Mitali Saran: Free speech vs free-for-all

People love to talk about “reasonable restrictions” on free speech. “Reasonable” turns out to be what they personally consider to be reasonable. The most generous will draw the line at “incitement to violence”, asking – rhetorically – whether the freedom to create any book, painting, speech or act is really worth spilling precious blood and losing irreplaceable lives. But wherever they draw the free speech line, it is almost certainly different from the next guy’s. And that’s why it doesn’t work.

I’m thoroughly sick of the “reasonable restrictions” argument. Subscribers place faith in their own benevolent despotism. But since, in the real world, Hitler can live alongside Gandhi, and Osama bin Laden alongside Mother Teresa, and Chetan Bhagat alongside J M Coetzee, and Justin Bieber alongside Leonard Cohen, one man’s reason is clearly another man’s insanity. Reasonableness is, therefore, not a terribly useful parameter for how to run society. Physical safety, of people and property, is.

And that’s possibly the best argument for free speech absolutism. Reasonable restrictions exist on a slippery slope, one that ends up ceding ever more ground to the violent — not just in response to but, as in India, in anticipation of violence; and eventually simply by snowballing effect. If, as a government, you ban one book, shut down one photo exhibition, hound out one artist, disallow one peaceful public assembly, cave in to one religious institution, fail to control one riot, you empower every zealous nut job out there to force the same thing the next time they feel like it.

Every time you give in, you are saying, loud and clear, that you don’t have the power to enforce peace; and worse, you imply the legitimacy of violence. A government that can be duped into restricting individual rights under the misapprehension that it is upholding minority sentiments is a dream come true for political opponents, and for those who seek political power without political office — a more comfortable, less accountable place to be, usually in the pulpit of a church, the sanctum of a temple, or the minaret of a mosque.

Peaceful demonstrations, expressions and protests are the legal tender of democratic protest. “Peaceful” means without harm to another’s person or property — not “polite”, or “inoffensive”, or “without harm to a person’s ego or feelings”. It does not mean suppressing voices, or making arbitrary, pre-emptive artistic and social decisions; it means maintaining physical safety, to allow anyone and everyone to have their say non-violently, and taking violators to task. Barack Obama told the United Nations General Assembly that he felt for Muslim outrage over the anti-Islam video that provoked an attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, but he also stood firmly by the filmmaker’s right to make the film. We need to make the distinction between upholding rights (constitutional mandate), and pandering to sentiment (cheap political gambit). Are you hurt and upset and angry? Talk about it, write about it, make art about it, protest it peacefully — and if nothing changes, suck it up. Yes, suck it up.

But this only works when the political and administrative leadership believes in the constitutional rights of individual citizens, and throws its weight behind educated law enforcement. In our case, most mobs are led by political interests. It takes one person to tip the scales by committing the first act of violence. Chances are that that person is acting out of cold calculation, not white-hot anger; and that that person can assure rioters of immunity from the law.

Salman Rushdie talked, in a recent interview with Bill Maher, about the political manufacture of rage. As the dark star of this year’s Jaipur Literature Festival in January, when politicians whipped up anti-Rushdie sentiments because of a local election, Mr Rushdie should know. M F Husain, forced out of India, should know. Taslima Nasreen, virtually shoved out for being controversial, should know. Anyone who watched Congress workers lead a mob charge on the Bhubaneswar Assembly in early September, knows. Anyone who remembers Gujarat, 2002, or Delhi, 1984, knows. Any woman who has been blamed for getting raped should know. So, to those people who talk about incitement to violence: criminalise those who cast the first physical stone, not those who express themselves non-violently, no matter how disagreeable they may be.

A functioning democracy is not one in which everyone is unfailingly considerate, uncritical and agreeable. A functioning democracy is one in which people holler about whatever they want, create whatever art and speeches and acts they want, live under whatever customs they want, with whatever faith they want, insult or parody whoever they want — and nobody gets hurt. Voltaire’s elegant summation has never been topped: I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.