Bans binned

The logical end of censorship,Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once claimed,“is when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.” In banning Jaswant Singh’s magnum opus Jinnah: India,Partition-Independence,the Gujarat government was certainly following the first half of this dictum: it banned a book that virtually everybody in the political class is ploughing through. This,even though the Gujarat government had obviously not read the book,a discrepancy which the Gujarat High Court pointed out in its order overturning the ban.

That the decision to ban Jaswant Singh’s book — a decision that ran concurrently with the BJP’s decision to expel its author — was politically motivated is a no-brainer. The ostensible reasons were either absurd (that the book would cause communal violence) or cynical opportunism (that derogatory references to Sardar Patel were made). In fact,the book’s references to Patel,for historians to nit-pick over,were clearly harmless,as the book’s consequences elsewhere show. The Gujarat High Court rightly pointed out that the Gujarat government’s notification did not make even the pretence of an argument. In such a situation,the notification was a violation of the constitutionally guaranteed rights of free speech and expression.

A party that glorifies these fundamental rights when it comes to books by Salman Rushdie or Taslima Nasreen demeans itself when it advocates censorship when convenient. The bogie of Sardar Patel was especially repugnant,the hope that some political harvest could be gained in the land of his birth. Not all of the BJP thought the same way:  Karnataka Chief Minister B. S. Yeddyurappa refused to ban the book. But it seems that the Gujarat government has learnt neither from his example,nor the high court’s pronouncement: it might issue another notification,with fresh grounds for a ban. If that is indeed its intention,the state government should rethink. And it is hoped that political leaderships across party and state lines will read this as a sign that capricious bans are out.