have afforded discontinuity. It is important to continue and sustain it and therefore one should understand the compulsion of the organisers who, it is claimed, want to build a literary culture in this country where literature is not celebrated publicly.

We are asked to be considerate to the organisers who have dedicated to the task of building a literary culture in India and abroad. If you want to do things on this scale, you need to make some compromises.But do we need such a massive celebration? It is the gigantic scale that necessitates the participation of corporations, the head of one of India’s top management institutions told this writer. The ethical universe of these corporations, he said, is defined by a very old and simple word: profit. They cannot be expected to be proponents of freedom and democracy. The Indian corporate lords have not an exemplary record in this regard.

The last two and half years have been torturous for the minorities for whom this country has turned into an open prison. We, in universities and elsewhere, too have lived with a feeling of unfreedom and fear. This feeling has brought us closer to understanding what the minorities face. Our normal existence has been interrupted. It is a zombie-culture we are made part of. Therefore, it is not surprising to see – in fact, it is difficult to miss – the strategic mind behind the theme of the JLF, which is Bhakti.

The selection of the theme brings to mind something Bertolt Brecht wrote: “Times of extreme oppression are usually times when there is much talk about high and lofty matters. At such times it takes courage to write of low and ignoble matters.”
In India 2017, we need this courage as badly as oxygen.

(First published in Scroll on 18.01.2017)

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