They keep piling up — Salman Rushdie, Kamal Haasan, Ashis Nandy. The authorities explain it differently, through a single prism — maintenance of law and order. India has dropped a few notches in the freedom of speech and expression scale in the bottom half of the list. As the slide goes on, there is no end in sight.

Behind the embarrassed silence, or worse, justification, over their actions lie the compulsions of what India has become: a country of identity politics. In a sense, the birth of post-Partition India inevitably meant the salience of issues of Hindu-Muslim equations. But thanks to the revolt of the so-called Other Backward Castes and then the dalit awakening enshrined in the Mandal factor, they became game changers.
If the bane of caste was to be surmounted not merely by the initial reservations for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes, predictably extended into the distant future, but by the further stratification of the social fabric by casting these differences in stone, the end result had to impact freedom of speech and expression as understood by the world.
Depending upon each political party’s support base, it espouses limits to freedom as it guards its votebanks. Thus many parties have Muslim votebanks and it is no surprise that anything offending Muslims or sections of them become taboo. The largest number of prohibitions, therefore, concern alleged or genuine Muslim sensibilities. But other groups or sub-groups have also carved out their own no-go areas.
As far as Muslims are concerned, any group of them can get together and claim to be offended by a work of art or a film, with disastrous results for the artistes concerned, as we have witnessed in the case of the film Vishwaroopam. Or they can take offence at Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and ban it before anyone has even read it. The fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini followed, leading to the long years of captive existence of the luckless author, now elaborated in a copious memoir.
The reverse side of the coin is the case of the hounding out of the country of one of its most famous modern painters, M.F. Husain, by sections of Hindu activists for his alleged offence of insulting Hindu goddesses. It is no coincidence that Kamal Haasan cited Husain’s case in his initial angry protest over the banning of his film by the Tamil Nadu government suggesting for good measure that he might have to emulate the painter, who died in his self-imposed exile, to search for more secular shores.
The plight of Dr Nandy belongs to a somewhat different category in the sense that he was thought to be treading on the depressed classes’ toes. Their sensibilities are raw because their limited emancipation is rather recent and they continue to suffer at the hands of their supposed caste superiors in terms of murders and continuing sexual assaults on their womenfolk. Their great leader, Babasaheb Ambedkar, had taken his fellow dalits’ struggle to a new level by tracing their misfortunes to the allegedly casteist nature of ancient Hindu precepts from Manu, among others. The mass conversion of dalits to Buddhism has not helped. Thus, the outrage voiced by the dalit leader Mayawati over
Dr Nandy’s remarks that the Scheduled Castes and Tribes were more corrupt than the rest had a resonance not fully appreciated by non-dalits.
That Dr Nandy’s argument was more sophisticated than his remarks as they were initially reported and telecast was lost in the ensuing outrage. As he explained later, his bald comment was part of a larger thesis of corruption being a great equaliser and he welcomed this new equality because the better off and wealthier sections of society were often not caught in the act since they had political clout and other ways of taking bribes. Rather, the tragedy was in how quickly all major political parties, including the ruling Congress, were unanimous in condemning
Dr Nandy because all of them had dalit votebanks they did not wish to lose.
This leads to the inevitable question: Where do we go from here? Are we to be perennially locked into a situation in which any deviation from accepted political wisdom is subjected to almost impossible political costs? The civil society — in essence the literate and empowered middle class — is duly exercised over the seemingly endless cases of freedom of speech being constricted even as political leaders and parties continue to surrender freedom to political expediency.
Over time, if the civil society continues to back its anguish over increasing limits on freedom of speech and expression by vigorous protests and forming cohesive organisations, they could become constituencies political parties would wish to cultivate and listen to. But this requires persistence and organisation. In the meantime, political parties will find greater profit in listening to the voices of a segmented society guarding its flanks by yielding to people with narrow views.
Part of the problem lies in the passing of tall leaders of India’s Independence generation. Their broadly liberal views and tolerant nature were not imbibed in equal measure by succeeding generations of leaders who tended to be more narrow-minded, more cynical and more indigenous in the sense of their nativist beliefs. The demands of the family and their communities in caste or tribal terms are more prominently imprinted on their make-up.
As the countrywide protests over the gangrape and subsequent death of the 23-year-old on a Delhi bus demonstrated, social media are powerful tools in spreading the word. One problem, of course, is to reach a wider audience. Most people in the countryside are strangers to such media. Therefore, the task of fighters for freedom of expression is to convert their homilies into simple terms through folk theatre and other ways that will appeal to the neo-literate and the illiterate. If we continue to follow the path being taken by our political leaders, we would lose the struggle to safeguard an essential element of a democratic state we otherwise proudly proclaim.
Let us not elevate “law and order” to an all-encompassing credo that trumps freedom of speech and expression.