Farrukh Dhondy | The cancelling' of all those you don't agree with might have gone too far

“The roadside tamarind trees were fair game

We shot at them with catapults and down came

A shower of brown fingers -- the ripe fruit

Sour but tasted sweet -- as it was loot.

The trees of mangoes blossomed in private yards

Protected by their owners and often canine guards --

No catapults and no thieving boys could climb

To steal the fruit we all consider sublime

Thus, tamarind and mangoes must each know their worth

As do we -- the rich or wretched of this earth!”

From Gulley Bol, by Bachchoo

Trains, meetings, appointments were cancelled -- people weren’t. Till now.

Though “cancelling” someone brings to mind eliminating them gently, it doesn’t mean that. It merely means shutting them up.

And so it was with Diane Abbott, who was suspended from membership of the Labour Party when she wrote in a national newspaper that black people were historically subject to graver forms of racism than Jews, Irish people, Travellers or redheads. I firmly believe this was a matter for debate, not an offence leading to “cancellation”.

Diane has, this week, been reinstated in the Labour Party and returns to Westminster as a Labour MP -- but! Yes BUT… the deal to reinstate the whip may involve her not standing as a Labour candidate in the general election to be held on July 4.

Labour says no such deal was done. If it was, I am unhappy on her behalf.

Not only on her behalf -- on behalf of the cause of free opinionation, if not free speech. Obviously, free speech must not be allowed to spill over into threats or abuse. There may sometimes be a thin line between holding an opinion, expressing it and someone characterising that opinion or speech as offensive and meriting “cancellation”.

Two recent cases are studies in which this distinction is in question. To my mind, they are both unfair and wildly discriminatory against women of ethnic minorities in Britain.

Case one is that of the journalist and broadcaster Sangita Myska, who had a programme on the popular radio channel LBC. It was a talk show on which she interviewed politicians, people we have taken to calling “celebrities” and anyone in the news. In April, Sangita had as her guest Avi Hyman, an Israeli government spokesman.

The gist of Sangita’s questions were about Israel’s bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus. The fellow Avi denied that there was any attack on an “embassy”, insisting that the bomb was aimed at an Iranian anti-Israeli terrorist leader. Sangita argued vigorously against Hyman, who has in the past maintained that the State of Israel owns (by God’s gift, I expect) the land from the Euphrates in Iraq to the Nile in Egypt. In all the interchange, robust though it was, I could discern no offence.

And yet, Sangita was promptly “cancelled” by LBC. Dismissed and replaced by a presenter with distinctly over-the-top right-wing inclinations.

Case two is that of the journalist and broadcaster Geeta Guru-Murthy. She wasn’t quite “cancelled” but was certainly compelled by the BBC, for whom she works, to publicly humiliate herself.

The story: The extreme right-wing politician Nigel Farage, who as the former leader of the UKIP and Brexit parties and now the honorary president of its successor the “Reform” Party, is avowedly anti-immigration. It’s his political career’s central policy. This career includes standing for public office -- five of those as a parliamentary candidate -- and failing in all of them. In a speech in support of Reform’s election campaign in Dover, he quoted the Polish Prime Minister as saying that “aggressive young males” were entering Poland as immigrants. My Polish is non-existent, so I can’t assess how much of the quote was lost or enhanced in translation.

Geeta, insightfully, understood the sub-text of this quotation. Farage meant that admitting young Muslim men into Europe, including, mainly, into Britain, was inviting terrorists and endangering the population. On her programme on the BBC, she characterised Farage’s words as “customary inflammatory language”.

Nigel, who is spending most of his time supporting his friend Donald Trump in America, knew exactly what he intended his Dover audience to conclude from his characteristically anti-immigrant stance. He disingenuously complained on the social media that Geeta had contravened the BBC’s impartiality rule. The cowardly BBC succumbed and forced Geeta into making an abject apology on air.

No doubt Farage might maintain that some of his best friends are immigrants and this might be true as the Tory ex-minister Priti Patel’s father, Sushil Patel, an immigrant from Africa, stood as an anti-immigration candidate for Farage’s UKIP in Hertfordshire.

“Cancellation” is not reserved for “ethnic” females. The writer J.K. Rowling and some academics who maintain that transgender people have the right to call themselves whatever they choose and live as free citizens in whatever role they adopt, but that gender is unchangeably assigned at birth, have also been challenged and variously “cancelled”.

I certainly have the right to assert that the earth is flat and I am free to join an aggressive campaign of the Flat Earth Society, but none of that changes the approximately round shape of the earth.

My safety from “cancellation”, despite all the above, is that I don’t work for any broadcasting organisation and am not an MP and I am confident that the owners and editors of the Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle are not cancellation-wallahs.

Oh dear… wait and see.