Arundhati Roy makes a lot of unpopular statements and holds very unpopular opinions. Her latest stunt of sharing a podium with Syed Ali Shah Gilani and supporting the separatist movement just carries forward her trend of preaching against the government after she expressed sympathy with the Naxals.
But what’s most interesting is that it has revived the old “Freedom of speech” debate. The TOI has a news article on how the government is planning to press ahead with sedition charges. It’s obvious that most (but not all) commenters on that story are baying for her blood, applauding the government’s move and advocating a wide and colorful variety of retributions among which include hanging her, deporting her to Pakistan, trying her for treason, jailing her for life, taking away her property…etc. etc.
Never mind the fact that she was stating an opinion, that she wasn’t abusing anyone, wasn’t inciting people to violence, and wasn’t indulging in hate speech. Sure, she may be shrill, her opinions may be extreme, and she probably has a screw loose, but so what? What happened to freedom of speech?
I’m really fed up with certain statements which keep getting repeated ad nauseum whenever this issue comes up. So let me rebut them one by one.
Freedom of speech doesn’t mean you can say anything. There are “reasonable restrictions”
Err – it kinda does. Freedom + Speech. What part of that equation is hard to understand? If you’re not abusing someone personally, you can say whatever you want.
If this was China, Pakistan, she would have been…(you know the rest)
Except that it’s not. This is India and freedom of speech is what sets us apart from Pakistan and China. Be proud of it instead of being ashamed. They must try and be like us. We mustn’t envy them.
Freedom of Speech doesn’t mean you can offend people
Yes it does. As long as someone isn’t abusing and spreading lies about you personally, they have the right to offend whoever they want. Because there are no rules for what people find offensive. Tomorrow a mullah will feel offended over a woman wearing jeans. Doesn’t mean I have to “respect his sentiments.” In a free country, you don’t have the right to be unoffended. Be a grown up and learn to handle offensive things like an adult will ya? Don’t go crying like a baby to your government for protection.
When the American pastor Terry Jones threatened to burn the quran, the American government had to plead and beg him not to do it. They couldn’t arrest him or threaten him. Because according to the law, he had freedom of expression. And that is the level of free speech we must aspire to.
If freedom of expression means you can only say those things which are unoffensive, acceptable to the majority and politically, and religiously correct, then what’s so great about it? Doesn’t every country allow that? If we’re going to make “Freedom of expression” a talking point, then it must be absolute.
Either everything is ok, or nothing is!
I don’t agree with what Arundhati Roy says, but she has the right to say it. Ignore her if you want, counter her points one by one if you wish, make fun of her through cartoons, songs, or plays. Write a book, or draw a painting. Those are acceptable, democratic, and Indian ways of protesting or disagreeing with something. By trying to jail her or shut her up using force, you’re just showing your weakness and insecurity.
Update: This whole sedition nonsense is crap anyway. The government was very quiet when the Khaps wanted to tear up the Constitution because it didn’t allow them to murder their kids. But an old woman who says silly things is an easy target no? Hang her!
Never mind the fact that as Sujith pointed out below, in Kedar Nath vs State of Bihar, 1962 the Supreme Court said that unless someone used violence or openly called for an armed revolt nothing they say can be called sedition. Here’s a good article on outlook analyzing this.
What does one achieve by fuelling anger and violence in an already ravaged nation?!!
And what does one mean by saying ‘absolute freedom’? Does that mean, that if I am angry, I can just go shoot somebody? Because afterall, I should have ‘absolute’ freedom?!!! This is absurd. Anything is acceptable ONLY when it has limits. The boundaries may be small or large. But we sure need a boundary. Otherwise we would be living in a jungle, not a society.
Also, why do we NEED to project ourselves as ‘liberal’ country?! If we aren’t truly secular , then we aren’t. Simple as that. We have achieved nothing but a fluctuating and chaotic vote bank, manipulated by dirty politics.
I wish people had more sense to work quietly at the grassroot level, to help out people, rather than making inflammatory speeches that do not help in any positive manner!!!
In reply to Writerzblock
Well, we can’t have absolute freedom per se, but we can have absolute freedom of expression. In the end, words never hurt anyone and I feel adults should have the capability to ignore words if they want.
I feel ideals are important because they act as a moral compass. Even if we’re not pointing in the correct direction, there’s pressure to do so and in the long run, we tend to align with the ideals.
In reply to bhagwad
Words never hurt? Ofcourse they do, Bhagwad. A few sharp words are far more powerful than a lathi blow!!! People who incite violence must not be spared.
‘Roy did not intend to incite violence’ would be a fair argument. What then, was the point of the speech? Just to say ‘Hello’ to Kashmir or the press?
