Their Free Speech And Ours

Perhaps the best single word to describe India's collective attitude towardsfree expression, and civil liberties in general, is 'confused'. Just like, onemight say, India's attitude towards the United States, where the right to freespeech is virtually absolute and positive. There, you have the American CivilLiberties Union (ACLU) gritting its teeth and going to court to protect theright of leather-clad lesbians to parade on the streets one day, and--presumablyholding its nose--fighting to defend demonstrations by Neo-Nazis the next. Theprinciple is quite clear: it does not matter how you feel about what is beingexpressed, who is doing it, or who is gaining politically by it; .the right to free expression itself is sacred and a common good and nothing can be allowed to do anything even remotely like abridging it.

It is telling that, India's public sphere is full of high-minded rhetoricabout freedom, but the energy of social activists in this realm is focussed onexactly the opposite goal--namely to crush free speech whenever and wherever itsuits them. We have, of course, fundamentalist Muslim leaders chivvying thefaithful to lynch Taslima Nasreen because she told what she thought were a fewhome truths; and just to balance the scales, there are Hindutva activists filingsuit in court (and throwing in a little vandalism to spice things up) toprosecute M.F. Hussain because he, a presumed Muslim, trespassed on Hinduterritory as it were when he drew pictures of naked goddesses.

Taslima and M.F. are of course merely the most prominent of the lot that havebeen told aggressively to shut up or else. There are random people who go to noend of trouble, it seems, to monitor every perceived transgression against theirsense of propriety, however casual or unintended the offence may have been. Thehonour roll is much too long to list, certainly long enough to establish that"freedom fighter" has a whole new meaning in Indian culture.

In drawing this conclusion, there is, sadly, no rhetorical refuge to be hadin comforting bromides about education, modernity and so on. The usual patexplanation offered by the media commentators, academicians, and other thoughtleaders and interpreters of society is that a combination of pre-modern socialvalues, and the crass greed of the post-socialist era is at the root of ourrepressive urges. The obiter dicta of this class are, by turns, wistful and stern,but the gist, more or less, is that if only they--the good and the great--wereto have India to run as a sort of benevolent dictatorship, they would thenclamp down on the unsightly exhibitions of intolerance by the less well-schooledhoi polloi, and that would be that. At best, this elite class might let a thousand carefullyvetted flowers bloom once in a while, but God help the thousand and first,especially if it dared to challenge their authority.

Aside from its obvious--if unrecognized--irony and presumption, this messageby the intelligentsia is founded on a factual untruth. The Marxists of politicsand academia are perhaps the nearest thing India has to modernist thinkers andactivists. In name at least, the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) andallied organizations are the Indian counterpart of the American Civil LibertiesUnion (ACLU). Unlike the ACLU, the PUCL makes no secret of its selectiveness indefending only the kind of expression deemed beneficial to the Marxist cause.The left-leaning liberal intelligentsia mostly follow this party line, and quiteopenly at that. They reserve the bulk of their energies for denouncing threatsto free expression seen to originate from the Hindu Right. They are also earnestand unsparing of their indubitable learning and cleverness in debating the caseof the Hindu side to exhaustion: Hindu culture itself is far from blameless, andanyway what do commoners understand of high art, and so on.

The departure from this one-sided fervour in the case of Taslima Nasreen ismore apparent than real--the Left's defence of that poor battered woman was lukewarm at best, and any left-wing voices that spoke for her emerged only when their indifference and disinterest were coming to be seen to be a political liability.All in all, it is completely fair toconclude that free speech activism by civil society in India is actually apolitical campaign in camouflage, and therefore most of it deserves to bediscounted.

The picture that emerges, then, is that of a people with various politicaland personal axes to grind, but all united in their authoritarian drive to useany handy tool--administrative, civil, political, or the lynch mob--to suppressany expression that they find inconvenient, distasteful or dangerous. And it'sno use blaming politicians either: there has been no politician in history withthe ability to exploit an urge that is not already present in the people. We'reall perverse freedom fighters, in brief.

This conclusion, while distressing on the face of it, is not entirely a causefor unremitting despair. While it might be embarrassing to admit that we are notreally a free people at the core, there are definite mitigating factors.

For one thing, the ability to crush dissent, when used wisely, can be used torealize various long-lasting conspiracies of silence, for example on matterssuch as the Hindu-Muslim dichotomy. Getting at the truth of such matters is allvery well, but implications of such truths could be fraught with grave dangersfor the state. There is something to be said for suppressing some truths, andgetting on with life, in the hope that in time, the relevance and impact ofthose truths might fade.

Also, the existence of competing political interests in a populationdedicated to the suppression of free speech generates a natural constituency forthat same free speech. The secret here is the Indian--perhaps human--urge to beseen as being better than what one actually is. Thus, if the Left can use thesuppression of M.F. Hussain as a stick with which to beat the Hindu Right, thelatter can gleefully turn that stick around and use it to beat the Left when itcomes to Taslima Nasreen. While this wouldn't achieve the ideal of everyoneacknowledging the innate rights of Taslima or M.F., at least the two individualsare arguably better served than they would have been if they had no one at allto speak for their rights.

Ultimately, however, this sort of balanced intolerance still isn't goodenough for India, even if one were to discount the urge to get the West (mainlyAmerica) to tell us that we are as free as they are. A national commitment tolet the truth out is essential if we are to build a stable, growing andsustainable economy that doesn't actually eat India's people alive and perishunder its own contradictions. By tolerating a culture of authoritarianism andsuppression, we put at risk the integrity of things like accounting, marketvaluation, product quality, and so forth. If that integrity is violated, theregoes consumer and investor confidence. Then there is the increasinglybetter-understood key role of active pluralism and the marketplace of ideas, forwhich free expression is a prerequisite.

Perhaps it was due to considerations of this nature that prompted, in part,the bourgeois-kulak founding fathers of America and their successors to insiston uncompromising adherence to the protection of free speech. We might, afterall, be on to something in our national obsession with America--while it mayfeel humiliating at times, it is probably indicative of an underlying culturalaffinity that both attracts and repels us. It is not as though the Americanpeople, or any other people, would have been inherently more prone to supportingfree speech than the Indian people. The genius of America's founding fathers wasthat they codified their vision of historical and economic forces into aprinciple.

The fact that this worked, more or less, for America suggests thatit could work for India as well. America has had two centuries for the forces ofhistory to play themselves out and validate the free speech principle. Because India will have much less time than that before its destiny will be determined, we should pay less attention to empty moralizing andfocus more on developing a systematic approach to managing intolerance and promoting freedom

K.V. Bapa Rao is a long-time NRI professional and student of India.