Sometimes I almost wish I were wrong / who's your doggie now?

A couple of weeks ago, in comments to a post about the whole Danish cartoon thing (a comments track that I never managed to keep up with - sorry!) I expressed my horror at discovering that India actually had laws (laws, mind you!) that allowed people to be prosecuted for actions that give offence to religious sensibilities. My argument was that this was absurd, because (among other things) religion was fundamentally illogical (or rather infra-logical) anyway, so there was really no saying what might constitute an offense against it (my comments to that post have a longer discussion of this). You could effectively throw pretty much anyone in prison by arguing that he / she had insulted your religion in some way or the other.

Then today morning I see this post by Uma talking about how a journalist got thrown into prison for submitting a story about the name of a film-star's dog, because some zealot somewhere found the story offensive. Doesn't that sound like something out of a Kundera novel? The scariest part about the whole thing is the way the newspaper report Uma links to tippy-toes around telling us what the article actually said or what the name of the dog was that gave such offense - presumably for fear of having more of their reporters hauled off to prison. So much for freedom of the press.

Meanwhile, if someone does know what the alleged name of the dog was (even if it turned out not to be true - and I wonder if it became not true after the original article got published) would you mind telling me? I don't read the ToI in general, but I'd love to know. And if it offends some random fanatics out there, so much the better.

Categories: CurrentAffairs