Of myopic cultural exchanges

IT WAS perhaps easier to explain the fascistic attack on Fahmida Riaz five years ago. After all she was a Pakistani poetess who was trying to bring her message of peace in a badly poisoned atmosphere of post-Kargil Delhi. Moreover, she was a liberal, progressive feminist who asked difficult questions of religious bigots in both countries. The people who attacked her at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, when she had barely started reading her poem, were followers of the religious revivalist Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh. The group, better known as RSS, is the cultural equivalent of the right-wing Muslim groups in Pakistan or Bangladesh that spew venom on progressive women and men. Remember in Delhi in May 2000, it was the period of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s rightward leaning government when Narendra Modi and Praveen Togadia, though yet to acquire notoriety in Gujarat, were beginning to become the dominant flavour of Indian culture.

To be fair to Indian audiences, even in those troubled times Ms. Riaz was able to successfully recite the same poem earlier in the week in Delhi that year, and to a wider group of more discerning listeners; but she was unlucky the second time.

“Tum bilkul hum jaise nikle abtak kahaan chhupe thay bhai? (You Indians have turned out to be as bigoted as us in Pakistan. Where have you been hiding all this while brother?) went the opening lines of her poem that mocked religious narrow-mindedness in both countries.

Almost on cue, a certain Major Sharma had whipped out his pistol. As he threatened to stall the Mushaira, the army man and two of his equally viciously hostile aides were overpowered by the largely secular audience. They were packed off to a hospital in a hapless state.

The entire Vajpayee government and the ever so fickle media came down like a ton of bricks on Ms. Riaz and JNU’s leftist students’ union, her hosts.

The defence minister visited the dubious army officer in hospital to express his sympathy for the great act of nationalism. The issue generated heat in parliament and such was the effect of the Kargil poison that there was no one left among the MPs from any ideological corner to defend the poet and her poetry. It seemed to be the end of the nascent cultural exchanges the two countries had only recently embarked upon.

As a consequence of that incident, Fahmida Riaz would have to wait for the entire government to change in New Delhi to be invited again for her next poetry symposium here. And when she was in Delhi last month she was still worrying about the rise of rightwing tendencies in Pakistan and now in India too. It was a sad development for the Pakistani poet because India was where she had once taken refuge from Gen. Zia-ul-Haq’s fanatically narrow-minded interpretation of Islam in the late 1970s.

It was however relatively easy to understand the fascist assault on Ms Riaz during the Vajpayee rule. There was little else that could be expected from the cohorts of the Hindutva brand of cultural fascism. However, when Sheema Kirmani and her troupe of young and talented actors were stopped by their hosts in Lucknow last week from going ahead with an anti-war play they were invited to stage, some of her Indian friends were shocked.

Ms Kirmani and her Tehreek-i-Niswan group have been actively involved since 1980s in the promotion of liberal ideals to receptive Pakistani audiences who have ranged from rural schoolchildren in Sindh to urban women’s groups across the country. The play — Zikr-i-Nashunida — that was to be staged in Lucknow, Varanasi and Bhubaneshwar presents women’s perspective against war in which American misadventures in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are effectively highlighted as examples of contemporary violence that dog the world.

Ms. Kirmani’s hosts in India were a group called Women’s Initiative for Peace in South Asia (WIPSA). The group boasts of a formidable patronage that includes India’s ace peace activists such as Nirmala Deshpande. How could such a group take a narrow-minded stand so as to block a play simply because it was critical of American militarism? Developed out of a workshop conducted by Indian theatre director Prasanna Ramaswamy, the play is truly a joint Indo-Pak venture. The Pakistani cast includes Mahvish Faruqi, Shama Askari, Asma Mundrawala, Shazia Qamar, Saifi Hasan, Mahmood Bhatti, Atif Siddiqui, and Saleem Jafri. It has been translated into Urdu by Anwer Jafri. These are all well meaning and genuinely progressive people. Why were they threatened and stopped from performing the play in Varanasi and Bhubaneshwar by WIPSA? Is it because WIPSA had taken money from Ford Foundation for the show, as we are told, and thus there was a conflict of interest between the script of the play and its Indian/American financiers?

After their return to Delhi, the humiliated and dejected troupe were subjected to a further nightmarish ordeal. They were thrown out of the guest-house where they were lodged by some friends in Delhi in what must truly rank as the scariest mid-night knock they have experienced. All this happened under a Congress party-ruled Delhi. Is that what makes it more difficult to digest the cultural policing that Ms. Kirmani’s troupe were subjected to? That would be hasty judgment to make. Remember it was not the mullahs in Iran, but a Congress party government in Delhi that had first banned the controversial book by Salman Rushdie.

There is something insidious about all the governments in India, whether they come from the Hindutva stock or belong to Nehruvian-Fabian gene. They would subsidise the annual Haj for Indian Muslims, they would deploy an entire army to supervise the Hindu pilgrimage to Amarnath in Kashmir, they will hold special talks with Pakistan to facilitate Sikh pilgrims to visit the Nankana Sahib shrine across the border. But try to go to them with a liberal agenda, bereft of religious content — say against American imperialism, or to get humanitarian relief across the Line of Control in Kashmir. The chances are you would meet the fate of Sheema Kirmani and Fahmida Riaz.

POPULAR film actor Amitabh Bachchan is recovering from a life-saving surgery in a Mumbai hospital. His round-the-clock medical bulletins, or speculation in the absence of news about his progress, have been the staple fare on major Indian TV channels, except, it seems, on the state-run Doordarshan.

This has become controversial. Samajwadi Party General-Secretary Amar Singh, regarded as the actor’s confidante, says Congress President Sonia Gandhi, an estranged friend of the Bachchan family, was responsible for the ‘blackout of news’ pertaining to Bachchan’s hospitalization. “It is Sonia Gandhi who is behind the news black out on DD,” Singh told reporters. Now that’s news.

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