NEW DELHI — In a fight with a major company, a frail, 84-year-old retired headmaster would seem to be the David to India’s publishing Goliath, Penguin Books India.
But last week, the retiree, Dinanath Batra, achieved the crowning victory of his career as a right-wing campaigner, when a lawsuit he had filed prompted Penguin to withdraw and destroy remaining copies of a scholarly work on Hinduism by an American professor that Batra has called “malicious,” “dirty” and “perverse.”
Batra’s assiduous legal filings in defense of his religion had sometimes paid off, but never like this. India’s intellectuals stopped in their tracks last week, wondering what had induced Penguin Books India to settle out of court with what one writer termed “an unknown Hindu fanatic outfit.” The Times of India warned of “Taliban-like forces,” and a prominent columnist denounced “the pulping of liberal India.”
The announcement has rippled through a city bracing itself for big change. Three months remain before general elections, in which the center-left party Indian National Congress is expected to suffer one of the worst losses in its history to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.
The BJP’s leader, Narendra Modi, has campaigned on his economic policies, appealing to the frustrated expectations of India’s new middle class. Though he has a long association with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu right-wing organization, in the campaign he has stayed far away from divisive language on religion.
The governing Congress party’s record on freedom of speech is hardly stellar, as evidenced by India’s sliding ranking in the World Press Freedom Index. Even Salman Rushdie’s book “The Satanic Verses” was banned in India by a Congress government led by Rajiv Gandhi that was fearful of offending Muslims.