Why Shekhar Gupta has become a heretic among liberals despite giving ‘2/3rd support’ to Zubair
Why Shekhar Gupta has become a heretic among liberals despite giving ‘2/3rd support’ to Zubair
Howard Jacobson, the Man Booker Prize-winning British novelist and journalist, in his 2017 book, The Dog’s Last Walk (And Other Pieces), exposes in one of its chapters (‘Yes but no but’) the innate illiberal tendencies of the liberal. He writes, “I have a proposal to make: What if, instead of employing the (Noam) Chomsky ‘but’ whenever something terrible is visited on us, we tried saying ‘and’ instead? Not just for the fun of it but to make the world a better, bigger, more inclusive space. ‘But’ shrinks and grudges; ‘and’ amplifies and allows.”
Jacobson explains how the Chomsky ‘but’ operates: “The attack on the Twin Towers was an atrocity,” you concede, “but”… And here you insert whichever qualifier takes your fancy. “The attack on the Twin Towers was an atrocity, ‘but’ Americans are committing atrocities all the time.” “The attack on the Twin Towers was an atrocity, ‘but’ George Bush is a shit.” Or, how about, “Gunning down the staff of Charlie Hebdo was an atrocity, ‘but’ Israel kills journalists in Gaza.” Would anyone say that? Unless I dreamed it, Noam Chomsky just has.
The British author takes his argument further to say that the ‘but’ that was “deemed so necessary after 9/II — that great ‘but’ from which all the lesser ‘buts’ have sprung — was the ‘but’ of extenuation”. He explains, “It was the first, grammatical step in shifting blame from perpetrator to victim. Not only, on the back of that ‘but’, was America reminded that others had suffered, that America was instrumental in that suffering, that America could therefore be said to bear a share of responsibility for what happened, the ‘butters’ finally came within a whisker of condoning the act of terrorism itself.”
Today, in the wake of the Nupur Sharma episode, which has been followed by the tragic beheadings in Udaipur and Amravati, one finds a large number of liberal ‘butters’ up in arms with the following arguments: “The beheadings were barbaric, but Nupur Sharma shouldn’t have provoked”; “Muslims were angry after Nupur Sharma’s comments, but the government refused to arrest her”… Such has been the pervasive and persuasive influence of ‘but’ that even an esteemed constitutional body couldn’t stop itself from being bugged by it, as one of its oral observations suggests.
Things have come to such a pass that liberal fundamentalism today appears as regressive and totalitarian as Islamist fundamentalism. Not only is the ‘other’ deplored, despised and decimated (if possible), but also the ‘heretic’ within the group is equally and vehemently targeted. The backlash against senior journalist Shekhar Gupta — mostly from people of his own ilk — for what seems to be a commonsensical argument, is a stark reminder to that.
It’s not that Gupta has come out in support of Nupur Sharma. In his article, ‘Do I have a complaint with Mohd Zubair of Alt News? Here’s why I have 3 answers, No, No and Yes’, he actually defends the now-celebrated fact-checker on two counts and has issues on just one count. All he is saying is that Zubair should not have been prosecuted and jailed, but if he claims freedom of speech for himself, he cannot be hypocritical enough to deny the same to Nupur. A logical argument, and yet, the liberals are baying for his blood!
Let’s look at the three points in detail.
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First, Shekhar Gupta stands “four-square behind him (Zubair) for the restoration of his liberty”. He says, quite rightly, that nobody should be prosecuted, or jailed, for their views. “People living in a democracy, liberal or not, can’t be so thin-skinned.” Gupta then looks at the colonial history of Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the circumstances under which it was introduced in 1927, to say that it was “a bad law, enacted by a cynical colonial power with no permanent stake in India”.
His second ‘no’ comes from the heart as a believer, a Hindu. “For generations, we Hindus have grown to have a questioning, often critical view of our gods. Probably that’s why we have so many of them. You need one god to make up for the imperfections of the other. None has given us the final word we can’t argue with. At least not until lately,” he says, adding: “Blasphemy was almost non-existent for the vast Hindu majority in our country. Now, if the same Hindus are taking offence, and that too so angrily as to cheer Zubair’s arrest and demand more such, it shows an ‘Abrahamisation’ of Hinduism, which isn’t good.”
