By Jay Bhattacharjee
18th January 2015
The last week and a half seemed to last forever in one’s mind because of the sheer scale of barbarity and grisliness that one witnessed in the streets of Paris and its suburbs. We have been through this before; the Mumbai assault (particularly the image of the lone Pakistani gunman wreaking havoc on the railway platform), the Nairobi shopping mall massacre two years ago and, of course, the 9/11 events that now seem distant history.
When the world got over its initial horror and revulsion, and the presidents and kings left Paris for their own bailiwicks, it was business as usual for the opinion-makers and the so-called thinkers and intellectuals, specially in the Fourth Estate. After the initial catering to TRPs and all the other parameters that keep the cash counters ringing, the media moghuls and the culture vultures retreated to their lairs from where they preach their convoluted gospels. The three-day interregnum was finished and their fundamental agenda could no longer be ignored.
This writer has been a dispassionate student and observer of the “secular” media and intellectuals for at least two decades. The logic behind the way they respond to events, in the name of so-called balance, is mystifying. The manner in which many of the torchbearers of conscience responded to the Charlie Hebdo episode goes against the very principles they claim to defend —freedom of speech and liberty.
There are two principal arguments that we dissect here. The first concerns the comments of a senior writer that the behaviour of the Charlie Hebdo journalists was “utterly bizarre, indeed suicidal”. He goes on to predict that the determination of the French journal’s staff to “pay any price to safeguard its independence” will lead to “more terror attacks, greater polarisation along religious lines that would further alienate the country’s Muslim minority”.
The second is from a self-anointed prima donna who pontificates that “the killing of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists was unacceptable, no one has any right to gun down a critic. Yet beyond the tragic deaths, perhaps it’s best when the cartoon remains a cartoon: a weapon of laughter and thought, not a weapon of war against religious beliefs”. This is a mindset that is fraught with contradictions. Liberty, equality and fraternity, the fundamental principles of the French revolution, imagined a universal freedom of mind and action. Nothing is taboo except criminal acts and treason. Perhaps, Voltaire’s dictum of disagreeing with someone’s statement but fighting till death to defend that person’s right to say so was too subtle for these proponents of “secularism” and sanctity of religious beliefs.
The two positions set out above provide a capsule summary of all that ails this bunch. They are happy to predict a horror scenario if genuine secularists (not of the 24 Akbar Road variety) behave according to their conscience and beliefs. More lamentably, there is a terribly condescending and subliminal admission from them that one has the right to murder one’s critics.
The bottom line in all this sermonising and pontification is that liberty of expression must have its limits, especially when it comes to making fun of ‘religious belief’, that too of one specific religion, Islam. If you do so, you are inviting trouble. The undeclared proposition is that other religious faiths are fair game, because their adherents are not enjoined by their religions to murder and massacre those who crack jokes about their creeds. The Indic faiths (Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism and Jainism) are clearly favourite targets, followed by Judaism and Christianity.
The last named was in the same camp as Islam a few hundred years ago, but suddenly saw the advent of the Renaissance and Reformation. Over the next three hundred years, Christianity ceased to be a vengeful, merciless faith that butchered its opponents or those who mocked it. Judaism, in any case, was the most eclectic of the three religions “of the Book” and never resorted to proselytisation and conversion. Jews, because of their tortured history, learnt to laugh at their god as soon as they realised that laughter was a necessary medicine for them to forget their daily travails. The best jokes on Jews came from their camp, their own flock, so to say.
In the distorted worldview of these media pundits and thinkers, who are quoted here, the Indic faiths are the ones that are forever ordained to bear the cross, pardon the pun. Any insult and any sophisticated “caricaturing” of these four faiths are fair game, as they qualify squarely as freedom of expression and liberty of thought.
This scenario is replicated, with minor modifications, by many Anglo-Saxon media high-priests. Which leads me to sign off with the old dictum that most of these hacks succeed because of their plausible manner, some literary ability and capacity to steal others’ ideas. Truth and principles count for nothing.
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