That Bloke In The Big Smoke

The British government has (grudgingly) decided/been forced to end a 140 year-old ban on voting rights for prisoners, following a 2004 decision by the European Court of Human Rights which ruled that the blanket ban was discriminatory and breached the European Convention on Human Rights. Under the Forfeiture Act 1870, prisoners sentenced for felonies were denied the right to vote and this ban was retained in the Representation of the People Act 1983. Prisoners on remand, fine defaulters and those imprisoned for contempt of court can still vote. In addition, the Court allowed individual governments to decide which offences should carry restrictions on voting rights.

For several months, the government's lawyers tried to find a way to avoid enfranchising a potential 70,000 British inmates. But after exhausting every potential avenue the government realised lifting the ban was the only viable option, else taxpayers faced paying huge sums (upto £50 million possibly) in compensation from prisoner claims, and potential legal action from the EU. Most other European nations allow some prisoners voting rights. And despite two separate public consultations, the previous Labour government failed to implement any changes. The news has polarised the country with Tory and Labour supporters upset, though many acknowledge the government had no choice, while many Lib Dems are happy because they campaigned for the law to change. I too wanted the change. But what do you think?

[Poll #1639898]

This article by Soumitro Das (a Kolkata-based writer) is taken from the Hindustan Times, an Indian English-language daily newspaper:

Exactly 21 years ago today, on February 19, 1989, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie, the author of what he proclaimed to be a blasphemous novel, The Satanic Verses. While this act instantly galvanised — and radicalised — the protests from Muslim communities in various quarters against Rushdie, it was in India that The Satanic Verses was first banned in end-October 1988 by the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress government, months after the novel was first published. For all purposes, the ban on Rushdie’s novel marked the beginning of the State gagging artistic freedom in India under the guise of ‘protecting the sentiments’ of various groups.

We are a very sentimental people. The abolition of sati in the 19th century, for instance, hurt Hindu sentiments. But that did not make the abolition less necessary. It was down to Hindu reformers supported by the British administration who finally overturned the tyranny of tradition.

Offensiveness comes in two categories: involuntary and voluntary. M.F. Husain’s depiction of Hindu deities in the nude is an example of offence given involuntarily. Husain’s nudes are not pornographic. The Nude is a particular genre of painting that has been rendered famous in art. The aim is to celebrate the human form and not to titillate. The intention is not erotic and Husain is not undressing women. Besides, in painting goddesses in the nude, Husain is divesting them of human accoutrements and enhancing their divine quality. (Why on earth should goddesses dress in saris anyway?)

But what about voluntary offensiveness, where the artist goes out of his way to provoke if not cause offence? Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses falls into this category.

The modern novel has arrogated to itself the right to offend. Its source lies in the literary revolution that swept through France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. People like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Mallarme and Apollinaire took literature out of the salons and into the streets and the bordellos of Paris. They attacked bourgeois culture and repudiated all bourgeois forms of success: fame, wealth, power, etc.

Every individual surrenders a part of his freedom and his self when he acknowledges any form of social or political authority in order to enjoy the security and the other benefits that society bestows upon him. The literary revolutionaries mentioned above reneged on this social contract and reclaimed for themselves the freedom and the selfhood that had been sacrificed on their behalf by their mentors.

They all suffered from a condition that, after Nietzsche and Freud, could be called 'unheimlichkeit', or homelessness. Homelessness was the price they had to pay for attacking family, country and religion. This is borne out literally in the case of Rushdie and also Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen. Rushdie, after the fatwa, had to literally hop from safe house to safe house for 10 years, without being able to call any place his home. Nasreen, on her part, was hounded out of 'India’s cultural capital' (sic) Calcutta by Muslim hoodlums and is now flitting from country to country, returning occasionally to India to renew her visa, but without being able to return to her 'home'.

More than a political condition, 'unheimlichkeit' refers to a psychological state where it is not possible to obey any authority but that of one’s own self. Art, revolutionary art, is the highest value, the highest expression of what Nietzsche calls "the will to power". The worship of beauty for its own sake is much more demanding than the worship of God. It is from this point of superiority that Art is able to mock at, insult or humiliate religious faith.

India is, of course, a poor country and all such things are incomprehensible here, where politics is the highest expression of 'the will to power'. The poor look towards the State for succour and the State does or does not do them justice. This is a black and white world, a world of Manichaean extremes. While Truth, to which Art is intimately linked, is full of ambiguity and ambivalence, and is, as Nietzsche puts it so finely, "beyond good and evil".

Since August last year I have made three trips to India (via Bahrain, Dubai and Mumbai) and two trips to Oman (via Bahrain and Doha). I started each journey from four different airports (Heathrow Terminal's 3 & 4, Gatwick, Muscat and Chennai). In all those journeys the thing that stood out the most was the sharp contrast in security checks in each airport. It stood out for three main reasons.

Firstly, London's two biggest airports had been in a heightened state of alert since 9/11, 7/7 and particularly 10/8 (The August 2006 Transatlantic Aircraft Plot). Secondly, India had been victim to several terrorist attacks in recent years and were in the midst of an intelligence crisis involving a potential conspirator in the Mumbai Attacks of November 2008, who had allegedly made several trips to India, including one to Mumbai days before the attack. And thirdly, that the so-called police-state dictatorships of the Middle East had a more than passing interest in the current climate of the global terrorist threat and significantly, its implications on their security.

You'd think that most, if not all the airports I flew through would have had a fairly standardised (ie, stringent and thorough) system of security checks. Wrong. The gulf in security particularly that for hand-luggage, between the London airports and their Middle Eastern and Indian counterparts struck me as ironic. Here was a liberal democracy inconveniencing and invading the privacy of every passenger in the name of security, while in the authoritarian East there was a comparatively negligent and indifferent attitude to security.

In London, pat downs were performed on every single passenger, regardless of whether the metal checker detected anything or not. Rarely was one allowed to walk through the detector with their shoes and belt on. All liquids/sprays had to be in 100ml (or less) containers and scanned separately by the X-ray machine. Laptops and jacket-like clothings also had to be taken off/out and scanned separately by the X-ray machine. And following the alleged incident on Christmas Day, the authorities now want to rush in the body scanners. Civil liberty campaigners have challenged the government on whether the scans will contravene our child pornography laws.

In comparison, the security in the Middle East and India was almost non-existent. Few pat downs, hardly any of them as thorough as the ones in London. If the metal detector beeped and the security area was not teeming with passengers, the security guy would perform a token check with a handheld detector, but most of the time they seemed uninterested. None of the airports necessitated liquids/sprays to be held in transparent ziploc bags and not once did I see any container above 100ml disposed of. On every transit journey via Bahrain, Doha and Dubai, I was able to keep the 500ml+ bottle of water with me that I had picked up in either Mucat, Chennai or London Duty Free. And until Heathrow nabbed my 150ml deodorant on my latest trip last month, not even London's airports detected its illegitimate passage across the world and back in twelve separate journeys between August and November.

Unfortunately, I'm still not sure how strongly I feel about airport security. On the one hand I want air travel to be safe, especially as my family, friends and I frequently use it. On the other hand, I don't feel true to my liberal ideals by accepting these erosions into our personal spaces and civil liberties for the sake of protecting air travel. I'm not even sure the security in London's airports are as effective as they are made out to be necessary, especially when one considers that the more relaxed security regime in the Middle East and India has not resulted in any incident till date. Yet I get the distinct impression that the halcyon era of stress-free air travel has disappeared forever. Each new attack will erode the few existing liberties that remain and it could have a huge impact on global travel.