PUBLISHING IN POST-TRUTH WORLD

IN 2014, Penguin Random House India (hereafter, Penguin for convenience) settled out of court with Dinanath Batra, the ageing general secretary of RSS school network Vidya Bharati and founder of an organisation committed to purging Indian education of foreign influences.

- PRATIK KANJILAL

It was unconditional surrender—Penguin agreed to withdraw and pulp all copies of Chicago scholar Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History. It capitulated in the face of the familiar charges of hurting religious feelings, besides safety concerns.

There was dismay. Someone had waved a stick at the most powerful Indian publisher and it had surrendered. How would smaller publishers fare after this? Now, under the same leadership in India, Penguin has reprised its dubious triumph. It has dropped plans to distribute in India graphic reporter Joe Sacco’s 2025 book, The Once and Future Riot, which cuts through the fog around the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013.

Once more, it is a rout—apparently, Penguin wanted Sacco to remove “red flags” and update a map to risk-proof the distributor, and he wouldn’t. Once more, there is dismay. Ram Guha calls the draw-down “pusillanimous”. Arundhati Roy hopes Sacco finds a “braver distributor”.

The dismay over Doniger’s book was in context. It was February 2014, a pre-lapsarian time—the last days of Manmohan Singh’s government, when people were still confident that they had freedom of expression and the ability to defend it. Why is there dismay now, when some of us actually have even more freedom of expression? As the rupee inches towards the 100 mark against the dollar, a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the PM says that it’s “just a number”. Much earlier, the finance minister said that her family does not eat onions, so they have no experience of inflation.