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Democracy's Paradox Send Thackeray to jail if necessary. But allow him to vote.
The other questionable factor is the one pertaining to the disenfranchisement of Thackeray. To debar him for seeking electoral office is one thing, to take away his right to vote quite another. An adult Indian's right to the ballot box is inalienable. It is not denied even to convicted criminals. Indeed, it is one of the beauties of democracy that a citizen can denounce the very concept of a nation and yet exercise his franchise. Since Thackeray is guilty of fomenting social unrest, of publicly insulting a community, it would have been proper to jail him and debar him from holding public office. Depriving him of his vote sets an unfortunate precedent. Democracy cannot be defended by denying it. God Save the Queen
The fit of morality apart, it is the double standards that rankle. A few years ago, the censors objected to nudity in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, a film on the Holocaust. It would take a truly perverted mind to detect erotica amid mangled, bare bodies in a concentration camp. Following protests, the film was released without cuts. This year Spielberg has won clearance in similar circumstances for Saving Private Ryan. Yet Elizabeth has been denied this right, just like Kapur's previous film, Bandit Queen, was before the courts rescued it. Obviously somebody with a long memory and a matching ego has decided Kapur needs to be taught a lesson, his credentials as a director be damned. The issue, however, goes beyond individuals. The censor board as it exists and functions is one of the vestiges of the nanny state, of the time when Indians could, for example, watch any channel as long as it was Doordarshan. It is completely out of tune with the permissive mores of a millennial society. Elizabeth makes every Indian proud only as much as a cussed censor board leaves every Indian looking silly. |
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On Wednesday, July 28, a Rashtrapati Bhavan
notification disqualified Bal Thackeray from participating in the electoral process till
December 2001. Issued on the recommendation of the Election Commission -- and after
damaging judgements by the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court -- the presidential
decree seeks to punish the Shiv Sena leader for a vituperative campaign speech that
incited religious enmity. At one level, Thackeray's punishment amounts to a victory for
constitutional propriety and for secularism, when it is understood -- as it should be --
to mean the divorce of church and state. The triumph, however, is a qualified one. The
specific remarks for which the self-proclaimed "Maratha tiger" has been, in
effect, manacled were made in 1987. It has taken over a decade for the Indian justice
system to complete its work. If Thackeray's inflammatory canvassing had been tackled
strongly and urgently, Maharashtra's recent history may have been different. Emboldened by
the sheer thrill of notoriety, the Shiv Sena's politics turned increasingly more
pernicious. It culminated, of course, in the party's highly destructive role in the Mumbai
riots of 1992-93. Too little, too late may have become something of a cliche; but it has
rarely found better use. 
Such controversies can arise only in a country
that has elevated cretinism to an art form. Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth is by all reckoning
one of the biggest films of the year. It was nominated for more than one Oscar, opened to
worldwide acclaim and won its Indian director much praise for his handling of a subject as
English as the cliffs of Dover. This coming week the film was to be shown to Indian
cineastes. Now this appears unlikely because the censor board has decided that the film
needs to be bowdlerised. It has objected to a couple of nude scenes, the display of a
decapitated head and the use of an archaic slang expression that nobody other than a
particularly committed lexicographer would understand.