India must carry the shame of being the first country to ban The Satanic Verses, the work of its greatest novelist, and of following up that miserable achievement by driving its greatest artist into exile.

Why pick on Husain for sketches no one found disturbing when he first released them? Read his accusers, and they cannot justify their charges of blasphemy or obscenity. How can they when Husain's paintings are not remotely pornographic but part of a deliberate attempt by the artist and his contemporaries to continue Indian traditions?

Husain's real offence was to be born into a Muslim family almost 100 years ago and to defend Nehru's secular dream. That was it. That was all his attackers needed. They wanted to feed their supporters a diet of outrage, and needed to supply them with targets for their rage. The identity of the target was irrelevant. If they had not gone after Husain, they would have gone after someone else. In the new, pure India they yearn for, a Muslim cannot be a true Indian, or indeed in Husain's case live in India as a citizen. Any Muslim or any historian they could accuse of being a socialist, communist or relic of British liberalism would do.

Well, how lucky we are that we do not suffer from versions of India's censorship laws here, and how proud we should be that we could offer Husain a sanctuary in London.

But we are not so lucky, and there is no cause for pride. Go back to the forced closure of the Husain exhibition in 2006. The reaction to the attack on intellectual freedom in the heart of a city that boasts of being a great cultural capital told you all you needed to know about the spread of the enfeebling dogma that society must appease any religious group that can claim offence and threaten violence. There was no reaction. The artists and intellectuals who are usually so keen to write round-robin letters to the press denouncing this policy or that injustice stayed silent. Journalists and politicians bit their tongues, too. They tacitly accepted the tyrannical proposition that if a writer or artist failed to show "respect", then he or she must suffer the consequences. The denial by fanatics of the right of the public to see the work of a major artist did not warrant one paragraph in all the news-in-brief columns of the daily newspapers. 

The closure of Husain's exhibition shows that we have no right to feel superior to India. The West has quietly accepted a new blasphemy law. It is not a law that has been debated by congresses or parliaments. No legitimate authority has spelt out its limits in a statute book. No judge protects defendants' rights to a fair trial. No jury insists that they must find the accused guilty beyond reasonable doubt before conviction. It is enough that some know-nothing thug somewhere deems that a writer or artist had insulted him and his god or gods, and has the means, motive and opportunity to threaten retribution.