Well, quite obviously there was an INTENT. Now whether the intent was to cause violence or to ‘help’ lost and confused Kashmiris, is debatable.
Either way, I firmly believe if we don’t have anything good to say, then we might as well just shut up. Silence is much better than saying things that fuel violence.
In reply to Writerzblock
I don’t agree that one can treat sharp words on the same footing as a lathi blow. The power to ignore words lies within each of us. As adults we all have the power to ignore them. But we cannot ignore a lathi blow. We’re forced to react to it. And it’s for this reason that physical violence is punishable by law, whereas giving mere offense isn’t. I can ignore the latter.
As adults in a free country, we’re expected to not lose control of ourselves when we hear words and be responsible for our own actions. It’s not an adequate defense to say that “I was incited to kill that fellow. Don’t blame me. I lost control.”
Roy is a writer after all. She says things just to put her ideas out in the open. She’s not a leader and I don’t think she has any designs to become one. I’ve certainly not heard any direct incitement to violence from her.
I agree that if we don’t have anything good to say, we must keep quiet. But that’s my personal choice. We can’t make it a law. Everyone has to choose for themselves what they want to say.
In reply to bhagwad
When we disagree, we should also speak up. If we say that we have to keep quiet when we have nothing good to say, it silences a large section that is not happy – whatever be the issue. Then we have maoists who don’t speak and only do objectionable things.
If freedom of speech is to work, it has to work for when we have good and not-good things to say. It has to be the first tool of resort to resolve issues. Otherwise, what’s the point of speech at all?!
In reply to bhagwad
Some of Arundhati’s ideas are quite thought provoking and the tribals of Dantewada or the civilian population of J&K deserve our sympathy, deserve better governance than what they are getting, deserve in practice the protections of our Constitution that they are entitled to.
I’m very ambivalent about AFSPA and other similar high-power acts and how they are used. I’m not absolutely opposed to such acts (ie. I wouldnt say “never, not under any circumstances”) but beyond some immediate fire-fighting scenarios they should be discontinued, if necessary in a graded fashion. Not kept going for decades.
To me the problem with Arundhati is that she finds very combative and provocative ways to express her thoughts which are often spring-boarded off something we can identify with. One loses count of how many times she has “seceded from India” herself or advocated secession for others. It has ceased to shock and provoke.
My core disagreements with her philosophy are with the way she has pretty much identified with the Maoists and how seemingly OK she is with violence.
Re. free speech itself: There are, or should be if there arent, restrictions, eg. “fire” in a theater is a typical example. Its very slippery-slope beyond this. Pls consider the following scenario:
Bhagwad resides in an area dominated by some ppl who for some reason take a dislike to him for some infraction they believe he has committed, and they have a leader who encourages them to keep heckling him when he is on public property in the vicinity. Leader gathers chamchas around and talks about how okay and justified it would be for any of them to wreak violence, not only on Bhagwad but also anybody that associates with him or supports him. This violence is depicted as a liberating tool against the evil oppressive Bhagwad. At least occasionally they talk about previous incidents of violent attacks on “ppl like Bhagwad” in very approving terms. This group does not talk about going to the police or the courts, since in their opinion, these agencies are in illegitimate support of Bhagwad.
Its been all talk and no action, not even a threatening gesture in fact.
Is Bhagwad justified in feeling any fear? Do we need to spend any time sympathizing with Bhagwad if he says he feels threatened? Should he have any legal recourse available to him? Should he not just ignore it, or perhaps spend time and resources gathering another group around himself to counter-heckle the first group?
Does one need to know and form an opinion on what Bhagwad said or did that “provoked” this reaction from group 1, and to what extent do they mitigate if at all the reaction from group 1?
thanks,
Jai
In reply to Jai_C
A good example Jai. The defining characteristic of what speech is free and what speech isn’t is that you can safely ignore the former and not the latter.
Someone shouting “fire” in a theater without cause isn’t free speech because one is forced to take action even when it’s false. It causes bodily fear and bodily danger of a stampede.
Again, in your later example, the heckling, hate speech and advocating of violence creates a fear in me which I need to protect against and change my lifestyle in order to do so. Hence it’s not covered by free speech.
Any speech which a person can listen to and choose to ignore when there’s no threat to his/her life is protected by free speech laws.
In reply to bhagwad
Er…. actually the second case is perhaps where things start to become slippery and the “reasonable man” or similar concepts need to get into play. Please note that no direct incitement of violence the way you have envisaged it is taking place in that scenario.
I can slowly take this path all the way to actual things said by Arundhati but I think the drift is clear.
Maybe more later…. one defence is that the heckler (Arundhati) is not forcing you to listen to them. They are just more of them (imagine you live in a village in Maoist controlled territory) and you just *know* they can act on their speech if they so desired.
