They passed over what he had painted and demanded to know about the paintings he had never painted. Why did he not paint Muhammad? Why did he paint nudes of Indian goddesses but not of the Prophet's favourite wife Aisha? On the internet, his enemies contrast his abstract nudes of gods and goddesses with his fully-clothed portraits of his wife and daughter and Muhammad's daughter Fatima. "Hussain depicts the deity or person he hates as naked. He shows Prophet's Mother, his own mother, daughter, all the Muslim personalities fully clothed, but at the same time Hindus and Hindu deities along with Hitler are shown naked. This proves his hatred for the Hindus." 

India's lawyers and politicians helped at every stage of the campaign of harassment. India and America are the world's dominant multicultural democracies. But whereas America's founding fathers wisely protected free speech with the first amendment, India's founders believed in 1947 that censorship could promote national unity, as many politically-correct European politicians and bureaucrats believe today.

Article 19 of the constitution allows Indians free speech — but then adds opt-outs to allow censorship to protect "the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency..." Article 295 of the criminal code penalises "deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings or any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs". 

For good measure, Article 153 mandates the punishment of those who promote "enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc, [by] doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony".

The courts and the police, who never seemed to be on hand when criminals attacked art galleries, besieged Husain for more than a decade. The enemies of the secular Indian state were able to use its laws to undermine its principles. Censorship was not promoting harmony, let alone the interests of justice, but allowing sectarians to pick grievances out of thin air and order their goondas to avenge imagined wrongs. It took until 2008 for the Delhi High Court to throw out all of the hundreds of criminal charges against Husain, and warn: "In India, a new puritanism is being carried out in the name of cultural purity, and a host of ignorant people are vandalising art and pushing us towards the pre-Renaissance era." 

By then, Husain had had enough. In 2010 at the age of 96, and after years of exile, he renounced his Indian citizenship. Speaking with sadness but not bitterness, he said: "I have not intended to denigrate or hurt the beliefs of anyone through my art. I only give expression to the instincts from my soul. India is my motherland and I can never hate the country. But the political leadership, artists and intellectuals kept silent when Sangh Parivar [Hindu nationalist] forces attacked me. How can I live there in such a situation?"