Abstract
India’s government is quick to censor on grounds of religious offence. And the situation is deteriorating, says
Recently, the Indian government’s motives to censor have seemed political more than religious. India’s prickly leaders are proving increasingly prone to take offence. In the last year alone, politicians and religious leaders have sought to silence everyone from Salman Rushdie to the Indian cartoonist Aseem Trivedi, who was detained in Mumbai’s notoriously brutal Arthur Road prison for two days in September 2012, accused of sedition. He was released on bail on 12 September.
The charges against this once little-known artist relate to two cartoons. In one, Trivedi recasts India’s national emblem, replacing the customary lions with wolves, to make a statement about the government’s conduct: the caption underneath reads ‘Long live corruption’. Another cartoon depicts Indian parliament as a giant toilet bowl. Neither cartoon was likely to cause a religious riot. But both are highly embarrassing to a government mired in political difficulty and scandal. Corruption is likely to be the key issue at the next election, posing a serious threat to India’s economic resurgence.
In September 2012, the fallout from The Innocence of Muslims demonstrated how moderate voices can quickly be drowned out by fanaticism and threats of retaliatory violence. The film was posted on YouTube and circulated widely, causing widespread offence and leading to dozens of deaths. Its US-based filmmaker was forced into hiding. The controversy reignited the debate over whether free speech on religion should be limited.
In the digital age, a few words, a cartoon, a film is enough to engulf whole countries in protest and violence within hours. Government responses from around the world have been varied. Even in a democracy, free speech is no longer automatically sacrosanct, it seems. Nowhere is this more starkly illustrated than in India – the world’s biggest democracy.
India was forged in the fires of Partition in 1947, when the British ended its rule and divided the country along religious lines, creating a secular India and the Muslim nation of Pakistan. The religious riots that tainted India’s early days of freedom meant its leaders were forever mindful of the dangers of communal conflict. Long before the modern age of Islamist jihad and al Qaeda, India lived with religious conflict involving all its major faiths: Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and Sikhism. With such a turbulent history, careless acts or words could cause communal riots that cost the lives of thousands. As well as safeguarding the notion of free speech, it was crucial that India’s constitution enshrined the principle of religious tolerance as well.
For decades India has maintained a fragile balancing act, where liberty, civil society and religious differences co-exist. But now the government is using the principle of protecting religious sensitivities to curtail free speech in general and to censor at will. The dangers it faces now are similar to challenges India has faced throughout history – but the one big difference is the speed at which information can travel.
In recent years, India has seen an increasing encroachment upon freedom of speech in the name of religion. Writers such as Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin speak of the ‘cancer of censorship’ in Indian society afflicting everyone from novelists to political cartoonists. Nasrin lives in India, exiled from her own country after her writing offended Bangladeshi Muslims. In 2007, she was forced to leave her adopted city of Kolkata, too, after she was attacked by supporters of a fundamental Muslim party.
Salman Rushdie continues to face backlash over The Satanic Verses, particularly from some fanatical Muslim groups in India. The renewed controversy over Rushdie’s aborted appearance at the Jaipur literary festival in January 2012 had clear political roots as well as religious ones. With parliamentary elections looming in 2014 and political parties jockeying for the Muslim vote, India’s politicians seem keen to appease the hardline Indian Muslim clerics who seek to censor critical voices like Rushdie’s.
This renewed zeal to protect religious sensitivities is hypocritical given that many political parties have exploited religion at one time or another to win votes. The Hindu nationalist BJP ran an entire political campaign based on the historical grievances of Hindus suffered at the hands of their one-time Muslim Mughal rulers. The party’s crude political philosophy aimed to convert Hindu anger into BJP votes.
In Maharashtra, the extreme Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena has waged a religious war against the Muslim community and its artists. When India’s most famous artist, MF Husain – widely regarded as India’s Picasso – chose Hindu gods as his inspiration for a series of paintings, Shiv Sena declared its own version of a fatwa on the elderly artist, describing his work as offensive. The artist was targeted throughout his later life, driven into exile and died in a London hospital in 2011. His most controversial paintings depicted Hindu deities in the nude.
In Christian-majority Goa and northeast India, religious leaders succeeded in banning films, including The Da Vinci Code. The goofy ‘bromance’ Kya Super Cool Hain Hum (How Super Cool Are We?) was also banned, causing offence for depicting the marriage of two dogs by a priest. A Congress Party spokesperson in Goa said it ‘insulted all Christians’ and filed a police report. If the censors can win out on such small matters, what will happen on matters of real substance?
At national level, the ruling Congress-led government has also taken aim at critics under the guise of preventing religious offence. Internet giants like Google and Facebook have been in the firing line as the government seeks to police internet content and tries to secure the right to remove potentially offensive material. In the last six months of 2011, Google reported that requests to delete content on behalf of the Indian government rose by 49 per cent.
Countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have appealed to the United Nations to acknowledge religious defamation. Such a recognition would make blasphemy a criminal offence. Yet the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948, and to which India is a signatory, enshrines the right to enjoy freedom of expression – and this includes the freedom to agree or disagree with the tenets of any religion or set of beliefs. These challenges to the UN constitute a more profound challenge to a broader set of rights the UNDHR protects, such as minority or gender rights. If the rights of women ‘offend’ some conservative Muslims, should they be banned too?
Poster of The Da Vinci Code is reflected in a motorbike mirror. The film was banned in the Indian state of Punjab after Christian outrage threatened violence
Credit: Jagadeesh Nv/Reuters
As the history of India demonstrates, nations are composites – comprising different ethnic groups, religions and cultures. Political parties can often have their own cultural or religious affiliations, even in secular democracies. Therefore, we cannot leave it to individual governments to define at will what freedom of speech should be. A government that believes it has the right to draw the line according to the political needs of the day can constantly redefine where the line should be drawn and open up the opportunity for this redefinition to be repeated again and again. This puts free speech seriously at risk.
India already has laws in place to prevent people from advocating religious hatred or violence. The best mechanism for preventing abuses of free speech is better application of existing laws and a more open and civilised debate. If you disagree with a film or a book, argue your case against it. Let facts be your retaliatory weapon of choice. Or, as Rushdie put it: simply close the book. Switch off the video.
As the Indian government seeks to wrest back control over Indians’ freedom of expression, civil society and critics abroad have voiced outrage and opposition over the future of free speech in the world’s most populous democracy – especially given the draconian censorship being applied in neighbouring China. Together, these two countries represent the world’s future economic superpowers, so it is India’s duty to show the way on civil liberties.
The last time India was engaged in such fierce debate over free speech was during Indira Gandhi’s 1975 State of Emergency, widely accepted to be Indian democracy’s darkest hour. What’s happening now bears no direct comparison with that terrifying period, which resulted in the temporary dismantling of democracy itself. But India learned an important lesson from that shameful chapter in its history – that politicians will use perceived threats to the integrity of the nation-state to interfere with fundamental freedoms. For India, the real danger lies in silencing voices.
In my journey into religious fundamentalism in India, I have found that political disenfranchisement always fuels fanaticism. Restricting the right to dissent is a dangerous road for a democracy to travel. The greatness of a country is measured not just by economic power. It lies in its ability to accommodate all opinions while protecting the weak and vulnerable. As Mahatma Gandhi once put it: ‘Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress’ – a message as valid now as it was then. His political inheritors would do well to heed it.