-Jai
In reply to Jai_C
Agreed – after all, a paranoid person can view anything as a threat. But the “reasonable man” argument isn’t as slippery as it seems and is in fact used in many tenets of law.
For example, while overturning the banning of the Shivaji book, the Supreme court said:
“The effect of the words used in the offending material must be judged from the standards of reasonable, strong-minded, firm and courageous men, and not those of weak and vacillating minds, nor of those who scent danger in every hostile point of view. The class of readers for whom the book is primarily meant would also be relevant for judging the probable consequences of the writing”
So even within reasonable men, we’re looking at those who’re willing to give every possible benefit of the doubt.
In reply to Jai_C
The subjectivity inherent in all the adjectives in that quote of the judgment, the lack of quantifiability, to me present slippery slopes, at least half-a-dozen of them, right within your quote! Bells dinged…. alarms clanged. It is genuinely surprising you dont see any slopes at all. different strokes I guess :-)
Anyway we’re off-topic. Trying to come up with something on-topic:
The Bhagwad that resides in XYZVille, USA has freedoms vastly different from the Bhagwad that resides in a village in Dantewada, India.
My problem with Arundhati is that for all her fusillades at the Indian state, she appears to be supremely unconcerned that Bhagwad-2, Dantewada, India would not be able to say “Arundhati is crazy” more than a couple of times max!
After maybe one warning, Bhagwad-2 would be diagnosed with “informeritis” and involuntarily cured by “surgery” quite likely performed without any anaesthetic by folks with little medical training.
Bhagwad-2 knows well the odds of this happening. He behaves rationally in a way that maximizes his chances of avoiding “surgery”. He may even have words of comfort for the budding “surgeons”.
My problem with this whole issue is that there exists considerable heft of opinion within India that Bhagwad-2 by his speech and possibly even his silence agrees and approves of the surgeons and their cause.
IOW, to me the core concern is “how free is the speech of Bhagwad-2”.
thanks,
Jai
PS: At max effort I’m still not on-topic :-). Let me conclude here. I tried to make my example generic to cover various kinds of riot situations but it got refined into Maoism. It is very possible to make a case that police personnel apply “out-of-court” punishments to Bhagwad-2 in Dantewada for any speech that criticizes them.
In reply to Jai_C
We have only two ways to avoid subjectivity when it comes to allowing or disallowing expression – either everything or nothing. So the price of making the laws ironclad is to have them insane. What rules would you suggest?
Given that we’re going to have subjectivity, would you rather the subjectivity be decided by those who’re not easily offended, and are not insecure?
I’m afraid I didn’t quite get the Bhagwad-2 thing… :)
In reply to Jai_C
1. What rules would I suggest?
I dont know…. that’s what makes this so complex. The baseline should always be the harm principle. I would lean towards “everything” rather than “nothing”.
However (as Ketan had commented earlier I think), if given the responsibility (and authority) to maintain law and order in a place, I could find myself acting to shut down an expression of free speech at least temporarily if riots are breaking out over the contents of that expression, however much I may agree with the contents of that expression, or the rights to that expression and disagree with any violence allegedly “provoked” by that expression. Arrests and prosecutions would follow but I would move to disable the “causative agent” at least interim.
I’m interested in knowing how you would respond in such a situation Bhagwad?
I’ve only found Ketan who seems to scrutinize this from these or similar angles.
2. Who gets to subjectively decide the criteria whether in this scenario above or elsewhere?
Offence and insecurity are relative things… again I dont know. One of the proponents of maximum, even absolute FoS once remarked about an incident when a stranger catcalled his wife: “this paunchy husband would have gotten punchy”. He did not say he would respond verbally; he directly talked physical force. This person also employed a physical tactic (blocking a railway carriage door) to get back at somebody who verbally abused him for reading a book in a crowded train.
There are scenarios I can think of where I am unable to say with absolute certainty that I would only employ verbal repartee in response to verbal stimuli. If you have that you are probably at the pinnacle of security. You know bliss :-)
3. Bhagwad-2
Oh this was just my way of conveying that the freedoms of speech I am concerned about are in the following scale & inverse to the freedoms available to them IMO.
Bhagwad-2, village in Dantewada, India (least freedom max concern)
.
.
(long mile)
.
.
Arundhati R, New Delhi, India
.
Bhagwad USA (max freedom least concern)
thanks,
Jai
In reply to Jai_C
I assume your scenarios are where the writing is just offensive and doesn’t qualify as libel. In any case, that’s a question for the courts and as someone with executive power, I don’t think I would have the right to just shut down even libelous material.
