Charlie Hebdo Massacre & Indian Intellectual Chicanery

Two demons barged into an editorial conference at Charlie Hebdo in Paris and gunned down ten innocent, unsuspecting human beings. While making their retreat they gunned down two security officials. It was a barbaric, act. It was a heinous crime against humanity. Two of their possible accomplices shot dead a policewoman; held a Jewish grocery store hostage and killed four innocent shoppers. The macabre acts were not done in the heat of passion. They were cold-blooded and premeditated. They cannot be justified no matter what the provocation was. They should be condemned in no uncertain terms. There should be no equivocation. There can be no alibis and no ifs and buts.

The international media has condemned the Charlie Hebdo massacre in unequivocal terms. Any right thinking individual would do it. Any right thinking individual in the media or public life would do it, not just because those in public life or the media thrive on ‘freedom of expression’ but because it is the morally right thing to do.

In its editorial on January 7, The Guardian opined that the gruesome incident should be condemned without equivocation:

“Events in Paris today were beyond belief, indeed beyond words. The adjectives are simply not there to capture the horror unleashed by weapons of war in a civilian office. The hooded thugs trained their Kalashnikovs on free speech everywhere. If they are allowed to force a loss of nerve, conversation will become inhibited, and the liberty of thought itself will falter too. […] The targeting of a weekly editorial conference implies a ruthless concern to maximise the toll, pursued with chilling preparedness. […] All those who are appalled by these crimes must use the free speech which the killers sought to silence – and use it to condemn them, without equivocation.”

In its editorial, The Washington Post (January 7) lamented that:

“SEVERAL PUBLISHERS in Western countries have disgraced themselves in recent years with self-censorship to avoid being targeted by Islamic militants. […] Media in democratic nations must also consciously commit themselves to rejecting intimidation by Islamic extremists or any other movement that seeks to stifle free speech through violence. […] Such acts cannot be allowed to inspire more self-censorship – or restrict robust coverage and criticism of Islamic extremism.”

Post-revolution France is given to democratic freedoms (her motto is Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) like the ancient Indian empires such as Magadha, Maurya, Gupta and the more recent Vijayanagara et al. Unlike contemporary India where secularism is a political tool France is a truly secular republic which in its original sense means that the church and government should remain aloof from each other.

Charlie Hebdo has not singled out Islam in its criticism. Indeed, in the past it ridiculed the Catholic Church and the Pope himself. The role of the Indian media in condemning the massacre is none too edifying. It could not whole-heartedly condemn the massacre, consumed as it is by dhimmitude and probably chastened by past experience:

The 1986 attack on Deccan Herald, Bangalore  is a case in point. The provocation was the English translation of a short story the paper published — the original of which was published a decade earlier in a Kerala newspaper. In the violence that followed sixteen people were killed. 

The Bangalore offices of the The New Indian Express came under religious fire over an article it published on the New Year Day of 2000. It was written by senior journalist T. J. S. George who merely referenced a seven-hundred year old work of the Italian poet/philosopher Dante. He had to go underground for several days to escape the wrath of lynch mobs. 

According to a 2002 article in India Today ‘[a]ll four English newspapers in Bangalore [Deccan Herald, The Hindu, The New Indian Express and Times Of India] have had their offices vandalized by Muslim mobs on the flimsiest of pretexts’ at one time or other.

The violent reactions might not have been spontaneous. They might have been instigated by the zeitgeist of competitive secular assertiveness. (Here the word ‘secular’ must be understood in its skewed Indian sense.)

There are other violent instances perpetrated in the name of Islam such as the 2007 attack on Bangladeshi writer Tasliman Nasreen in Hyderabad.

In another gruesome instance T. J. Joseph, a Malayalam professor at Newman College in Thodupuzha, Kerala had his hand cut off as punishment for blasphemy. According some reports the punishment was awarded by a Taliban type kangaroo court (Darul Khada). Intimidated by the barbarity of the attack, rather than defending its professor, the college dismissed him from service. Four years later, daunted by the financial difficulties faced by the family, the professor’s wife who was an eye-witness to the macabre incident committed suicide by hanging herself.

Sadly, none of the Indian intellectuals – a tribe which rushes to petition all and sundry on behalf of convicted criminals – condemned the Paris massacre. Congress politicians, Mani Sankar Aiyer and Digvijay Singh justified the horrific incidents by finding alibis for the killer demons.

The Indian media tried another tack to soften the blow by finding false moral equivalence with some real or imagined protests by the majority religion. Invariably the protests against M. F. Hussain’s paintings (some of which desecrated Hindu goddesses) and the recent movie PK (which ridiculed Hindu god-men) were cited. None of these incidents are even remotely comparable with the Paris massacre in scale or gruesomeness. They were protests by a section of people who were offended. Equating the two is bizarre. It amounts to intellectual and political chicanery. If right to offend as a facet of free speech is an acceptable democratic right, so should be the right to protest.

The Indian media would do well to heed Eric Wenkle (Washington Post, January 7) when he said that it is inadvisable to describe Charlie Hebdo as a ‘satirical magazine’ or a weekly ‘satirical newspaper’ as it would be distracting from the magnitude of the crime committed on its editors:

“The magazine famously deploys satire and art to convey it message. Yet the label, at least on this occasion, carries a distracting and diversionary impact, which is somehow to distinguish or distance the work of Charlie Hebdo form the work of a regular old magazine or newspaper. For the purpose of what happened today, however there is no distinction: These were journalists who died because of what they produced.”

The Indian politicians who found alibis and the Indian media which drew false moral equivalence with past Hindu protests are – it appears – attempting to somehow diminish the diabolical nature of the massacre.

There would be no point in arguing that these were only ‘reactions brought about by provocations’ or in any way rationalizing the incident by trying to ‘put it in context’ as the politicians sought to do. As Padraig Reidy (The Telegraph, January 7) put it:

“Jihadists kill because that is what they do. It does not matter if you are a French cartoonist or a Yezidi child, or an aid worker or journalist: if you are not one of the chosen few, you are fair game. Provocation is merely an excuse used by bullies to justify their actions, while ensuring the world bows to their will.”