What happened at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was condemnable without reserve and the world’s media, including in India, have risen in solidarity.
To have terrorists butcher the editor and star cartoonists of a hallowed French institution while they were in editorial conference is an unspeakable tragedy.
For the wider world, however, this tragedy must be placed in context. France, where I have lived for nearly two years in the 1980s, has a liberal tradition of freedom of expression in journalism.
Compared to the old, much lamented Punch in Britain, with its biting humour laced with unspoken discretion, there are no limits to aiming barbs at institutions. In other words, there are no gods that cannot be demolished.
France’s most famous satirical publication, Le Canard enchaine, has been delighting readers for long. There seemed to be an understanding among the editorial staff of this publication that religious beliefs were to be handled with care. No such limits were placed on Charlie.
What Charlie and France failed to realise was that the world is living in a new environment and century. The old verities do not hold good because there is even an Islamic state, wedded to extreme forms of religious practice, controlling and ruling over a vast area in Syria and Iraq.
Supporters of this state and allied extremist organisations interpret Islam in their own way, and despite the frowns of their religious teachers, practise forms of punishment the rest of their co-religionists call barbaric.
Demonstrating courage, the staff of Charlie, with the overwhelming support of their countrymen and the democratic world, remain undeterred and plan to continue to plough its furrow.
Much of the world applauds them over their determination. But the French as a nation must wear their thinking cap to reassess the national tradition of liberal freedom. Must provocation at demolishing gods end somewhere in the new religious environment we live in?
Contrast the French mores of media freedom with India’s. As a new free multi-ethnic, multi-religious country on Independence, the new rulers decided that there must be limits to press freedom as far as religious heresies are concerned for the very survival of the country.
And hanging over the new nation was the dark legacy of the bloody Partition of the subcontinent that led to a mass evacuation, with religious minorities seeking shelter on the other side of the new borders.
Mercifully, apart from the aberration of the Emergency years in the 1970s and continuing attempts by politicians in power to try to control how events are projected by media, India enjoys a largely free media environment. Thus by sheer necessity there are some gods that cannot be demolished and there is political consensus on the issue.
It is a widely accepted belief in most free societies that there are some limits to free expression. Each society defines these limits in its own manner.
Only the Scandinavian countries share the French penchant for liberal freedom. We have had the famous incident of the Danish publication Jyllands-Posten that got into a lot of trouble over offending Muslim religious sensibilities, with plots being hatched against its lead cartoonist necessitating police protection being provided to its offending cartoonist.
Police protection was also provided to the Charlie editor after threats being hurled at its direction by Muslim protesters, but it proved woefully inadequate.
The murder was well-planned by trained assassins with a possible connection to the exodus of Europeans, mostly of Arab ancestry, fighting with jihadis in Syria and Iraq.
Again, the new environment calls for a French rethink on their traditional way of exercising media freedom.
The irony, of course, is that we are living in a modern world with immensely expanding visions of the marvels of the universe.
We know much more about the wider world and the planets than we ever did. Men have landed on the Moon, we have touched Mars and have ambitions to settle human beings on planets.
In another sense, the development of the human brain has not kept pace with our dramatic knowledge of the universe.
While large sections of the human family have graduated from religious beliefs to atheism and agnosticism, there has been a reverse movement in interpreting religious beliefs more literally, contrary to the preaching of sages and religious saints.
The turmoil in the Middle East (West Asia to us) has made an immense contribution to the strain of religious intolerance we see almost daily.
First, the region was convulsed by a set of revolts, beginning in Tunisia, to topple dictatorships of one kind or another. Most people in the region celebrated and an excited world called it the Arab Spring. But the cause of the people, after decades of dictatorship, proved too fragile.
With the singular exception of Tunisia, where it all started and still retains some promise, the people’s movement were toppled. In Egypt’s case, it took one whole year, and the people who sparked the revolts themselves became disillusioned, facilitating the return of familiar dictators.
It has been a downward journey since then. Tragically, the space occupied by those revolting for freedom is occupied by extremist elements such as Al Qaeda, progressing to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (known as ISIS), and culminating in the Islamic Caliphate. Islam, in the narrowest sense, became the war cry of the new revolutionaries.
The rest is history. The world is witness to the continuing bloodshed on a massive scale in Syria and Iraq, with Libya is a state of chaos because the previous long-time ruler Muammar Gaddafi had dispensed with institutions, except those created by him, to rule over his people.
This is the world we live in. And the extremists are testing the world’s patience by testing their forms of religious observance and edicts and laying down the law.
These developments carry the warning that the French media in particular must readjust their sights without losing their prized freedom.
