The fatwas reflect this belief in double standards. The differential attitude to conversion and apostasy illustrates this vividly. Islam regards it a… - Arun Shourie

They rely on intimidation, It is exactly by tactics of this kind that an earlier book of Mr. Swarup - Understanding Islam Through Hadis - was put out of circulation... November 27, 1990, under the influence of the same intimidation the Delhi Administration declared that, contrary to what it had itself twice decreed, the book was not only objectionable, was deliberately and malicious so!....
Our response should be three fold. First, whenever an attempt such as this from quarters such as Mr. Shahabuddin is made to stifle free speech, to kill even scholarly inquiry, we must go out of our way and immediately obtain the book....
Secondly, whenever the intimidators prevail and such a book actually comes to be banned large numbers should take to reprinting it, photocopying it, to circulating it, and discussing its contents.
The third thing is more necessary, and in the long run will be the complete answer to the intimidators. As long as scholars like Mr. Swarup are few, intimidators can bully weak governments into shutting them one by one. But what will they do if 1,000, scholars are to do work of the same order? This is the way to deal with intimidators. Let 1,000 scholars carry on work Mr. Swarup has pioneered.

The brutal—the customarily brutal—way in which the Chinese government suppressed the protests by Tibetans in Lhasa in the months preceding the 2008 Beijing Olympics once again drew attention to the enormous crime that the world has refused to see: the systematic way in which an entire people have been reduced to a minority in their own land; the cruelty with which they are being crushed; the equally systematic way in which their religion and ancient civilization are being erased. Protests by Tibetans in different cities across the world, joined as they were by large numbers of citizens of those countries, had the same effect.
No government anywhere in the world did what the Manmohan Singh government did in Delhi, no government reacted in as craven and as frightened a manner as our government did. The Olympic Torch was to be relayed across just about two kilometres—from Vijay Chowk to India Gate. The government stationed over twenty thousand troops, paramilitary personnel, policemen and plainclothes men in and around that short stretch. Tibetan refugees were beaten and sequestered. Government offices were closed. Roads were blocked. The Metro was shut down. Even members of Parliament were stopped from going to their homes through the square that adjoins Parliament, the Vijay Chowk.
Do you think that any of this was done out of love for the Olympics?
It was done out of fear of China.

The forfeiture is exactly the sort of thing which has landed us where we are : where intellectual inquiry is shut out ; where our tradition are not examined and reassessed and where as a consequence there is no dialogue.