Much of the debate on Salman Rushdie’s (lack of) freedom to speak at Jaipur is notable for how a simplistic focus on first principles has ignored context; and not properly addressed the question of how any law on the subject should be (and should not be) invoked. The libertarians assume that the right to offend is an essential component of the freedom of speech. The government’s refusal to adopt this view found expression more or less co-terminously in its complaints about the BBC and Jay Leno; as might have been expected, the complaints were summarily rejected by the British and American governments. Anyone familiar with The Book of Mormon, the musical running to full houses on New York’s Broadway, would know that this profanity-laden production lampoons the Mormons — at a time when the likely Republican challenger to President Obama is a leading Mormon. If no one in the US is concerned about causing offence to the religious sentiments of someone who might be their next president, why expect the US government to be exercised about someone causing offence to Sikhs? Free speech triumphs, and our Sikhs are free to like it or lump it.
Yet, the French parliament has this week passed a law that makes it a crime for anyone to deny that the mass killing and expulsion of (Christian) Armenians from (Muslim) Turkey in 1915 was genocide. Right or wrong, the Turks say it was expulsion and not genocide; so what has happened to their right to free speech in France? European countries also have laws that make it a crime to deny Hitler’s Holocaust, something that the Iranian president has done more than once. You might think Mr Ahmedinejad needs to learn some history, but is free speech only for those who know or will not distort their history? Yet, a Europe that so restricts free speech also permits newspapers to lampoon the Prophet Mohammed in cartoons. So the argument is not about free speech as an absolute right; it is about what causes offence and to whom. Secular societies in Europe with 15 per cent church attendance have moved beyond their old laws on blasphemy, but a multi-religious society like India’s has another set of realities to contend with. Post-Hitler Europeans don’t want to relive fascism, but nor do we want to relive communal riots. Especially in a multi-religious society, there is a case for arguing that a sensible organising principle would be preventing abuse of the next man’s religion. In short, freedom of speech is relative to context, not just here but elsewhere too.
This is already reflected in Indian law (try lampooning the Prophet and see what happens), but it is a tricky terrain, where competing principles clash. The question that follows is whether the problem in headline-hitting cases is the law, or how it is used. Should India’s greatest contemporary painter have been forced to live and die in exile? Or Taslima Nasreen externed from West Bengal? Who is to decide, and on what basis? Should the government ban a book that no one in the government has read? Or claim in court that something on the web might cause a riot, months after there have been no riots? How do we prevent religious conservatives from running away with the issue, as they have done in Pakistan? What about coercive threats of violence, and dealing with them as criminal conduct? Simply asserting the right to offend because the Constitution guarantees free speech is to evade the real challenge, which is how best to work through the difficult choices to arrive at sensible compromise, and how to build safeguards against abuse of the law — and also against weak-kneed responses to threatened violence.