IT’s unfortunate that there is much hue and cry about M F Husain giving up Indian citizenship. While India has a policy of free expression, one cannot accept blatant insult to the heroes of its land. It is the intention behind a man’s creativity which is questionable.
In one of Husain’s paintings of Mahatma Gandhi, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein and Hitler, he has painted only Hitler nude and said that his way of humiliating a person is to paint him nude. Caught in his own words, his intention is to humiliate. No one has ever sculpted Rama and Sita as nude. Creative expression is always welcome. No country has been as liberal as India, especially Hindus. But there is a limit to tolerance and taking insults. Any nude woman could have been painted by him but calling the women Sita, Lakshmi, Saraswati shows his perversion and hatred.
Will M F Husain show the same creativity and the same spirit with Islamic heroes and would he, then, be able retain his Qatari citizenship? One fails to understand how we can have different criteria for Salman Rushdie and Taslima Nasreen on the one hand and M F Husain on the other. Will the same people who support him, encourage him to paint women / men of his faith in a similar manner?
Double standards, bias and hatred do not go well with men of excellence.
