In the past month, two fairly
high-profile men in India were charged with hate speech. Akbaruddin Owaisi, a
Muslim and a member of the Legislative Assembly in the state of Andhra Pradesh (from an openly sectarian party), made unappreciated remarks about Hindus.
Soon afterwards, Praveen Togadia, a leading light of the VHP (a
Hindu-chauvinist organization with a large following among expats), made some
comments that the government decided were anti-Muslim. The charges filed in the
two cases included incitement to rioting, promoting enmity between groups,
commission of public nuisance (which, in Indian legal jargon, can also mean
pissing on the sidewalk), deliberate outraging of religious feelings, and
criminal intimidation.
What exactly did these gentlemen
say to get into so much trouble? Well, if you follow the major newspapers and
television channels, you would never know, because the media understands that
repeating ‘hate speech’ is itself a cognizable offense. So in a classical
rabbit-hole scenario, we have crimes committed and prosecuted that nobody is
allowed to talk or hear about. Of course, in these days of the Internet this
sort of information is very hard to suppress, and a quick scan of the Web
reveals who said what: Owaisi said that if Hindus did not have the police to
protect them, Muslims would kick their collective Hindu ass, and Togadia lamented
that even the police could not prevent Hindu corpses from piling up during
riots. (I had to laugh.) Owaisi did not, you might notice, actually threaten to kick anybody’s
ass, although that may have been the implication. And Togadia, a bigot who I am
loath to defend, did not threaten to pile up Muslim bodies. In fact, both men
have said worse on occasion. But this time they got the Indian Penal Code
thrown at them.
The rationale behind such
policing of ‘hate speech’ in India is that talk of ass-kicking and piles of
bodies ‘hurts the sentiments’ of some ‘community’ or the other. And sometimes
this fear of pain takes on bizarre administrative forms. On the eve of the
Jaipur Literary Festival recently, the police declared that the annual
schmooze-fest of self-admiring authors could proceed only if the organizers gave a
guarantee that ‘nobody’s sentiments would be hurt.’ (The assurance was given.)
This was a reaction to what happened a couple of years ago, when a few authors
read aloud from Salman Rushdie, causing great anguish to people who are not his
fans. Rushdie has of course been on the frontlines of these sentimental politics
since the late 1980s. Most recently, he was refused entry into the city of
Calcutta, where the delightful Chief Minister, who has been said to dabble in literature
herself, feared that he might hurt people’s feelings. Rushdie was informed that
if he came, he would be put on the next plane back to Bombay. It was illegal
and utterly cynical: the West Bengal government had first engineered the ‘hurt’
by reminding conservative Muslim leaders to protest Rushdie’s impending visit. The
organization that had invited him (for another literary festival, naturally) bravely
denied having invited him at all, prompting an angry Rushdie to brandish the
reservations that had been made for him and declare that a ‘cultural emergency’
is in place in India.
Now, Rushdie’s outrage about
censorship is highly selective: he does not seem to be all that disturbed by,
say, the imprisonment of Bradley Manning for spilling the beans on an American
massacre in Iraq. But he is right about the cultural emergency. ‘Hurt
sentiments’ are its rhetorical signature, and like the original Emergency of
1975-77, it is politically very handy: not only does it facilitate political pandering,
it provides a gag for critics of the state. So we have a convergence of
silencing maneuvers: Rushdie, M.F. Husain, James Laine, Taslima Nasreen, R.K.
Laxman, Ashis Nandy and Kamal Haasan slapped for cultural offenses, and Binayak
Sen, Aseem Trivedi, Arundhati Roy and assorted Facebook posters for ‘sedition’
of one kind or another. The Ashis Nandy case (again, in Jaipur!) is
particularly interesting, because his defenders and detractors among academics,
activists and journalists have commenced an earnest and self-defeating fight
over ‘what he really said.’ Not too many have protested that it doesn’t matter
what he said – he should not have been threatened with criminal charges and
arrest. Heckling, arguing, walking out of the room, and simply refusing to buy
the book have evidently gone out of fashion: Indians whose ‘sentiments are
hurt’ now go straight to the police and file a First Information Report. (When
they don’t resort to physical intimidation, that is.)
