On Free Speech
When will Indian citizens be able to speak their mind freely?
On Samay Raina’s show, India’s Got Latent, Ranveer Allahbadia — one of the panelists — cracked a crass joke in a failed attempt at humour. Inexplicably — the same joke had been cracked a decade earlier by Kanan Gill— it got everyone up in arms. The police sent off a notice to Ranveer, Samay and all their panelists, including the ones from previous episodes. Himanta Biswa Sarma, the Assam CM, asked the Assam police to summon the comedians. If that wasn’t enough, the National Commission of Women (NCW) also summoned him. What was the cherry on the cake? A “spiritual leader” alluded to having them hanged. It would’ve been a black comedy if it wasn’t happening in real life.
Why does India hate free speech so much? Why were politicians across the aisle so nettled? Why is Indian society so prickly and waspish? Is this a case of culture being upstream of politics? So many questions, so few answers.
Does India even have free speech?
Article 19 of the Indian Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and expression. Passing the First Amendment of the Indian Constitution in 1951, Nehru further restricted freedom of speech. But even before that, Article 19 always reserved the right for the Government to make laws against anything that “offends morality or decency”.
How can a country with such a qualifier ever have true free speech? Different groups of people get offended differently. Conservatives are offended by licentious liberals, liberals are offended by uptight conservatives, anarchists are offended by any semblance of imposed order. In India, the list is endless. Each province has its holy cows. Additionally, each religion has its venerable books. Every sufficiently vocal group gets a veto on book publications. Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” was banned in India for 4 decades! Worse, people are conflating the defence of free speech with agreement with the speech itself. Every Ranveer defender started out by saying “I don’t agree with it, but…”.
Blasphemy
India has 3 blasphemy laws:
Section 295A of the Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita1 punishes deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings. It punishes acts like burning religious books, throwing beef in a temple or pork in a mosque, offensive imagery of religious figures — you get the gist.
The Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act punishes any atrocities or hate crimes against SCs and STs.
Section 66A of the IT act punished offensive messages sent through an electronic medium, with a jail term of at least 3 years. Thankfully, the Supreme Court struck down this act as unconstitutional in 2015.
All three laws have the same problem. Who decides what is offensive and what is a hate crime? Let me make my position on the topic clear. Physical acts of violence or harm, throwing meat at a religious place of worship, practicing untouchability or inflicting violence because of caste membership are clearly wrong. There’s no two thoughts on this. But beyond these open and shut cases, lies a vast endless landscape of moral grey.
Other than calls to violence, why should any speech be restricted under blasphemy? Isn’t blasphemy a peculiar concept? It is the State intervening and saying that some things cannot be said. Isn’t that trampling on an individual’s right to hear? Galileo saying that the Earth wasn’t centre of the universe was blasphemy. Shutting him down trammelled individuals’ right to know about progress. Fellow scientists had the right to build on his experiments. We look back and laugh at the situation. But it isn’t any different now. Only the objects of blasphemy are different.
Marketplace of ideas
Free speech attackers imply that their ideas are too weak to compete in the marketplace of ideas. I strongly believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant. No idea is sacrosanct enough to be shielded from criticism. Truth will emerge from competition between ideas and inferior ideologies will be culled. Humanity benefits as a whole.
A popular rallying point against free speech is to ban hate speech. Again, who defines hate speech? There are countries where speaking against the dominant religion’s cultural practices constitutes hate speech2. How do you know the influence of speech on action?
India ostensibly bans hate speech. In practice, unless a group raises a ruckus, “hate speech” goes unchallenged. Let’s do a thought experiment. If you can go back in time and prevent BJP’s “Goli Maaro” slogan during the CAA protests, would the Delhi riots have been prevented? Can it even be proven? I would argue that deep communal tensions already existed. If hate speech laws can’t be enforced in principle, why have another rent seeking tool in the statute?
John Stuart Mill on Heretics
J.S. Mill was among the most influential philosophers in England, and one of the first to layout principles of liberalism. He defends heretics beautifully. I’ll summarize his thoughts briefly.
