Too Many Sacred Cows

DELHI — On May 11, a furor erupted in India’s Parliament over a black-and-white cartoon from 1949. Reproduced in a textbook for high-school juniors, the drawing depicts B.R. Ambedkar — India’s foremost Dalit leader and the chairman of the committee that drafted India’s 1950 Constitution — whip in hand and astride a snail labeled “the Constitution.” The first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, stands behind him, also wielding a whip.

Some say the cartoon portrays the two politicians trying to speed up the constitutional drafting process, but several prominent Dalits have claimed it shows Nehru lashing Ambedkar. The Dalit member of Parliament Thol. Thirumavalavan called the cartoon “insulting to Ambedkar, Nehru and the whole nation.” Under pressure, the government quickly agreed to withdraw the textbook.

Ambedkar, a student of John Dewey’s and a staunch defender of freedom of expression, would probably have disdained that decision. Meanwhile, none of the people objecting to the cartoon have been asked to explain what wrong they’ve suffered exactly. India is increasingly becoming a country where any group’s claim that it was slighted, however baseless, is a justification for censorship.

Many groups in India have become increasingly sensitive to perceived insults. Groups here are largely defined by reference to caste, religion or language (or a combination of the three), and they often channel feelings like those that gave birth to nationalism in Europe. But unlike in Europe, minority groups overlap in ways that makes dividing them based on geography untenable.

The Indian Constitution treats diversity as a given and protects group rights. Under Indian law, jail terms of up to three years can be awarded for “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs,” including outrage caused by either the spoken or the written word. Cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad cannot legally be published in India, for example. Turbaned Sikhs are exempt from wearing helmets when riding motorcycles. Affirmative action measures give Dalits preferential access to universities and government jobs.

This tolerance for diversity has allowed strong group identities to emerge. But with Indian democracy rewarding groups that assert themselves aggressively, identity politics is now threatening to undermine the kind of mutual accommodation that allowed for group identities in the first place.

Last month, Dalit students at Osmania University in Hyderabad campaigned for the right to freely consume beef: the university currently does not serve it out of deference to upper-caste Hindus, who oppose cow slaughter. The students were running headlong into the preferences of another group in the name of fighting long-standing discrimination against their own.

Some commentators have seen this initiative as challenging not just the forces of Hindu nationalism “but equally the gentrified left-liberal politics of composite culture” — shorthand for the politics that accommodate group identities. It is an apt observation, but its celebratory tone is misplaced. Seen on its own, the call for lifting dietary restrictions can be a form of struggle against the impositions of caste. When such measures multiply, however, the problem becomes clear.

Dalit activists protesting the Ambedkar cartoon make much of their own sensitivity: some even vandalized the office of the academic who supervised the publication of the textbook. But they seem to regard the sensitivities of the upper castes as an undue burden on them. Likewise of the Catholic associations that encouraged the arrest, on grounds of inciting religious hatred, of a rationalist who claimed that water was dripping from a crucifix in Mumbai because of capillary action rather than a miracle.

India’s political establishment indulges this competition of hurts because catering to group prejudices tends to bring electoral gains. This is the reason that no one in Parliament — not from the liberal left, not from the Hindu right — challenged those who were offended by the Ambedkar cartoon. Or that no political party defended Salman Rushdie’s right to speak against the Muslim clerics who opposed his participation in the Jaipur Literary Festival a few months ago. Yet by giving in to such demands again and again, Indians are allowing tolerance to turn into a tyranny of its own.