Since ‘communities’ and the state
are both so easily outraged, it has become rather dangerous to open your mouth
within earshot of any audience whose approval you cannot absolutely take for
granted. The ramifications for the press are a mixed bag. Established Indian
newspapers like the Hindu and the Telegraph are still scathingly critical of
the government, although they occasionally take curious vows of silence (what
Owaisi/Togadia said) and indulge in coy euphemisms (‘a certain community’). But
the upstart media, like Tehelka.com, has not always been so immune from
censorial pressure, and the citizen without press credentials is even more
vulnerable. In a recent survey of freedom of expression in nearly two hundred
countries, India was ranked somewhere south of 140th. Even allowing for some reasonable
skepticism about how the ranking was calculated, this is hardly a point of
pride for a democratic society.
How did this state of affairs
come to pass? The first thing to bear in mind is that the situation is not straightforwardly
undemocratic: more and more Indians want
restrictions on free speech when it comes to ‘hurting the sentiments of the
community.’ In other words, the problem has gone hand in hand with the growth
of an identifiable Indian public. As the public has expanded, room for free
speech has actually receded. And that is ironic, because if hurting the
sentiments of the community was consistently proscribed and punished, then
Rammohun Roy, Vidyasagar, Syed Ahmed Khan, Ambedkar and Nehru would all have
been locked up or lynched. Without their willingness to offend, there would be
no democratic republic to provide a platform for those who are unwilling to be
offended. Indian nationhood has historically been inseparable from reformism: from
the very outset, even its reactionary wing – Bankim, Tilak, Savarkar – has been
reformist on social issues, to the degree that words like ‘reactionary’ become
slippery and unhelpful. Since it is impossible to be reformist without also
being offensive, the emergence of a virtual ban on the hurting of ‘sentiments’
marks a crisis within the ideology of the Indian nation, in which the
democratic impulse and the liberal impulse have effectively blocked each other.
The impasse cannot, however, be
blamed entirely on democracy itself, i.e., on the enfranchisement and
mobilization of the illiberal masses. We can see it in the Constitution, which
was not written by the rabble. Yet this document, in spite of its radical
disregard for John Stuart Mill’s insistence that illiterate peasants should not
be encouraged to think of themselves as citizens, does not get to freedom of
expression until Article 19. It then immediately hedges its bets with
‘reasonable restrictions’: a jungle of clauses and sub-clauses that have, over
time, nearly strangled the main article.
While these developments are shaped
by factors ranging from court decisions to electoral calculations, they also
reflect a construction of ‘tolerance’ that may have been a feature of Indian
statecraft for a very long time. Romila Thapar observed, for instance, that the
civic ideology of tolerance in the Mauryan Empire was essentially repressive: speech
that offended any social group was punishable by the state, according to the
Ashokan edicts. I am not suggesting anything as ahistorical as a straightforward
continuity between the third century BC and modern India, but the latter has
borrowed quite a few of its icons from the Mauryan Empire, which has become, in
nationalist discourse, the foundational episode of the Indian state. Other
foundations closer to the present throw up similar perspectives, in which tolerance
is imagined as appearing before the state as a collection of respectfully
silent communities: separate collectives going about their own business. The elite-level
political culture of late-Mughal India represented itself as ‘the Hindus and
Mussalmans of Hindustan,’ Rajat Ray reminds us, and certainly the colonial era
produced its own powerful vision of corporate peoplehood, made up of ‘peoples,’
‘tribes and castes,’ ‘two nations,’ and so on.
