Some photographs have unintended effects. Nick Ut’s 1973 images of children, including the naked Phan Thị Kim Phúc, fleeing the Napalm devastated village of Trang Bang stirred the conscience of undergrads, triggered a mass upsurge against the American involvement in Vietnam and brought that messy war to an end.
Kevin Carter’s haunting 1993 photograph of a hooded vulture waiting to prey upon a starving Somalian child, even as it made it to the front pages across the globe, triggered a furious debate on the ethics of photography and the human responsibilities of the photographer, leading to Carter’s suicide the following year and a major shift in disaster photography.
Nilufer Demir’s 2015 photo of the desolate body of Alan Kurdi washed ashore on the Turkish coast brought home the plight of Syrian refugees and persuaded most EU countries to open their borders for those fleeing the war in West Asia.
A photograph from Bengaluru last fortnight is, I think, destined to have a similar effect and initiate a new wave of resistance. It shows the prone, frail, splayed legs of friend Gauri Lankesh, gunned down in front of her home. Above the waist, the injured body has been photo-shopped and blurred; the violence of her death, mimicked by the self-imposed violence of the erasure of her face and body.
Extreme censorship
Ironically, rather than ‘exploit’ the gory image betokening her gory assassination, this more restrained and self-censored image is what is likely to reach out to a vast population out there, which still hasn’t silenced its own voice of conscience.
But this new form of ‘censorship’ is here to stay. “Murder”, said V.S. Naipaul, dripping morbid wit, “is an extreme form of censorship.” He was reacting to the ridiculous fatwa, in 1989, on Salman Rushdie’s life for his Satanic Verses . It is heartening that overwhelming international support helped Rushdie tide over the dark period of a decade-and-a-half, though the threat itself has not gone away.
But, going by Naipaul’s formulation, India at present seems to be celebrating a carnival of ‘censorship’. Even playwright Tom Stoppard, in his foreword to Another Sky (2006), an anthology of dissident voices from around the world, wrote of the real threat that those who choose to speak up face: “The ultimate form of censorship — murder!” This is an idea that has taken wings in India over the past few years.
Murder and killing to snuff out the idea or thought you don’t like, seems to be emerging as the recommended method of social discourse. We are rapidly achieving the distinction of being a highly censorious society — not because of puffed-up apparatchiks like Pahlaj Nihalani who made a mockery of the CBFC nor because of the Dramatic Performances (Prevention) Act of 1876 (the first censorship law in colonial India), which is still operative in 14 Indian States nor even because of any unusual official restriction on freedom of speech — but because of the chilling fear that has been allowed to proliferate in the hothouse of sectarian hatred that the country has been reduced to.
Suddenly, so many seem to be wearing their hate and morbidity on their sleeve. And these are not emotions they are wary of or embarrassed about any longer; these have become trophies to flaunt with which you engineer an abusive, hostile, threat-filled environment, within which the only retribution for any perceived act of ‘deviance’ in word or thought or food or dress or faith other than the majoritarian is instant execution. You cannot blame any system or government here; it is your neighbour who has decided to hate you and be intolerant of your very existence.
There has been a snowballing sense of anguish and fury since we awoke disbelievingly to the news of Gauri’s killing. Some have called it an attack on free speech while others have called it an act of terror, meant more as a signal to those who sought to ask uncomfortable questions in a culture of silence.
Genie’s out of the bottle
However, we also awoke to the fact that the genie is now well and truly out of the bottle and save a major paradigm shift, it is not going to be easy to return it to the bottle. No leader or party or administration has control over it now and it is finally on its own steam. In Albert Camus’s celebrated last lines of The Plague , the bacillus is once again out in the happy city, for the bane and enlightenment of men.
No doubt, it is the culmination of decades of experimentation in the social laboratory of the manufacture of fear and repulsion and anxiety. I personally believe the systematisation of this — now ubiquitous — experiment began with the well-planned and executed public hunting down of one of our most prominent artists, M.F. Husain, soon after the Babri Masjid demolition in the early 1990s. The methodology is clear: first, foist a false accusation (in this case, that he painted Hindu goddesses in the nude); then repeat this falsehood from multiple platforms and through many mouths till it begins to sound like a truth or even a half-truth; then withdraw a bit and let the incensed ‘public’ vent its wrath on the physical persona of the artist; then join the chorus again and bay for his blood through over 140 anti-Husain websites set up under all sorts of fabricated names to protect the great Hindu religion ‘under assault’ from this one 80-year-old artist; then do fake ‘investigations’ and ‘discover daily proof’ that he is after all a ‘serial offender’ and had been insulting Hindu gods since his childhood; then declare him persona non grata and slap over 40 legal cases on him; until, unable to withstand these attacks any more, he decides to go abroad into self-imposed exile.
No freedom after speech
Most people looked away and very few came forward in solidarity with the wronged artist. The bitter relief came when Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul of the Delhi High Court absolved him of all accusations and summarily dismissed the cases with the memorable line, “Freedom of speech is meaningless if there is no freedom after speech”. He was to repeat similar sentiments in his more recent judgment absolving writer Perumal Murugan too.
But that was when the fascist core of majoritarian Hindutva earned its spurs. It is a strategy they have been diligently applying to other contexts. On the one hand is the elimination of rationalists, writers, thinking journalists, leftists and so on, who come in their cross-hairs with uncomfortable questions and, on the other, is the opening up of the sport of a ‘public hunt’ against marginalised sections for imagined insults and ‘crimes’.
Now, the flaming arrow has left the bow and they have no trick to return it to the quiver. Like Gauri, this is going to burn many. But that photograph of Gauri’s prone, assaulted body in an abandoned pool of blood is destined to affect the conscience of many who have chosen to stay quiet over the past quarter of a century.
Once again, a photograph might still release a mass movement against the masquerade of such censorship from the street.
