When Maqbool Fida Husain was busy making nude paintings of Hindu goddesses in the 1990s, he got unprecedented liberal support within and outside the country. He became an icon for everything progressive and modern, battling obscurantist, reactionary and medievalistic forces. The liberal grandstanding, however, was hollow, for they were the ones who competed with each other to get Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses banned, ironically even before the theocratic Iran and Islamist Pakistan could do so. Rushdie’s fate was sealed in India much before people here could get hold of the book. Hearsay was enough to get him ostracised! History...