How India and Muslim world joined hands to protest Western prejudice against oriental religious sensitivities

Amid the increasingly fraught Hindu-Muslim relations, illustrated by the latest  communal flare-up  in Haryana, a good story of Hindu-Muslim solidarity on the international stage has gone  unnoticed.

In an unprecedented move, India joined hands with the Muslim world at the UN to protest the alarming rise in religious phobias in the West with a surge in attacks on places of Hindu worship, including defacement and destruction of temples and idols, especially in America. 

The Oppenheimer film which controversially has a sex scene featuring a line from the Bhagavad Gita has reinforced the perception that it is an open season on Hinduism. 

India has long demanded that the UN recognise “Hinduphobia” but in vain. Frustrated  by the UN’s dilly-dallying, it has decided to do what it should have probably done long ago: Form a broader front with other victims of Western religious prejudice.

So, when — in the wake of a string of incidents of desecration of the Quran in Sweden and Denmark — Pakistan brought in a resolution at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC)  condemning the “alarming rise in …public acts of religious hatred”, India threw its considerable diplomatic weight behind it facilitating its adoption.

India’s crucial support represented a rare display of Hindu-Muslim/ India-Pakistan solidarity against  Western doctrine of absolute free speech. Which has led to an egregious disregard for religious and cultural sensitivities of non-Western traditions and is fuelling culture wars.

Notably, all  the 28 countries which voted in favour of the resolution were from outside the  Western bloc and included China, South Africa, Vietnam, Ukraine, and of course the Muslim world represented by 19 members of the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC).  Predictably,  big Western powers – America, Britain, France, Germany and Belgium — all voted against it but for a change  ended up on the losing  side.

Some commentators, while welcoming a united front on the issue, have noted that during the debate some Muslim and non-Muslim countries appeared more interested in pushing their own priorities ignoring the original spirit of the motion. 

Pakistan, for example, spent all its energy on highlighting the rise in Islamophobia across the West. Not a word on Indian concerns about  attacks on Hindus and Sikhs.

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, speaking through a video link, condemned the  desecration of Quran as  “incitement to religious hatred, discrimination and attempts to provoke violence”.  

India’s statement also tended to focus on growing Hinduphobia , though unlike Pakistan it did make the point that followers of other religions were also victims of   “instances of intolerance…(and) prejudice”.

Urging the international community to “recognise the instances of intolerance, prejudice, phobia, and violence against followers of all religions and work together to eliminate them”, it said: “In various regions of the world, we have witnessed defacement and destruction of temples and idols, glorification of desecration of idols, violation of gurudwara premises, massacre of Sikh pilgrims and numerous other acts of religious intolerance.” 

In the quibbling over who said what, it  is important not to miss woods for the trees – namely the broader aim of  calling out the arbitrary Western notion of free speech which has made all manners of  hate-mongering legit  in the name of the right to free speech.  

As the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk pointed out, any form of hate directed against any faith or its followers was “offensive, irresponsible and wrong”.

Making a distinction between free speech and hate speech, he called for a sensible balance to be struck between the two. 

“Free speech is as indispensable as hate speech is indefensible…”, he said. 

His message to Western liberal champions of the right to absolute freedom was:  “Our vigour to protect free speech must not lose sight of the imperative to reject hate speech.”

Currently,  the balance is disproportionately tilted in favour of Western free speech orthodoxy. It is this orthodoxy  which allows manners of provocative actions  in the name of the right to free speech that is now being challenged. 

No doubt, we’ll hear the same “free speech” argument in relation to the Oppehneimer controversy.  Actually, it’s a case of invented speech! Creative imagination gone wild. Because there is no evidence that Oppenheimer actually recited the verse in the circumstances he is shown to have done in the film. 

Documents from his archive accessed by the London Review of Books,  the first words he  is supposed to have uttered after the successful  A-bomb test was NOT -“I am become Death, destroyer of worlds” — but rather more prosaic: “Well, it worked.”

Clearly, the scene was intended to titillate without any regard that  reciting a holy text in a raunchy sex scene might hurt Hindu sentiments. The Western doctrine of free speech trumps everything else and includes the right to  insult. There are no red lines – and the boundary between civilised free expression and rudeness and hate has all but disappeared. 

This  despite the fact that most countries have anti-hate speech laws, and often pretty strict ones as in Britain, but they are reluctant to use them. There is also an element of double standards  with rules applied selectively. So, while Hindu, Muslim and even Christian sentiments are happily trod on, slightest criticism of Israel, let alone Jewish people, is promptly dubbed “anti-semitic”. 

Having said that, however, there is also a need to take a good hard look at our own tendency  — and by “our”, I mean all communities (Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Dalits) — to cry foul at the drop of the hat. We can go on complaining about Western liberal bias et al, the big elephant in the room is our own out-of-control culture of “hurt sentiments” which threatens to close all avenues of creative imagination and dissent. 

It has become commonplace for someone somewhere demanding a ban on a film or a book for offending their feelings. And, successive governments have fed this  frenzy by appeasing anti-free speech warriors. It started with hyper-Muslim “sensitivities”, most memorably with the ban Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses which Muslims declared blasphemous even without reading it. 

The canker has since spread to other communities to the extent that even a joking reference to a certain colour or dress is considered offensive. Questions have been raised over the government’s active intervention  in the Oppenheimer row with the Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur’s  demanding an “explanation” from the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) on how it passed such a scene; and the Information Commissioner Uday Mahurkar shooting off a letter to Nolan calling his film a “disturbing attack on Hinduism”.

Worse, of course, was the Muslim world’s reaction to stray Islamophobic attacks with Swedish and Danish embassies in several countries, including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Yemen vandalised by rampaging protesters. Their diplomats were harassed.  Iran refused to send its new ambassador to Sweden, and Qatar’s biggest market, Souq Al Baladi, removed Swedish products in protest.

Not to be left behind, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation lost no time in suspending the status of Sweden’s special envoy accusing the  Swedish authorities of “licensing” the “repeated abuse of the sanctity of the Holy Quran and Islamic symbols”.

It was a  cringingly disproportionate response to some random madcap acts reinforcing the perception of Muslim intolerance.  Ultimately, the best way to fight other people’s phobias is to rid ourselves (whether Hindus or Muslims) of our own phobias about others reflected in our gleeful references to  “racist West”, “communal Hindus”, “fundamentalist Muslims”. 

Let the charity begin at home. Any takers?

The writer is an independent columnist and the author of Unmasking Indian Secularism: Why We Need A New Hindu-Muslim Deal. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.

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