12 March 2013, 04:25 PM IST
In a previous post, I compared censorship of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi at the Wharton India Economic Forum (WIEF), scheduled for March 22/23, with censorship of Salman Rushdie at the 2012 Jaipur Litfest (Wharton's self-goal). The point wasn't to draw an exact parallel between the two. There were obviously different circumstances surrounding each. The point was to establish an important principle: don't cave in to bullying by a motivated minority.
In Rushdie's case, a few hundred protestors threatened to disrupt his appearance at the Jaipur Litfest. The organizers caved in though everyone else wanted to hear him. In the end Rushdie didn't appear, the government playing its own Machiavellian backroom role.
In Modi's case, a few hundred petitioners threatened to disrupt his video address at WIEF's venue. Its Indian student-organisers, prodded by the university's top bosses, caved in.
In both cases, a small group of individuals unconnected to the event managed to scupper it. That's not democracy at work. That's autocracy at work. It goes like this: "If I don't like you, I won't hear you – and I won't let anyone else hear you either."
Three University of Pennsylvania professors flagged Narendra Modi's scheduled Skype videophone address at Wharton. That's fine. They have the right to object, as we all do, to things and people we don't like.
They obviously also had every right to launch a petition against Modi's video address. The petition got 135 signatures in 24 hours. The number swelled to 300 in a week. After 11 days of fierce lobbying it rose to around 500.
Most signatories were from UPenn, Wharton's parent. None, or few, were from Wharton itself.
So what should Wharton's Dean have done? Heard all sides? Talked to Wharton's general student-body? Taken a vote among the WIEF organizers who'd invited Modi in the first place?
Wharton's dean, Thomas Robertson, may or may not have wanted to do all, or any, of these. But before he could reach a considered decision, UPenn's petitioners, Toorjo Ghose, Ania Loomba and Suvir Kaul, went above his head to UPenn's President Amy Gutmann.
Robertson is known as a genial but ambitious man focused on increasing Wharton's endowment from the $1.20 billion he inherited when he took over from Patrick Harker as Dean in 2007. (Robertson is also, ironically, Reliance Professor of Management and Private Enterprise at the University of Pennsylvania.)
Born in Britain, Robertson has been successful in attracting endowments from large Indian business houses. The three UPenn petitioners clearly felt he might not be over-enthusiastic about withdrawing Modi's invitation. Nor as it turned out was Wharton's faculty or students' body, neither of whom signed the petition.
So the three professors directed their petition to Amy Gutmann, UPenn's President. She acted with unusual alacrity.
The petition kicked off on Thursday, February 28, the day Modi's address was announced.
The next morning, Friday, March 1, the strongly but craftily worded 135-signature petition was sent to Gutmann, the Wharton faculty and WIEF's organizers.
Within 48 hours – basically over the weekend – the invitation to Modi was withdrawn. The announcement was made on Sunday, March 3.
Were Wharton's students or WIEF's organizers consulted before the cancellation was announced? (If they were, it must have been overnight.) Or were they just told?
UPenn President Amy Gutmann was the only person who could have authorized such a lightning-fast decision on a petition with still barely 200 signatures on it – and not one from Wharton's faculty or students.
It's irrelevant to argue, as some have, that Wharton is a private school and therefore can invite and disinvite speakers. Of course it can. But it operates in the public domain with public funds. It has rights as well as obligations. One of those obligations is to tell its "stakeholders" – a word it has used a lot recently – who actually authorized the decision to cancel. Gutmann? Robertson? WIEF?
Democracy without transparency fails the test.
* * *
Soon after he won the Booker Prize, Salman Rushdie was invited by Sterling Newspapers, a media company I founded, to deliver the Gentleman Magazine Annual Lecture on Politics and the Novel in Mumbai and Delhi.
The Mumbai lecture, at the Taj's President Hotel, went off well. On our flight to Delhi, for the second lecture, Rushdie and I spoke among other things about liberty, literature and the politics of free speech.
At the lecture the next day in Delhi, this is what Rushdie told the audience: "I have no wish to nail myself, let alone anyone else, to the tree of political literature for the rest of my writing life. Lewis Carroll and Italo Calvino are as important to literature as Swift or Brecht. What I am saying is that politics and literature, like sport and politics, do mix, are inextricably mixed and that the mixture has consequences."
WIEF's organizers should read out that bit from Rushdie's lecture at their conference next week and send a copy to three Indian-American professors at UPenn who need to upgrade their notion of liberty.
Follow @minhazmerchant on twitter
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