Husain's sketch of Saraswati, the goddess of learning, did not compare with temple carvings of goddesses wrapping their thighs around gods. You could not even call the drawing a fully realised nude. Saraswati sits cross-legged beside a lute holding a lotus flower above her head. There is nothing erotic — let alone pornographic — about his stylised white-on-black sketch, in which only contours, not detailed physical features, are evident. Husain's goddess is pure to the point of being ethereal.

He drew her in the mid-1970s. No one complained. In 1996, a Bombay art critic included the sketch in a book on Husain. A writer on a sectarian Hindu monthly picked up a copy, saw the line drawing of Saraswati and decided to create a scandal out of nothing. "M. F. Husain: an Artist or a Butcher?" ran the headline above an article accusing the artist of insulting Hindus. The provocateur had picked the right time to start a culture war. By the 1990s, religious parties and sectarian militias had infested the supposedly secular and multicultural Indian state. They wanted — they needed — to inflame their supporters and, if they could not find real provocations, they were happy to invent them.

The leaders of Shiv Sena, a thuggish bunch of religious rabble-rousers, controlled Husain's Bombay. They saw a copy of the article and instructed the police to file charges against him. Three days later, Hindu activists stormed a gallery in Ahmedabad showing his work and trashed his paintings.

Husain's enemies had thrown him into the self-pitying and vicious world of Hindu sectarianism, whose malignancies the West should treat as a warning.

At the heart of multicultural theory lies a trap. Of all the reasons to be wary of unelected religious leaders asking the state to suspend freedom of speech to spare their tender feelings, not the smallest is that selective censorship leaves liberals with no argument against sectarians from the dominant denomination or ethnic group. In India, multiculturalism has led to the majority — or rather demagogues claiming to represent the majority — to behave as if it were a persecuted minority.

The various Hindu sectarian parties claimed that the descendants of India's former Muslim masters still dominated the country. They noticed that in 1988 Rajiv Gandhi's Congress government had banned Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses to please Muslim sentiment. Gandhi had also agreed to exempt Muslim men from paying the alimony to divorced wives that the secular law demanded, while not allowing Hindu men to benefit from the cheap rate authorised by sharia. Look, cried the Hindu sectarians, look at how the elite panders to the minority while penalising the majority.