Unchecked in India: Political correctness takes giant strides

In Western countries Right-leaning authors, columnists, and commentators often bemoan the cantankerousness and absurdity of political correctness. This is not surprising because PC has become not only an abomination plaguing common parlance and free speech but also a device for the Left to promote its irrationalities and pathologies. In India, however, it is not just the Left but practically all political parties and social organizations that are ardently, and sometime violently, championing PC. At any rate, the casualty is always freedom of expression.
It is seldom that violent PC is successfully checked. In a recent such instance, the country’s Supreme Court came to the rescue of south Indian film actress Khusboo for her statement on pre-marital sex, virginity, and live-in relationships. In an interview in 2005, she had said it was not wrong for women to have pre-marital sex as long as they took precautions. Further, the Tamil actress said, it was “not fair of any educated youth to expect his wife to be a virgin.” She also found nothing objectionable in live-in relationships.
The reaction to her remarks was swift and severe. Many political parties and a few people from the film industry itself castigated her for, what they called, an attack on “Tamil culture and values.” The Dalit Panthers of India (DPI) and another political party, the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), protested against her; the protest often degenerated into violence. But it was not the violent protestors and their instigators who were found on the wrong side of the law; Khushboo, on the other hand, faced more than 20 criminal suits filed against her! One reason was PMK was part of the ruling coalition in New Delhi, with its leader A. Ramadoss being the Health Minister at that time.
Hounded by the law as well as the lawless, Khushboo offered an open apology to Tamils, especially women, saying she would never even dream of sullying the image of the Tamil people. “Even in films, I never undertook roles that lowered the image of women,” she said in a statement. “I have the greatest regard for Tamils, especially Tamil women. If my remarks have hurt anybody’s feelings, I tender an apology. I am one among you and will always remain with you.” But her tormentors were unrelenting.
Her trials and tribulations are likely to end as the Supreme Court has made its sympathy for her quite evident. Its three-judge bench, headed by Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan, did not find anything wrong with live-in relationships, incorporating it in Article 21 of the Constitution, which guarantees the Right to Life with dignity, liberty, and respect.
The relief for Khushboo, however, came after over four years of prosecution, persecution, and vilification. It is interesting to note that the outfits which waged a jihad against her could scarcely be categorized as Rightwing. The DPI claims to be fighting for the Dalits—literally, ‘the oppressed.’ These outcastes were discriminated against in Hindu scriptures. The very name of the party was inspired by that of Black Panther Party of the US. The PMK, too, claims to represent a supposedly ‘backward’ community.
The Khushboo affair underlines not only the threats to the freedom of speech and expression but also the blurring of ideological divisions in India. The parties and groups which are often called Rightist or Right-leaning also promote causes which would elsewhere be considered Leftwing. For instance, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the largest Opposition party for which the terms conservative and nationalist are used, has supported Leftwing measures like increasing the scope of affirmative action and the national rural employment guarantee scheme. All political parties prefer to conform to the dogmas of political discourse, which is clearly Leftist in tone and tenor. The BJP, like other parties, has unquestioningly accepted, even internalized, many premises and principles of the dominant political discourse.
The consequences of ideological straitjacketing have been deplorable. All parties, willy-nilly, end up supporting the causes promoted by the Left: the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005; the reserving one-third seats for women in the Lower House of Parliament and in state Assemblies; the recently notified Right to Education Act; and long goes the list of measures that the Left—though small as far as numbers are concerned—has been able to impose on the nation.
Another group promoting big state measures, and which is often aligned with Leftists or Marxists, comprises political leaders who represent various Dalit or ‘backward’ castes. The ideological straitjacketing is so tight and vicious that even a murmur of protest against any proposal by these parties or leaders is immediately dubbed as anti-poor, anti-Dalit, anti-backward, elitist, etc. Needless to say, reason and commonsense have almost been ostracized from political discourse, which is swayed by sentimentalism.
This brings us to another conspicuous feature of Indian politics: the proclivity of politicians to appeal to the crudest, crassest, and basest of public sentiments. It happens all the time. A Hindi film was named Billu barber; some caste group found the word ‘barber’ offensive. The filmmaker was forced to drop the word ‘barber’ from the name. The lyrics of a Hindi film song had to be changed; Teli ka tel (edible oil made by oil-maker) was replaced by Dilli ka tel (oil from Delhi) because the traditional oil-makers, or Telis, objected to the word. The mere mention of a word denoting a profession becomes politically incorrect.
Pandering to the lowest common denominator has put sanctimoniousness on premium and has made reason a useless virtue; it has also ensured that PC in India fashions a trajectory for itself quite different from that in the West. Spewing gross sentimentalism brings immediate publicity which, in turn, sometimes also translates into political and pecuniary gains. Unsurprisingly, most attacks on the freedom of expression are made on the pretext that the movie, book, etc, “hurt the sentiments” of this or that community.
In the US, there are writers and groups fighting PC; they regularly point out the ludicrousness and menace of PC. In India, PC is wreaking havoc with all political parties—the Leftist, the Rightist, and the Centrist—seeking to capitalize on it.