IT is disturbing that the Jaipur Literature Festival that should have ended with aplomb this week was allowed to degenerate into a celebration of Salman Rushdie and his hurtful book.

Four Indian writers read passages from it to assert what they claimed was their freedom of speech. They were hypocritical.

The mainstream media was equally culpable in the incident. The background is worth looking at. A range of agencies representing diverse and curious corporate interests — miners, builders of mega dams, Coca Cola, American banks and financial bodies — sponsored the four-day gala. But a most interesting sponsor was the government of India itself.

The Indian government was represented not by one but by three sponsors. They were the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, the Ministry of External Affairs and its public policy division, all shown as separate sponsors.This raises a question with regard to the Rushdie affair. Were the three government sponsors aware that the controversial author was invited to the Jaipur event? If yes, where was the need to pretend later that his presence at the festival was unwelcome? If the government did not know about the invitation to Rushdie, are we to conclude that the organisers violated the terms of sponsorship by making him the focus of their endeavour?

The whole affair is saddening because there were really very interesting people — authors, journalists, academics — that we met in Jaipur thanks to the organisers who had cast the net wide.

For me the highpoint of the festival was the privilege to hear Pakistan’s formidable historian Ayesha Jalal in conversation with a somewhat under-prepared William Dalrymple. It was a double bonus to hear her subsequently on a platform she shared with Fatima Bhutto, another brilliant mind from Pakistan feted in Jaipur.

The canvas Ms Jalal chose — the concept of jihad in Islam — should have been made mandatory for every Indian TV anchor to attend, not the least because they are single-handedly responsible for spreading an adverse stereotype of Muslims in general, Indian Muslims more specifically.

How many Indian journalists would be aware that Maulana Maududi, the late chief of Pakistan’s Jamaat-i-Islami, was opposed to his government’s concept of jihad in Kashmir in 1947-48? This is not to suggest that the maulana did not play havoc with Jinnah’s liberal vision for Pakistan. But facts should never be trifled with.

Obscurantist historians in India have propagated the notion that Islam arrived there with a missionary zeal to proselytise. Ms Jalal strives to convince them that Islam never came to India “as a finished package”, rather it changed and adapted to the Indian situation.

It was a treat to hear Fatima Bhutto tearing into the illusion of Imran Khan as a future saviour of Pakistan. If anything, he was a spokesman for the most regressive politics, which was poison for Pakistan’s women and a threat to the liberal ideals of the country’s founders.

Fatima Bhutto took a sharp pot-shot at American TV host Oprah Winfrey who was addressing a slightly smaller crowd in the neighbouring enclosure. It was characteristic of the times, she complained to her host Karan Thapar, that because she was from Pakistan she was somehow required to explain the trouble brewing in Afghanistan. “Nobody would ask Oprah Winfrey about what went wrong in Afghanistan,” she said to applause.

Why did I find the readers of Rushdie’s passages in Jaipur hypocritical and the accompanying media campaign targeting Muslim sensibilities as betraying double standards? To begin with books have been banned in India earlier. Sometimes they were made to disappear from public view without explanation. Big business, the kind that sponsored the Lit Fest, is not innocent in this regard.

In the 1990s, Hamish MacDonald’s Polyester Prince, which exposed the nefarious nexus between senior politicians and the Ambanis, disappeared from bookshops following an obscure court edict. Not a word was said in protest in the electronic media though there was a small story in one of the business magazines.

In the 1950s, Mystery of Birla House, an exposé by a Bengali writer did not make it to the bookshops because the Birla family bought the first two editions and subsequently the copyrights. A sole copy preserved in the ‘rare books’ section of the Nehru Memorial Library is the only evidence that the book did or does exist. Which media house has discussed the two ‘banned’ corporate books, much less campaigned for their free availability?

In the realm of religion and ethnic sensitivities of which there is a surfeit in India, how many books have been banned at the behest of the Hindu right? From the proscribed history textbooks by Romila Thapar, Bipan Chandra and R.S. Sharma, to James Plane’s book on Shivaji that was burnt on Bal Thackeray’s orders how many secular campaigns have we seen for their reinstatement?

Will the four writers go to Mumbai and read passages from the Shivaji book in Colaba? They might then appear a lot more even-handed as brokers of free speech.

Only recently Hindutva lobbyists forced the Delhi University to withdraw A.K. Ramanujan’s acclaimed academic research into a raft of alternative narratives of the Ramayana. There was some debate and there were some protests, mostly by the history teachers themselves. But was there anything like the media campaign we have witnessed over Rushdie’s book that too 23 years after the government banned it?

The right to free speech is never complete without the right to free inquiry. Of all the players in the fray in this regard, the Indian state has emerged as the most intolerant and myopic of the lot.

The brave samurai of free speech and the Indian media should explain their stand with regard to India’s newfound fear of foreign academics that are routinely denied visas. The denial of visa is not such a subtle means to limit the great freedoms under discussion.

The complaint against David Barsamian when he was rudely deported from the airport in September was that the American radio icon and sitar player had reported on events in Jammu and Kashmir during his last visit to India and that these reports were “not based on facts”.

Who determines the facts in Kashmir, the Ministry of External Affairs may be asked. It was after all the leading sponsor of Jaipur’s carnival of free speech.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com