The only reason why Shekhar Gupta is critical of Zubair is that the ‘eminent’ fact-checker makes the same mistake for which he wanted Nupur Sharma to be punished. “My complaint is that you get your fame and respect from your secular-liberal credentials. Or, please say that isn’t so. If you still, like a member of the Muslim clergy, are offended when somebody says something you see as derogatory or offensive about figures you so revere, that’s acceptable too. But then apply the same principle and avoid taking liberties with other people’s gods too.”
When read between the lines, it is obvious that Shekhar Gupta is still a loyal member of the elite liberal club. He has just qualified his statement, given the obvious and standout hypocrisy at play on the Nupur and Zubair episodes. While in the Nupur saga most liberals openly bayed for her blood standing alongside Islamists, in the Zubair case they took a libertarian position. Shekhar Gupta, being a veteran commentator and editor, could easily see the fallacy of this argument. He didn’t rewrite the liberal rules, but modified only that portion that blatantly exposed their hypocrisy. Still, this was good enough for him becoming a ‘traitor’, much like Margaret Atwood, whose article “Am I a Bad Feminist?” (2018) met with massive uproar among fellow feminists. Atwood then wrote how “their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated”.
Such has been the height of liberal fundamentalism that even The Economist, a self-proclaimed paragon of liberalism of all sorts, came up with an article on “The dangers of illiberal liberalism” (17 August 2018), by Claire Fox. While conceding that “being a liberal these days is confusing”, Fox writes, “Today’s so-called progressive liberals are often intolerant, calling for official censure against anyone perceived as uttering non-progressive views. They openly despise everyone from Trump-voting “Deplorables” and Brexit-voting “Gammons” (those “others” who dare to vote the wrong way and won’t espouse their “tolerant” values) to those in their own ranks who refuse to toe the liberal line.”
Shekhar Gupta would agree. He, after all, was only trying to polish the rough edges of liberal fundamentalism when he partially criticised Zubair. While doing so, he remained true to his ideological calling as practised in India. And like one, he sounded out the ghost of growing fundamentalism among Hindus. He called it the “Abrahamisation” of Hinduism.
Now, this is an interesting argument and has become a favourite Left-liberal toolkit to hit out at Hinduism — heads, I win; tails, you lose! This toolkit goes thus: First, these so-called liberals would say all religions are equal, that no religion teaches fundamentalism. Then, they will introduce certain sections that would showcase Hinduism to be a caste-ridden, abusive, violent and regressive religion, while in the same breath praise Islam for promoting equality and universal brotherhood. But when things turn awry, as it’s happening now when Hindus have started reacting to Muslim fundamentalism, these same liberals — and Shekhar Gupta is very much part of this clique — turn their age-old argument on its head to claim that Hinduism can’t be allowed to shed its innate tolerance; it should not be ‘Abrahamanised’!
The Shekhar Gupta episode is a stark reminder to the fact that liberals must make amends without delay. They should stop running with liberal characteristics and hunting with fundamentalist traits, as they did when they supported Maqbool Fida Husain when he was busy making nude paintings of Hindu goddesses in the 1990s, but refused to extend the same courtesy to Salman Rushdie when he wrote The Satanic Verses. In fact, many of our famed liberals of the era — from Khushwant Singh and MJ Akbar to Vir Sanghvi and Dileep Padgaonkar — were then seen standing in solidarity with radical Islamists in getting the book banned even before anyone in India could get hold of it. Hearsay was enough to get Sir Salman ostracised — and his book banned! Interestingly, decades later, when a leading publication in India decided to pulp Wendy Doniger’s erotic ‘history’ of The Hindus, these same liberal ecosystem saw fascism at play! From then to now, from the 1985 Shah Bano case to the 2022 Kaali controversy, very little seems to have changed. Except that the Left-liberal narrative no longer goes unchallenged, thanks primarily to social media that has refused to be regulated by the high priests of liberalism and secularism.
Sir Vidia Naipaul, had he been alive today, would have found Indian liberals as crafty, scheming and dangerous as Muslim fundamentalists, about whom he wrote over three decades ago in India: A Million Mutinies: “First you fight to get a country, and then you refuse to go.” It’s time liberals shun their own fundamentalism and become “too broadminded” to take their own side in a quarrel, as American poet Robert Frost would have wanted them to be. This will help liberalism get back to its true calling, but will the liberals remain the same? This but is the big question.
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