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        Artistes from many places in India gathered in Vadodara yesterday in a show of solidarity against the attack on Chandramohan Srilamantula, a painter who had displayed his works at the Fine Arts faculty of the Maharaja Sayajirao University (MS University). The artistes, in a colour coordinated show of having seen red, feel that freedom of expression in India is under threat from the moral police. There were some purple prose too to back their show of solidarity. To see painters, poets, philosophers, who inhabit the world of abstract and abstruse, come together on a single platform and agreeing on a common issue was a bit of surprise. For, they might have joined forces for freedom of expression, but it is arguable whether you could have got the same definition for freedom of expression from any two of them. That is the nature of art, and beast.

        It is presumable that no artiste was actually protesting the protest against Chandramohan as against the highhanded manner in which it was put across. No civil society should tolerate violence and vehemence, and hence the physical attack on the painting expo should be condemned, and the guilty brought to book. But it cannot be anybody's case that all that a person, labelled as an artiste, comes up with is art. Even the most liberal of minds would accept that Chandramohan, when he sought to paint Hindu religious symbols the way he did, was pushing the envelope a bit too far. Artistes should understand that freedom of expression does not amount to an omnibus licence to do anything in any manner. Artistes, howsoever bohemian or iconoclastic they may be, have to conform to the larger rules and regulation that the rest of the society play by.

        Somebody like M F Hussain should understand this. Yes, he, being a practising Muslim, always lets himself open to more attacks than others when he caricatures Hindu symbols and Bharathamatha. But he loses all his credibility and the sympathy he may otherwise deserve, when his creative interpretation that makes him paint Gods in nude stops with Hinduism. It is never nice to spell these things in such open terms. But the fact of the matter is Hussain has never had any 'creative impulse' when it comes to Muslim symbols and the depiction of his own mother. What makes yesterday's protest against the moral policing look equally dubious is most of the artistes', and also the so-called liberal publications that now give them enough space, played out a different tune when the Islamic reactionaries held out a threat after a Danish publication came up with a cartoon of Prophet Mohammed. The general consensus then was the cartoons were 'nasty and a needless provocation'. Pray what happened to the practised singsong of freedom of expression then? Closer home, three employees of a newspaper that published a survey have been murdered by violent mobs that apparently owed allegiance to the Chief Minister's son. Obviously, the newspaper's crime is certainly lesser than that of Chandramohan's or Hussain. But the price that has been paid is three lives. So what are the freedom of expression brigade waiting for? What is stopping the Arundhathi Roys and the Brinda Karats of our world from hitting the streets and making shrill slogans? Have the pens of the lofty editorial writers run out of ink? Why don't we see the same orchestrated show of condemnation for the murder of three? The truth, if told, will show up the true colours of these artistes and other pseudo fads.