On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 8:56 AM, Salil Tripathi <[email protected]> wrote:
> Sidin's points below are a fairly accurate description of the newsrooms I > have been part of (between 1986-1991, and later, in different contexts, > abroad, where, too, we "the foreign press" were criticised for not writing > the "real story". Coincidentally, this appeared in today's India Ink: http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/in-india-free-speech-with-limits/?pagemode=print In India, Free Speech With LimitsBy NILANJANA S. ROY<http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/author/nilanjana-s-roy/> Associated PressPrime Minster Jawaharlal Nehru, Vijaya Pandit, Indian Ambassador to the United States and President Harry S. Truman leaving the National Airport in Washington in this Oct. 11, 1949 file photo. The framers of the United States Constitution so highly valued free speech that they enshrined it in the document’s very first amendment. India, the world’s other mammoth democracy, has a first amendment too, but its intent and meaning are quite the opposite. Lawrence Liang, a legal expert and co-founder of the Alternative Law Forum, a legal collective based in India focused on social justice, has written a sharp legal analysis<http://altlawforum.org/law-and-media/publications/reasonable-restrictions-and-unreasonable-speech> of the ways in which the fundamental right to free speech in India is limited. He remarks on the irony of the phrase “the First Amendment:” in the United States, he notes, the First Amendment refers to the right to free speech, a right that has been held almost absolute, while in India, the First Amendment refers to the attempt to “strengthen state regulation over free speech.” That distinction is worth remembering when considering the dustup over Communications Minister Kapil Sibal’s call for “pre-screening” of the Internet, in response to what he sees as a problem of offensive and abusive speech online. While he faced accusations of censorship, his controversial and probably impractical proposal is in keeping with India’s ambiguous relationship with the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression. India certainly allows more freedom of expression than countries like Iraq, Malaysia, Afghanistan, China and North Korea. But the two organizations that rank press freedom, an important indicator of free expression in any society, have consistently ranked India lower than you might expect. India doesn’t even make the top 50 in Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press 2011 ranking<http://freedomhouse.org/images/File/fop/2011/FOTP2011GlobalRegionalTables.pdf>: it comes in at number 77, along with Bulgaria and East Timor, behind South Africa, South Korea and Lithuania. Reporters Sans Frontieres ranks India even lower <http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2010,1034.html> on its press freedom index for 2010. The country is at number 122, below Congo, Indonesia and Nepal. The intention behind Article 19 (1) a, which guarantees citizens the right to freedom of speech and of expression in India’s Constitution, was inspired in some measure by the U. S. Constitution, which made a profound and lasting commitment to free speech. In its original form, the fundamental right to free speech and expression in India lasted for two years. By 1951, the first serious curbs and limitations had been placed on free speech, reflecting not just political expediency, but perhaps a larger and very Indian discomfort with the idea of untrammeled freedom of expression. In 1951, the section of the Constitution that dealt with restrictions on free speech was expanded to include threats to public order as a possible restriction. The state’s control was extended to “reasonable restrictions,” a vague provision that would be debated for decades to come. This was also the decade when the state set a certain direction for book bans. The 1940s carry the stamp of British prudery and paranoia. Among the books banned by the Raj government in its final years were “The Perfumed Garden,” an erotic manual; incendiary pamphlets on Kashmir; and a potentially inflammatory article that dealt with the life of “Codijah, First and Devoted Wife of Mahomet.” The blanket protection that the U.S. Constitution allotted to free speech—“Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”—had little counterpart in India. By the mid-1950s, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s government had shifted direction. The political book ban was the most common: a play from Pakistan (Agha Babar’s “Cease-Fire”) and the newspaper *Hamara Kashmir* were barred from entering India. The decade saw two book bans that would greatly narrow the definition of what was acceptable in terms of free expression. The 1955 ban on Aubrey Menen’s “Rama Retold” revealed a discomfort with religious parody and inquiries into faith. A ban in 1959 on Alexander Campbell’s “Heart of India” was an early indicator of a very Indian prickliness about “outsider” histories that show the country in a bad light. It is one of the ironies of the history of free speech that the leaders of free India who, often reluctantly, endorsed the growing encroachment of the state on this particular right were those, like Mr. Nehru and Congress Party leader Sardar Patel, who had spent decades fighting for the Indian right to free expression before 1947. “The First Amendment,” Mr. Liang writes, “signaled the kinds of battles that would take place between the project of nation building and the sphere of the media. It marked the rather premature end of the vision of a ‘seamless web’ with the promotion of national security and sovereignty being prioritized over the promotion of democratic institutions.” Perhaps no one, not even Mr. Nehru, realized how much of a turning point the First Amendment would be to the fundamental right of free speech. His government had a choice, in independent India, to walk away from the fear-driven bans of the British Raj, where officers scanned books, plays, pamphlets, popular songs and periodicals for any sign of sedition or offensiveness. But they chose a path that privileged the idea that we are a nation of delicate sensibilities that must not be offended over the idea that a democracy is better built on a robust foundation of free expression. Mr. Sibal’s proposal to pre-screen the Internet is in practical terms impossible, born of a lack of understanding of the nature of the Internet. The only way to filter it of all undesirable and objectionable material is to go down the labor-intensive route that China has followed, where censorship is a thriving economic industry, employing thousands. But Mr. Sibal’s demands to be shielded from abuse, and his belief that the state has the right to impose controls, is no knee-jerk response to a new problem. It goes back to the time when Mr. Nehru’s government made a deliberate decision to pick up the Imperial burden of censorship, and it has its roots in a deep unease with the implications of a society based on the belief that free expression is a valuable, non-negotiable commodity. -- Marge: Quick, somebody perform CPR! Homer: Umm (singing) I see a bad moon rising. Marge: That's CCR! Homer: Looks like we're in for nasty weather. Sudhakar Chandra Slacker Without Borders
