The Hindu Business Line : The furies of Salman Rushdie

THERE is nothing quite like the seasonal disturbance of Salman Rushdie in a fit of the vapours. The great Cham of Anglo-Pakistani letters, in an interview with the German news magazine Der Spiegal, accused British media scribes of wishing his death at the hands of the Iranian ayatollahs whose fatwa had called for his life. He was held guilty of blaspheming against God and the Prophet of Islam in his novel, The Satanic Verses.

The fatwa, like Jove's thunderbolt, had emerged from the blue. Mr Rushdie, in surreal bliss, was basking in the glory of his three British television documentaries on India which showed how a brutish Hindu majority was reducing the country's minority Muslims and Sikhs to hewers of wood and drawers of water. His coruscating commentary and his foreword to Tariq Ali's book, The Nehrus and the Gandhis, came perilously close to celebrating Indira Gandhi's assassination. In one of his earlier works, he had suggested that she had murdered her husband, a libel for which Mr Rushdie was forced by a British court to pay damages to the late Indian prime minister.

The reason for Mr Rushdie's ire remains a mystery but methinks the Iron Lady's crime, in his eyes, was the way she had presided over India's military defeat of Pakistan in December 1971. It was clearly bad enough for a nation of believers to have been vanquished in battle by a despised and cowardly adversary believed to be in serious deficit of the martial attributes; to have been laid low by the resolution and cunning of a diminutive Hindu woman was an intolerable humiliation that compounded the shame.

No fancy British public school education, not even a spell at Cambridge, can guarantee exorcism of the spirits of the darkest night. The consumptive rage that drove Mohammed Ali Jinnah to hate and despise Gandhiji, and the convulsions that boiled over within Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and inspired his crusader's call for a 1000-year holy war with India are dismal reminders that ritual obeisance to Western high living brings no automatic reward of Western high thinking.

British scribes are bemused by Mr Rushdie's latest outburst. They recall with others how the great and the good, who included every name in British intellectual and political life, stood resolutely by him in his hour of need. There were meetings and assembles galore, each well publicised, some televised and broadcast. Such expressions of solidarity brooked no indifference, no casuistry that would muzzle free speech and free thinking in his defence. Ms Margaret Thatcher, as British Prime Minister, placed Mr Rushdie, as British citizen, under the full protection of the British state.

A posse of armed detectives took it in turns to guard him day and night. Ms Thatcher behaved with honour and dignity in upholding the rule of law in the finest traditions of her country. She had been subjected to persistent abuse by Mr Rushdie who, bit between radical chic teeth, hinted at a parallel between the perceived racism of British society and the apartheid regime of South Africa, to the understandable anger of certain Tory MPs. The protection afforded Mr Rushdie amounted to a king's ransom; however, he did defray part of the cost from his ample royalties. But now, he claims, the British state had made a fast buck out of him.

The Evening Standard columnist, Ms Melanie McDonagh, was anything but cool. "Well! Talk about ingratitude... Perhaps, he is just annoyed that the reviews of his last novel, Fury, were so bad. What he calls `hatchet journalists' are probably what the rest of us would describe as literary critics".

Rushdie is addicted to praise that is fulsome, and its pointed denial has led to withdrawal symptoms, hence, the petulant tantrum of the fallen star. During his times of trouble, when he was berating the British government for being tardy in not taking a more confrontationist approach with the Iranian authorities (nothing less than a declaration of war would have satisfied our hero), Pakistani demonstrators in London and elsewhere were busy burning Mr Rushdie's offending novel in public and demanding his execution. Their banners proclaimed an exotic wisdom which, for onlookers, added greatly to the gaiety of the occasion. Said one: "Islam is the only suitable creed for Europe". According to another, "Rousseau greatest champion of human liberty and equality deeply inspired by the Prophet Mohammed".

There was Muslim violence in parts of India and the Government, in the interests of social peace, banned The Satanic Verses. An outraged Rushdie published an open letter to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, refusing to accept that he spoke for a civilised nation. Its offensive tone would have invited damnation from the progressive fraternity if the writer by some mischance had happened to be white.

Mr Rushdie is not a man for half-measures. When the dodging from one safe house to the next became increasingly fraught, he sought penitence from an London-based Egyptian dentist who claimed to represent the face of liberal Islam and was a familiar voice in the nation's inter-faith dialogue. As a quid pro quo for forgiveness, which meant the removal of the fatwa, Mr Rushdie undertook to devote his time and best energies to "Islamic causes". There flowed from his prolific pen a spate of articles on Muslim suffering in Kashmir and Palestine at the hands of Hindu and Jewish oppressors. These were published by an obliging Independent in London.

The mea culpa failed to serve its purpose. There being a divine hand behind the fatwa, what God proposed only God could dispose. No human agency was empowered to withdraw its sentence. The free-masonry of agnostics beckoned. Mr Rushdie moved from faith to reason without any an anaesthetic to dull the pain.

He first anathemised Britain and India for holding the Indo-British festival of culture in 1982, directing his volleys at Mrs Thatcher and Indira Gandhi. His subsequent broadsides against both countries have the merit of consistency and singleness of purpose. His claim to an Indian label is a trifling baffling, though. His parents and family packed their bags and left Bombay for their new Pakistani homeland when Rushdie was at school, aged seven. He acquired British citizenship after he had surrendered a Pakistani, not an Indian, passport. But, yes, he recently won back his ancestral property near Shimla by order of the Indian courts. He did so, he boasted, without having to shake any BJP minister or official by the hand and so help the Hindu nationalist cause. Pecksniffian rectitude is not without its charms.

Sir Vidia Naipaul... Magnificent silence?

Sir Vidia Naipaul was quick to acknowledge his debt to Britain, where he now lives, and to India, the land of his forbears, after winning the Nobel Prize for literature.

He has made it a habit never to kowtow to political fashion or burn incense at the altar of political correctness.

His meditations on India's past and his reflections on the Islamic world may not always command assent but they cast a luminous light on his uncompromising moral integrity.

His truths are also uncomfortably close to the bone as the events of September 11 and after have made abundantly clear. In a question and answer session with the New York Times Magazine, Sir Vidia ruled out American foreign policy as the cause of Twin Towers suicide attack. It was, he said, religious hatred, pure and simple.

"The world is getting more and more out of reach of simple people who have only religion. And the more they depend on religion, which of course solves nothing, the more the world gets out of reach. The oil money in the 1970s," he opined, "gave the illusion that power had come to the Islamic world.

It was as though up there was a divine supermarket, and at last it had become open to the Muslim world. They did not understand that the goods that gave them power in the end were made by another civilisation. This was intolerable to accept, and remains intolerable."

These could also be words of warning to the lunatic elements of the Sangh Parivar in India whose narrowness of mind and spirit are an uncanny take on their Islamic adversaries.

With doubt extinguished the last light of the candle is blown. No prophet should be without honour in any country that takes pride in a civilised and tolerant culture.

Sir Vidia Naipaul flies his personal standard. It has majesty and is instantly recognisable. Salman Rushdie has stalked Sir Vidia such as a jackal does a lion.

He has charged him with being an accomplice of Hindu fascism and a disgrace to the Nobel Prize. Sir Vidia has no need to rise to the bait.

He who boasts an Indian flag of convenience is best left to his own devices.

Sir Vidia's silence is magnificent.

(The author, a visiting tutor in Modern Asian History at Kellog College, Oxford, is editor of the London-based India Weekly.)

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