Mitali Saran: Protecting the right to watch or not to watch Haider

Indian politics has rarely been on the side of individual citizens when it comes to freedom of expression. Politicians are far more interested in encouraging and manipulating differences for electoral gain, than in fulfilling their mandate to facilitate the kind of law and order conditions that allow differences to cohabit peacefully. The result is a kind of default conservative majoritarianism within all communities. It's not really all that surprising, then, that allowing creeping tides of local majoritarianism would eventually bring us the first overtly majoritarian central government in the history of India.

Gormless Indian administrations, ever playing the numbers game, have, therefore, largely been leery of the work, and electoral flak, that goes with defending individual rights, especially on the subject of artistic and intellectual freedom of expression, which we tend to regard as a non-issue. Access to water is worth fighting about. Murder may, in the right circumstances, be worth raising a ruckus about. Corruption is a genuine concern.

But one person's painting? One person's novel? A film? A sculpture? A poem? One person's clothing? A song? An essay? One gallery's exhibition? Individual Right to Information requests? Is it really worth the pain? Especially if so many other people find that one person's self-expression to be objectionable, and defending them will earn you the electoral approval of the one and the electoral wrath of the several, instead of the other way around?

No wonder, then, that administrations are not only trigger-happy when it comes to bans and other restraints on freedom of expression, but positively proud of them, so that the majority - or the most vocal majority faction - remains aware that the government is serving its interests. While the courts rightly reject "threat to law and order" as a good reason to impose bans, administrations notionally offer legally mandated protection to individuals with a de facto unofficial caveat: we can't guarantee anything.

In a society that doesn't overly value provocative artistic and intellectual self-expression in the first instance, and offers only the testiest, most reluctant defence of it when it must, it is then no wonder that our first line of censorship is, increasingly, self-censorship. That is, of course, by far the worst kind of censorship because it is a bloodless surrender to the majoritarian instinct and to administrative incompetence.

I found myself thinking, as I watched Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider, that the censor board had been more lenient with the film than one would expect it to be based on track record. To have such a thought is an indictment of how poorly we respond, as a society, to critiques of established national narratives, or of emotive subjects such as the Indian Army. Instead of anticipating healthy debates and critiques around such a film, or robust peaceful protests, all of which are perfectly welcome, we find ourselves fearing for the physical safety of makers of the movie, and for their property, and expecting pre-emptive restrictions, whether or not one agrees with them. Therefore, instead of being upset by the 41 cuts that the censor board made, we applaud the board for its maturity; instead of taking it as given that it will be screened without violence, we are pleasantly surprised that theatres continue to show it. That shouldn't be the case.

Freedom of expression depends on an ecosystem of civil, judicial and administrative cooperation. It depends entirely on enough people believing it to be a freedom worth having. If civil society wants to preserve that freedom, including the freedom to protest what it doesn't like, it will have to take the lead - first, by being the engine that continually produces argument, art, challenge and social change; and secondly, in robustly defending its own right to do so. The more civil organisations there are that insist on upholding freedom of expression rights, rather than abdicating them to a homogenising majoritarianism, the better placed society will be to preserve its own possibilities for inclusive progress.

In an era of increasing intolerance expressed through violence, there is an ever-greater need for such organisations to form and join hands in a common purpose - to hold and expand space for dissent, provocation, expression and individual rights in the face of a growing tendency to constrain it. If artists, writers, musicians, lovers, film makers and their audiences see the worth of what they themselves do, they will have to show those who practice a social veto of constitutional rights that there is also such a thing as a civil veto of such extra-legal, extra-constitutional controls.