EDITORIAL : THE HINDU, INDIA

Don't ban Great Soul

Union Law Minister Veerappa Moily's announcement that the central government would ban the book Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India had no justification in fact, law, or common sense. The threatened ban on the book — the contents of which Mr. Moily dramatically described as “heresy” — was based, at best, on a total misreading of it and, at worst, on no-reading but relying on grossly misleading reviews in a section of the western media. The biography, written by Joseph Lelyveld, a former editor of the New York Times, does not claim that Mahatma Gandhi was bi-sexual; neither does it portray him as a racist. In the course of a serious exploration that traces the links between the beginning of Gandhi's political life in South Africa and its development in India, the book refers to his close relationship with East Prussian architect Hermann Kallenbach. The strong emotional bond between the two, who lived together for a while on Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg, is more than borne out by the letters Gandhiji wrote to Kallenbach. Mr. Lelyveld quotes a Gandhi scholar in the book as characterising their relationship as “homoerotic” rather than “homosexual,” an interpretation one is free to dispute. But surely, that cannot be a basis for banning a book as the Gujarat government has done with great alacrity and the Government of India was seriously considering until Mr. Moily did an about-turn on the issue.

“I am of the earth, earthy … I am prone to as many weaknesses as you are,” the Mahatma famously declared. He explored a number of these weaknesses with extraordinary honesty in My Experiments with Truth. Most publishers love, and some even stage-manage, the kind of controversy that has broken out over what is a small section of a chapter in Mr. Lelyveld's biography. Not so long ago, in grandson Rajmohan Gandhi's Mohandas, a small episode in the Mahatma's life — his relationship with Rabindranath Tagore's niece Saraladevi Chaudharani (“around which Eros too might have lurked”) — became the frenzied focus of the media. Section 95 of the Code of Criminal Procedure empowers authorities to proscribe books if they contain material that breaches the peace or causes communal tension. Surely, it is no one's case that Great Soul does that. The Supreme Court, which has consistently opposed crude attempts at censorship, has severely limited the use of Section 95 to proscribe books. From a quick reading of the controversial references in the Kindle edition, it seems that Mr. Lelyveld has made too much of what is essentially thin source material on the subject. The answer to that is reasoned, informed criticism. The Mahatma would have been the first to protest against any suggestion of an obscurantist ban.

Germany's Green spring

In a historic development, Winfried Kretschmann is set to become the first Green Minister-President of a German state. The German Green Party has emerged as the senior partner in a coalition with the Social Democratic Party that has captured the state assembly or Landtag in Baden-Württemberg. The coalition defeated the conservative incumbent, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which had led the government of the very wealthy province for almost 58 years. On a turnout of 66 per cent, the Greens more than doubled their 2006 vote-share to 24 per cent, which gave them 36 seats. The CDU remains the biggest single party with 60 seats, but the new alliance will have a majority of four over the bloc formed by the CDU and its ally, the Free Democrat Party (FDP), which lost eight of its 15 seats. Further, the CDU-FDP share of seats in the powerful federal upper chamber, the Bundesrat, will fall in proportion to their regional losses — and Mr. Kretschmann will also have a Bundesrat vote. One consequence is that the CDU national leader and federal Chancellor Angela Merkel will find it even harder to get legislation passed.

Ms Merkel has blamed her party's losses on the stream of bad news from the wrecked Japanese nuclear plant at Fukushima. The Chancellor lost a lot of credibility by announcing a 12-year extension to the life of all 17 German nuclear plants and then doing a U-turn post-Fukushima to state that seven plants built before 1980 would be closed down for three months. But German public opposition to nuclear power, although strong and of long standing, forms only a part of the Greens' strength. Stuttgart, the capital of Baden-Württemberg, has been the focus of controversy over a multi-billion-euro plan to redevelop the central station as part of a high-speed rail link across Europe. The plan, called Stuttgart 21, catalysed a feeling among ordinary people that they were being subordinated to big business; after the election, the national rail company Deutsche Bahn suspended the project. But the news for the Chancellor is even worse. Voters across Germany are deserting the pro-market conservative and Right parties. The rising political stock of the Greens was reflected in a tripled vote-share of 15.4 per cent in Rhineland-Palatinate, which also elected a new assembly on March 27. In this contest, the FDP did not even get the 5 per cent needed for one seat. The most significant implication seems to be that ordinary German voters now want to address concerns and issues very different from those of the mainstream parties. The Greens have an unprecedented chance to initiate significant changes in the style and substance of German politics.