Replying to questions about American historian Peter Heehs, Mr. Chidambaram said that he would review the decision on cancellation of the visa to the historian who was living in Puducherry by Monday.
Mr. Heehs was asked to leave the country after he had spent nearly four decades working on a project of digitisation and archival of works of freedom fighter and spiritual leader Sri Aurobindo.
“This (decision to cancel the visa) was noticed by me this [Saturday] morning and I understand that the FRRO Puducherry passed the order. I have asked for a suo motu review and I will take a decision on Monday,” Mr. Chidambaram said.
Eminent historians and academics have protested against the move of cancelling the U.S. historian's visa and have also petitioned Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Mr. Chidambaram for reviewing the decision.
Mr. Heehs, author of the book ‘The Lives of Sri Aurobindo', had drawn the ire of a section of the spiritual leader's devotees who say the work contains objectionable matters.
Keywords: U.S. historian's visa issue, Peter Heehs
Peter himself has declared in his controversial book that he is a school drop out, was a taxi driver in USA. When did he become a historian without having any academic qualification or training? Is India so poor with Historians that a foreign national, without having any knowledge on Indian history & culture, will attempt to write filthy garbage, in the name of biography? When Sri Aurobindo himself has said that his life is not on the surface for men to see, how dare such an unwanted person write about him? Was it necessary? No, there is an international conspiracy to malign the spiritual leaders of our country. They (Jeffry Kripal who has financed this book, also financed another book called 'Kalis child' in which they have tried to show that Sri Ramakrishna was a homo-sexual)Jeffry Kripal, Richard Murphy etc. are the real conspirators in the process. A thorough investigation would reveal a lot of hidden agendas behind the ill motives of these people.
Peter Heehs has crossed all the limits a man can, when writing this controversial book. The book in question, has already been banned in India since April 2009. The Life History of great men can not be assessed from a very trivial and ordinary level of understanding, from a very low level of consciousness as Peter has done in his book. By doing so, he has hurt the sentiments of not only the millions of disciples and devotees of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, but also he has slammed all Indians in their face by maligning a freedom fighter of India, the only one to demand 'Complete Swaraj" from the British rulers. Only Sri Aurobindo's name appears in the records of the British Parliament as the "Most dangerous man in India", the greatest revolutionary. Peter must be deported from India. His visa, in no case, be renewed. Such an anti-national and criminal has no place in India, who tries to blame the freedom fighters, lovers of humanity, spiritual leaders, guru and incarnation of Supreme.
To be more precise in my comment above, I should have also said that the government should take a stand in favour of 'offensive-to-many' free speech, not just 'offensive-to-some' free speech. if the govt protects unpopular speech, it protects everyone, including popular speech. If the govt starts choosing between popular and unpopular speech to protect, it will eventually end up strangling everybody. That seems to be the way we are heading as a country but we have the means to reverse course. We just need the will. For the record, I liked a lot of the Heehs book, not all of it. That's true for most books for most people, I imagine.
A free society allows space for disagreement. If a man has lived for 40 years in India and gets expelled for writing a controversial book, it reflects poorly on the intellectual environment in the country. Hopefully, maturity will prevail and we will not another page in our sorry history of MF Hussain, Salman Rushdie, Taslima Nasreen, and countless book bannings. The solution is simple, let Heehs stay and let the Ashram Trust as an independent body make its own decisions. Let the people objecting to the book write a book in response or take up their objections with the Trust. There is no need for this to become a visa issue - surely India and the Ashram are not so brittle that they cannot absorb a controversial book. If they are, they need to toughen up and take a stand in favor of free speech, even offensive-to- some free speech. I found the book copiously referenced and researched, liked it, even if I can appreciate others may not like it.
There would be nothing wrong with that if the book was truly an honest and scholarly biography. Unfortunately it is full of misrepresentations and deliberate distortions regarding a) facts surrounding important events, b) their historical context, c) the teaching of Sri Aurobindo, d) the nature of his own yogic practices, e) life in the Ashram, and f) the Mother. Naturally these also lead to false interpretations and wrong conclusions. On reading the entire book, the pattern that emerges is that PH has distorted facts to force them to fit the Freudian view of spirituality. Such a book cannot be accepted as 'scholarly' since standards of scholarship demand honesty, accuracy and completeness in presenting facts. All three elements have been seriously compromised in this book. Peter has always avoided discussions. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust never tried to seriously find the solution. The Trust has weaken itself. Still if they wish proper solution can be found.
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