So in your first case, I would not take the material off the public domain, but prosecute the rioters with an iron hand. Such people tend to be cowards. They get away with it in India only because of the lack of political will. Show them real resistance and they’ll melt away.
As for who decides, I’ve already given my criteria. Free speech must not force me to respond due to a danger to my financial or physical well being. If the guy blocks my way that necessitates a physical response since I’m forced to respond physically because of him…
Absolutely. Agree wholeheartedly with the entire post. How about countering to people who are offended with ‘you have the choice to not be offended and the freedom to speak about your being offended. And guess what, that is something you can do for yourself, it does not have to be legislated for you!’
I think we are getting too easily offended at too many things and using force to make one’s point. That is the power of blackmail that we have now institutionalized. This is taking us backwards, regardless of how much pride we show in India and how it is ‘developing’. Until we figure these basics out and agree to not use force when offended, all our development is useless. We will be closer to banana republic than stable nation!
In reply to Sangitha
Yup – I think we must realize that offense != harm.
Right wing is always wrong. Left is always left behind with their ideologies only. And yet both have right to express freely.
BJP, People want confirmation not skepticism in their views.
I agree with your post. If at all she should be prosecuted for sedition, it should be because she walked hands in hands with the Maoists, rather than for something she said.
I can never stress enough how much people like Arundhati Roy damage the left-liberal political thought. Ultra-left causes people to drift towards the right, pretty much the way ultra-right does the opposite.
As for the BJP – why isn’t it possible for them to take non confrontational positions on an issue on which they disagree? Why is it always, “my way or the highway”, with them?
In reply to Abhay Dang
Thanks for the comment Abhay! You’re right – to me, the fact that she went and met up with Naxals is a far worse thing that anything she said. She crossed the line there between speech and action. Having said that, it depends on how she actually went about meeting them…why didn’t she inform the police etc.
I too confess to being frustrated when people confuse me with the left voices. It’s hardly the same thing and there’s a whole spectrum of opinion with outright lunacy being at the extreme. Just as with the right.
Thanks Bhagwad. I looked at the TOI comments section. The people making intolerant comments there, craving for her blood, can they answer this question of mine – “What would your views have been if you were born in Pakistan?”
It is obvious that these people have formed their opinions purely on the basis of the random circumstances of their birth, rather than any mature analysis of the issues confronting us.
http://abhaydang.blogspot.com/2009/02/why-should-set-of-random-functions.html
Good post Bhagwad. I agree with you wholeheartedly.
People should have every right to speak their minds. I would even go to an extent of saying that even those who deliberately want to incite violence should be given a platform. Let them speak their minds and if people end up following them, that’s probably what the people deserved in the first place. I would give even a Hitler the freedom to say all over again all the things he did.
As Timothy said above, the BBC did a great job by inviting Nick Griffin to Question Time. My respect for Britain only increased after that incident. The same goes with America’s handling of that pastor.
India should aspire to reach that level of maturity, not yearn to become another Pakistan, Iran or China!
In reply to Ashish Deodhar
Yup – we must aspire to go higher, not lower!
Good to see another debate on ‘freedom of expression’. I full agree with your post. Ideas should be fought ideologically,not by silencing the speaker. If you silence some one whom majority do not like,tomorrow it might be your turn to be silenced.
Interestingly what Arundati said was being said in Kashmir by many leaders and ordinary people for years. When Kashmiris tell this you are not bothered.But when Arundati say it you feel insecure enough to silence her.
Arundati is an anarchist and likes to [and is brave enough to] say politically incorrect things. You can ignore her or try to isolate her but not silence her. Best Judge of her ‘Kashmir’ speech must be Kashmiris.
You might have read Arundhati’s reply. She said
“In the papers some have accused me of giving ‘hate-speeches,’ of wanting India to break up. On the contrary, what I say comes from love and pride. It comes from not wanting people to be killed, raped, imprisoned or have their finger-nails pulled out in order to force them to say they are Indians. It comes from wanting to live in a society that is striving to be a just one. Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free” .
In reply to Charakan
I’m often surprised at how difficult it is for some to understand what freedom of expression is all about.
I guess it has to do with Indians generally. Our way is “my way or highway” combined with the way of muscle power. Reason doesn’t have a place. It is a civilizational trait.
In reply to Sujith Abraham
I think it’s more of a “how dare this one person stand up to all of us?” mentality.
Well said, Bhagwad. I’ve elaborated on this issue in a number of blog posts (and articles) at:
http://sabhlokcity.com/category/policy-perspectives/freedom-of-expression/
Regards
Sanjeev
I completely agree with you. She has the right to say whatever she wants and the government of India should leave her alone. I do believe that she is married to her ideology and is part of the problem and not the solution.