Art And Politics
Whether a man’s freedom to dress as he likes can be equal to the liberty of an artist to paint as he likes or not, needs a debate. One opinion is that if an ordinary man had dressed himself like a saint, he would have been treated as a freak, but a Dera chief doing the same thing has been interpreted as posing to compete with a highly revered Guru to the Sikhs.
Astonishingly, when it came to Sikh sentiments, no so-called secularist took sides. When it came to Muslim sensibility,
a similar set of people condemned the infamous cartoons about their prophet. When it comes to Jesus, the Christian
feelings were ignored and when it is Hindu emotions, they are dismissed by the so called secularists with disdain. This is horrendous political culture: for the Muslims reverence, for the Sikhs silence, for the Christians indifference and for the Hindus contempt.
There has been a disproportionate hullabaloo over the paintings produced by Chandramohan of M.S. University, Baroda.
Most newspapers have carried articles and the TV channels have held discussions on the subject. Heated arguments have been exchanged but, most of the time, without stating what precisely had been painted and, therefore, why it should be objectionable. It was reminiscent of the Union government’s ban of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses without its officials having read the text.
The simple point is whose freedom of expression? The artist’s who is morbid in mind? The devotee whose sensibilities are
wounded? Or the high and the low secularists of the land who smile indulgently at one community’s degradation, but raise a storm when the other is in dock?
