The photographs of Mohammad Muqtada Khan aiming a laptop at Taslima Nasreen in Hyderabad are perhaps some of the ugliest images to have come out of the history of Indian democracy. The outrage and the fear of harm on Ms Nasreen’s face, the defensive postures of her hosts trying to shield her, and Mr Khan’s face grotesquely distorted by bigoted rage come together in a spectacle any civilized society ought to be thoroughly ashamed of. Two little details keep up the black irony: the Press-Club setting and the laptop as missile. The first stands for autonomy and critical freedom, and the second for a kind of modernized governance that Hyderabad has come to stand for. The assault on Ms Nasreen subverts both, to an almost absurd extent. But the most shameful fact of all is that the three men who led the attack are all members of the Andhra Pradesh assembly. One of them has allegedly declared that he is a Muslim first and then a legislator. The head of the group that they represented has said publicly that Ms Nasreen should not have come to Hyderabad at all. His son has threatened her with death if she were to come again. The violence of this attack — quite apart from its larger political significance — was absolute.

Such an incident — and indeed Ms Nasreen’s entire career since the publication of Lajja in 1993 — is a naked instance of the most brutal attack on the freedom of expression. In Ms Nasreen’s case, the whole force of religious bigotry is directed not only against creative dissent, but also against a woman in whose writings that dissent has become inseparable from an assertion of her sexual independence. It is this combined challenge to orthodoxy that constitutes Ms Nasreen’s offence. (Bengal will have to recall, with some regret, that its government too had once found this sexual dissidence difficult to handle, to the extent of banning one of her books on a rather lame excuse.) Most religions harbour this peculiar violence against women, whose ‘honour’ they ostentatiously and oppressively ‘protect’.

Figures like Ms Nasreen and, more catastrophically, Salman Rushdie embody a curious paradox of modernity. The writer or artist must be allowed her creative independence and autonomy in the most absolute terms. Yet, when these are taken away from her, then every instrument of the modern State and civil society must be used to restore them to her, but without expecting to co-opt her in any way into the interests of the State. Yet, the same sort of logic cannot, and must not, be applied to dangerous fundamentalism. And one of the great challenges of civilization is to be able to exercise discrimination in such matters. Which are the freedoms that must be absolutely upheld, and which enacted with a sense of their relative limits? In this age of hypersensitive value-systems, who takes the ‘right’ sort of offence, and whose sensitivity must not be allowed to tip over into bigotry?