When everything jarred

Nick's piece berating liberals for religious (this time Hindu) intolerance What price freedom of expression now? at least has the merit of being a shorter rehash of his The Hounding of M. F. Husain in Standpoint.

In many ways, it's not bad. Something of a blip on Nick's recent run of relatively good form, perhaps, but a long way from the depths of undirected anger he has got away with.

The bad bits:

Hindu nationalists accused Husain of being a pornographer and blasphemer. They wrecked galleries that showed his work, ransacked his home in Mumbai and threatened him with prosecution for one reason only: that he was born into a Muslim family almost 100 years ago.

One reason only? Surely their (admittedly bad) reasons were that he was "a pornographer and blasphemer"? Nick seems to want to argue that this kind of persecution of artists motivated by racial or sectarian hatred; yet it's usually artists (Salman Rushdie for example) who have some tenuous commonality with their critics who are targeted. This sort of thing is usually about crushing dissent (or even though) in one's own side.

The law was happy to egg them on. While America's founders wisely protected freedoms of speech, the press and religious conscience with the first amendment in 1791, India's founders kept and expanded the censorship laws of the British empire in 1947.

Ah yes, America, home of the free.

In 1920 after the US magazine The Little Review serialised a passage of the book dealing with the main character masturbating, a group called the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who objected to the book's content, took action to attempt to keep the book out of the United States. At a trial in 1921 the magazine was declared obscene and, as a result, Ulysses was banned in the United States.

Wikipedia.

This sort of thing doesn't happen in secular states like France. Oh wait.

In the obituaries for Husain, one could detect a certain tension. Here was a magnificent artist of global stature and yet his obituarists felt the need to explain who exactly he was.

Isn't this what obituarists do for everyone?

The best tribute Britain could give Husain would be for the Royal Academy to organise a major retrospective of his art and include in the exhibition the supposedly offensive works, so viewers can realise how confected the charges of his accusers were. For that to happen, the police would need to break with precedent and promise to protect freedom of expression from its enemies.

Er ...

In 2006, Hindu nationalists forced the closure of a Husain exhibition in London.

And ...

But our shallowness is not the only reason for Husain's obscurity. He is a marked man. Any gallery that shows his work runs a risk. London's Serpentine Gallery included a selection of his paintings in a wider exhibition of contemporary Indian art in 2008. Strange though it once would have seemed, its staff deserved praise for their bravery as well as their good taste.

Cohen in Standpoint. So either there was no threat by 2008 or the police protected the gallery. What is the problem here? And what is this about precedent? The police protected Rushdie.

I'm all for freedom of expression, and Nick's case is helped by a nutter in the comments. So this is certainly one of his better efforts, but I wish someone would read his stuff before it's committed to print