As is usual in India, there is a whole array of laws against offending sentiments of all kinds: religious, racial, residential, linguistic — everything except the democratic. Yet the courts have not found adequate ground, amid this wide sweep of hypersensitivities that Indians revel in, to ban the book on Shivaji by the scholar, James Laine. The writing of the book, alleged to contain a ‘controversial’ account of Shivaji’s background, had earlier led to vandalism on Pune’s Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, with the consequent destruction of priceless manuscripts. The ban had followed. But both the lower court and the Supreme Court have directed that it be lifted. However welcome this direction may be, it is necessary to ask how groups unacquainted with history, research, thought and the practice of reading repeatedly manage to get away with muffling or attempting to muffle scholarship, debate, and multiple points of view.

One clue lies in the court’s response. The courts do not consider a ban improper or unthinkable in a democratic country where freedom of expression is supposed to be taken for granted. That freedom is not a non-negotiable value; instead, it is to be granted by “reasonable” and “courageous” people. Who are these “reasonable” people and who decides on the quality of their reasonableness? Reasonable from which point of view? Why do they need courage? Is it because marauding mobs spouting sentiment enjoy freedoms without limit? The invocation of an imaginary group of censors obfuscates the central question regarding the limits and duties of freedom in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy. That a ban, if imposed on a book at all, should be the rarest of rare exceptions, prompted by clear evidence of malice and the intention to incite hatred, is a statement that no one seems to be prepared to make. This refusal feeds, and is fed by, the mob culture that dominates ignorant and destructive movements against books and paintings, always fanned to create firmer vote banks by nurturing hatred. How politics is inextricable from culture is illustrated in this context by the Maharashtra government’s decision to formulate a law to prevent the defamation of state icons. This defies the spirit of the Supreme Court’s direction, and takes the country back aeons in civilization. But a country deserves the icons it worships.