Mill says that the biggest damage from suppressing dissenters isn’t to the heretics themselves, but to ordinary people who are mentally stunted by the fear of deviating from mainstream beliefs. Bright minds might never develop their full intellectual potential and might spend their lives trying to reconcile their thoughts with orthodoxy.
As we see from numerous examples throughout history, intellectual progress comes from independent thinkers. Mill says that freedom of thought is vital for allowing a vibrant and intellectually active society. Such a society needs open debate, even on the most challenging and controversial topics. Avoiding such discussions stifles such intellectual growth.
Implication for Indian politics
How does this incident play out in the context of Indian politics and society? In short, with decidedly negative consequences.
First, this backlash harms art and creativity. If artists are afraid to express themselves, society itself loses out. Art takes us through the human condition, shows rather than tells, and explores a variety of societal themes. Part of that is testing out boundaries and such a harsh pushback is bound to have repercussions.
Second, it shows that Indian society is light years behind American society when it comes to free speech. Such jokes have been doing the rounds of American and European social media since decades without raising any furore. What Andres Serrano did in American society without incurring backlash, is unthinkable in Indian Society.
Third, it confirms that politics is firmly downstream of culture. Politicians exist to get elected. To that end, they’ll espouse safe positions to garner support. Himanta Biswa Sarma would never involve the Assam Police if he didn’t see any electoral benefit to this. The hidden implication is that this action will fetch him votes, because it is demanded by society.
Finally, I fear that there will be even more restrictions on free speech and section 66A of the IT act might make a comeback.
This incident proves that the BJP and a part of the online non-Left is politically short sighted. Samay Raina was the only one to stand up for Kashmir Files after his entire fraternity denounced it as propaganda. Ranveer often bats for the non-Left. To throw them under the bus is politically naive. The non-Left could have been the torchbearers of free speech. BJP could have stood up for the joke while denouncing it thereby making inroads into the modern deracinated urban elite demographic. It could have proven the openness of Indic faiths.
The Left doesn’t want to do much with free speech. It is their ideas and thoughts that dominate the Indian landscape today3. They’ve built icons and they draw power from those mythologies.
The non-Left on the other hand has to be iconoclastic. There are many popular icons in the Left’s pantheon that need to be deconstructed and examined critically. That necessarily requires free speech. How are you going to deconstruct <redacted>’s4 ideas when you can’t even stand a joke?
It would’ve been expedient for the BJP and non-Left to support Ranveer and Samay. If practicality forbade an official endorsement, at least some renegade politicians could have used the opportunity to get in some good optics.
Unfortunately, what’s done is done. The fight for free speech is not going to be easy, and I have no idea whether there ever will be free speech in India. I only hope that existing protections aren’t bridled. Without free speech, decolonization gets harder, if not impossible.
Can someone please tell Mr. Modi and Mr. Shah that decolonization doesn’t mean only changing the names of legal codes to Indic languages?
IYKYK
Although it is changing slowly.
What does it say about free speech in India, that I am afraid to name a single icon here even though I am physically outside the country/
As always, great article, Rohit. I have a few things to add. I don't think the average Indian minds any of these bullshits. We generally don't care about what others says unless it has a direct and real consequence on us. Most of the noise during the Samay Raina controversy was due to some virtue signalling wonks. You can literally abuse hindu gods and people would simply ignore you; nothing serious would happen unless you kick the idols, etc. In this sense India is probably the only country where absolute freedom of speech could have worked as we don't give a damn about anything abstract unless it directly concerns us.
Regarding blasphemy, I don't think even a call to violence should count towards blasphemy if it doesn't directy and immediately leads to violence, then too the people who actually committed the violence should be punished more than the one who provoked them but somehow we've got this whole thing wrong.
Interesting perspective. Just want to understand/ know more about what exactly is the decolonisation the ruling party talks about? What are the actionable items a common citizen can take in that regard? And what’s the potential benefit of it?