Such arrangements may have been
viable in a pre-modern or a colonial polity, but pose severe problems in a democratic nation-state, not
least because they underline that ‘communities,’ not the nation and its individual
citizens, are the major claimant upon the state. Indian nationalism, which has
drunk from all the above-mentioned historical wells (and the colonial one in
particular), has a strong communitarian aspect: citizens and would-be citizens
have represented themselves in public more often as members of ‘communities’
than they have as individuals. The man or woman who does not belong to a
recognized ‘community’ can be all but invisible to the state. And even belonging to a
community can have unpleasant consequences if there is a falling out, as it did
for Shah Bano and Roop Kunwar: the former a reluctant outcast, the latter a dubiously
consenting super-insider. Indeed, consent – that old flogging-horse of nationalism
and gender history in India – becomes incompatible with tolerance if tolerance
is defined as a matter of community
relations.
The right of the individual to
speak freely is thus already rendered somewhat daring and transgressive. It
needs a strong state to protect it, and the Indian state is not strong or
confident enough. It is, however, often ‘hard,’ in the sense that it is ready
to ban films and entertain First Information Reports about who-said-what. A
‘hard state’ – marked by repression – compensates for the lack of the strength
that flows ultimately from consent or hegemony. Consequently, the element of
farce is never far away. After the Kashmiri militant Afzal Guru was hanged in
Delhi last week, newspapers carrying the story were confiscated by the
police in Kashmir – as if this would prevent people from knowing about the
execution. What matters more than the actual control of information, as usual,
is the posturing of power as the public face of panic. The liberal vanguard of
the republic, fundamentally embarrassed by its inability to conjure up a strong
state, has fallen back on hardness as a substitute from the very outset,
compromising on the liberalism of their class. Patel is the best example of
this, but Nehru (who signed both the Constitution and the AFSPA) is not exempt either. In the present time, the most prominent
such figure is probably P.C. Chidambaram, the current Finance Minister and former
Home Minister: very much an upper-class liberal, and also very much an
authoritarian.
There is, however, a difference
between the sheepish liberals of the Nehru-Patel generation and those of
Chidambaram’s. The former understood that when a liberal democracy is assembled
in violation of Mill’s principles of self-government, the vanguard and the
state necessarily take on a pedagogical role. Liberal democracy and its various
institutions – like free speech – had to be taught
even as it was put into practice; otherwise either liberalism or democracy
would cease to exist. This was in fact a common assumption, approaching a
consensus, among the nationalist elite as they contemplated the future Indian
state in the decades preceding independence. Since then, it has been steadily
undermined, not least because the vanguard – defeated by the combination of the
mob and the genuine reactionaries, and diverted into new channels of
self-aggrandizement – have abdicated the pedagogical project. In the process,
they have managed to sound a lot like Mill. ‘We are not ready for that kind of
freedom of expression,’ said the late great Sunil Gangopadhyay, explaining why his
friend and fellow-novelist Taslima Nasreen should be censored.
Moreover, the concept of the
pedagogical state has been undermined by the liberals themselves, particularly
the intelligentsia, which has not only lost its nerve, but become apologetic
about the elitism of the liberal-nationalist project. (Ashis Nandy, ironically,
is among the most prominent culprits here.) It is one thing if the anti-elitists
have an alternative ideology of the state, or of an anti-state, and the courage
and honesty to pursue it in their own lives. They do not. Their anti-liberalism
is entirely of the bourgeois-armchair variety. They are too comfortable for the
Gandhian anti-state, and the Maoist utopia is not really to their liking either.
But as self-hating liberals, they will not acknowledge that the nation-state,
in order to remain even moderately democratic, requires the robust and constant
promotion of bourgeois fetishes like free speech and individual rights. The
widespread and disingenuous contempt for the individual that emanates from this
class tends to facilitate a nexus between the community and the state that has
more than a veneer of fascism. The community of ‘hurt sentiments,’ banned books
and gag orders is not, after all, what Partha Chatterjee had in mind in his
theorization of political society. (And even that is not as benign as
Chatterjee would have us believe.) It is sometimes a convenient political fiction
– since it often has leaders and spokespersons, but few followers – and always
a bully. When it poses as the nation by hijacking the state, it is an
especially cancerous form of nationhood. I must admit that I have a distinctly
Goering-like reaction when I hear the word ‘community.’
February 12, 2013
