Freedom of speech misused to peddle hate
ON January 3, a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court ruled out fresh curbs on the free speech of ministers. The Bench said that the restraints or reasonable restrictions provided under Article 19 (2) are enough; it is not the duty of the court to constrain freedom of speech. And then a sentence that should puzzle anyone who knows a little about parliamentary government follows: The flow in stream of collective responsibility is from the Council of Ministers to the individual ministers, not the reverse.
The court said that it was not possible to extend the concept of collective responsibility to “any and every statement orally made by a minister outside the House of the People/Legislative Assembly.” But why not? A minister is not an ordinary citizen; people elect him/her to unimaginable and uncontrollable power; he/she dominates our collective lives and manipulates multitudes. A medieval ruler would envy the power of an elected leader in India. We assume that Prime Ministers exercise circumspection when they choose their Council of Ministers. We presume they ensure that no one who has called for violence in the public domain, or does so thereafter, occupies a position of power. Surely, ‘We the people’, who have put these people in power, should have the confidence that we are protected against hate speech by powerful merchants of violence.
As far as the holders of a public office are concerned, there is no right to privacy. One call to violence in the public domain by someone who belongs to the ruling party wipes out scores of lives. We saw this happen in Delhi in February 2020 when communal riots shook the northeast of the city. That is why the minority judgment by Justice BV Nagarathna, “Hate speech, whatever its content may be, denies human beings the right to dignity” is so important for future jurisprudence.
What role can we play in protecting our co-citizens? Perhaps, we should reflect on what our people feel when they are subjected to violence. In his 1998 work The Decent Society, Avishai Margalit suggested that people experience humiliation when they are treated as if they were non-human. Margalit’s argument forms a part of a political theory of recognition: the self-respect of individuals depends on others. If they are pilloried, abused, denounced, ignored and bypassed, humiliation scars their soul exactly as the body is irremediably scarred after being lynched, raped, brutalised or maimed. There is a difference between physical harm and the harm that is done to the mind. Both damage people. Whereas physical scars may heal, mental ones strip the person of self-respect.
Self-respect is further eroded, argues Margalit, when the perpetrator has power. Nothing can be done for the victim, and nothing is done to the perpetrator of humiliation. Ever since its inception in ancient Greece, political philosophy has focused on justice. Margalit puts aside dreams of a perfectly just society and recommends that institutions, or more precisely the people who command these institutions, have the duty not to humiliate anyone. Institutions might not do anything to help people, but at the least they should not subject them to demeaning treatment. The moral imperative of lessening pain and suffering trumps every other consideration. Everything is inconsequential before the terrible harm that humiliation heaps upon people. Politics that counters harm should be given priority, especially when the powerful are the perpetrators.
The argument gains urgency in today’s India. Colonial administrators spent their time estimating demographic strengths and weaknesses of religious groups. And organisations demonised the other community as they demanded a state of their own. This led to the partition of India. Today, we see once again a partition, not of territory but of hearts and minds. And many of us ask in deep distress — how many more partitions? We want to live in a society that sees recognition as an integral part of justice. Our children have to live in a decent society, not the one in which people are humiliated for reasons that are purely arbitrary, that of birth into a community that has been stigmatised in history. We have to go beyond politicised religion and the harm it has wreaked upon us. We have to chart another sort of politics; one that will enable us to call ourselves a decent society.
We should be holding ministers who violate the right to freedom accountable. We should also ask this question to ourselves — what is the impact of hate speech, stigmatisation and mockery upon the psyche and self-confidence of Indians who belong to the minority community? The holders of power and their minions refer to members of the minority community in disparaging terms, perverse ideologues misuse social media and foot soldiers of the currently dominant ideology regularly waylay them, bully them and demand that they refrain from offering their prayers. How many of us even think about how our fellow citizens feel when they are mercilessly bullied and when they are asked to prove their fidelity to the country they were born in, time and again?
Freedom of speech of ministers has to be curbed. And we have to identify with the victims of humiliation. We have to learn from Sahir Ludhianvi’s immortal words. In a song he wrote for BR Chopra’s 1961 film Dharmputra, Sahir asked a stunning question: “Yeh kiska lahu hai, kaun mara?” This question can perhaps form the building block of a decent society.
