Quote:
Originally Posted by j.p.s
The problem is that the book is not a work of fiction that the Indian government finds criminally offensive, but a history book that (at least purports to) documents facts.
This would be like having a law in the US making it illegal to document slavery in the US, or a law in Germany prohibiting publishing any record of acts by the nazi party while out of or in power, or Italy making it a crime to document any cases of pedophilia by the clergy.
(Not that banning fiction that ruffles feathers isn't really really bad, but banning the publication of historical facts is much worse.)
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Governments have done illogical things in the past. There was a case where a man was charged with sending obscene material through the mail sometime in the last part of the 19th or the early 20th century. What he had in fact mailed was a copy of "The song of songs" which in fact is part of the Bible. But he was charged with obscenity anyway. Just goes to show that if someone can object to something on some sort of grounds that they will even if it doesn't make sense. There was a movie about the prophet Mohammed that people of the Islamic faith reacted very violently to because to them a visual image of their prophet is against their beliefs. Hostages were taken and held til the movie was stopped mid show and the film removed from distribution. The ironic thing was that the film is shown from Mohammed's viewpoint so that he was never even shown so they were objecting to something that didn't even happen.
