Lessons in Advanced Citizenship

So Arundhati Roy is an idiot. Yes, we all knew that...what's new? In her never-ending quest for notoriety, Roy recently visited Kashmir in the aftermath of the civil unrest there. While there, she spoke to locals in small gatherings and severely criticised the Indian government for the atrocities it was committing in the state. She further stated that the disputed territory of Kashmir was not an integral part of India. The next morning's newspapers covered her comments and there was an outcry across the emotionally stunted nation. “How could she say such nasty things about India?” people wanted to know. As was to be expected, the observation was very quickly made by a lobotomised individual that Roy could get away with such talk only in a free country like India, and had she been in Pakistan she would not have been cheeky enough to pull such a stunt.

The Indian Home Ministry is reported to have told the police in New Delhi that a case may be filed against Roy for sedition. Clearly, it thinks that there is enough evidence to charge Roy under Section 124 A of the Indian Penal Code, which states, “Whoever, by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the Government established by law in India, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, to which fine may be added, or with imprisonment which may extend to three years, to which fine may be added, or with fine.” Ironically, freedom of speech in India, though enshrined in the Constitution of India as a fundamental right, is actually curtailed. Although Article 19(1)a gives the freedom of speech and expression to every individual, sub-clause (2) restricts the freedom whereas it pertains to “reasons of "sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states, public order, preserving decency, preserving morality, in relation to contempt, court, defamation, or incitement to an offence.” If the Union Minister for Justice, Moodbidri Veerappa Moily, is any indication of the laws in India, the Minister described Roy's remarks as "most unfortunate". He said: "Yes, there is freedom of speech...but it can't violate the patriotic sentiments of the people."

Upon learning of the possible case pending against her, Roy cleverly used the media opportunity to lambast the Indian government some more. In a statement she released, Roy declared,"I spoke about justice for the people of Kashmir who live under one of the most brutal military occupations in the world; for Kashmiri Pandits who live out the tragedy of having been driven out of their homeland; for Dalit soldiers killed in Kashmir whose graves I visited on garbage heaps in their villages in Cuddalore; for the Indian poor who pay the price of this occupation in material ways and who are now learning to live in the terror of what is becoming a police state." In an interview, she went on, "Some have accused me of giving 'hate speeches', of wanting India to break up. On the contrary, what I say comes from love and pride. It comes from not wanting people to be killed, raped, imprisoned or have their fingernails pulled out in order to force them to say they are Indians.” Roy continued, “Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor roam free."

Speaking at a seminar on ‘Wither Kashmir: Freedom or Enslavement?’ in Srinagar, Roy said, “Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. It is a historical fact.” She declared that she was proud to associate herself with “resistance movements” across India and counselled Kashmiris to “consolidate the gains” of the recent four months of anti-India agitation. “The power concedes nothing unless it is forced to,” she said, and demanded demilitarisation of Jammu & Kashmir, urging Kashmiris not to join the State police and the Central Reserve Police Force. “India is behaving like a colonial power and suppressing one community at the hands of the other,” Roy ranted on. “They are sending Nagas to Kashmir and Punjabis to Manipur.” Roy didn't spare Prime Minister Manmohan Singh either. “The Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy,” she claimed, “has not been elected.” Roy is known not only for her controversial speeches but also her equally polemical writings.

In the wake of such rancid verbal diahorrea from Roy, it is difficult to clearly see the issue in question here. Undoubtedly, many are angry at much of what Roy said. Furthermore, there is no doubt that not only does Roy have her history wrong, but she also does not understand the nation-building aspects of military recruitment and deployment not just in the Indian Army but armies worldwide. It is also quite clear that Roy is a naive person who is yet to see real brutality or denial of civil rights. However, that cannot be allowed to translate into anger instead of justice. As the law stands, Roy is clearly guilty. The outcome of any legal proceedings will surely find it to be so. But that is not what concerns me. The fundamental principle of the restriction of free speech and expression is what bothers me. In his classic defence of free speech, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill laid down what is known as the ‘harm principle.' It postulates that the only justification for silencing a person against his will is to prevent him from causing harm to others. It is to this powerful libertarian mid-19th century principle that we owe the idea that free speech cannot be proscribed merely because we find it disagreeable, and that curbs may be imposed only if such expression constitutes a direct, explicit, and unequivocal incitement to violence. Roy, for all her raving and ranting, did not cross this threshold – the law requires that direct connection between a defendant’s words and the harm done by others be shown. Clearly, there is no direct link between Roy and Kashmiri separatists or the Maoists. Roy's support of these heinous causes is unquestionably problematic to say the least, but she has not armed or funded them. However, laws cannot be enacted retroactively and this argument does not serve as a defence of Roy. It is, however, something that Indians should pay close attention to for the future lest India indeed become a police state. One would have thought that we had all learned our lesson from the Weimar Republic NOT to have such sweeping and powerful laws on the books.

So what are the problems with the restrictions placed upon free speech? Does freedom mean license? Of course not. However, to frame the debate as a choice between license and encroaching restrictions is the fallacy of excluded middles. Subject to the harm principle, freedom of expression should indeed be absolute. Let us quickly run through the specific restrictions placed upon free speech in India:

1. sovereignty and integrity of India – how is the sovereignty and integrity of India “violenced” by free speech? Sovereignty and integrity can be threatened by armies from without and terrorism and separatism from within. If free speech is not directly inciting a rebellion, it cannot be said to have done violence to sovereignty and integrity.

2. security of the state – the security of the state is covered by the Official Secrets Act. There is no need to place further restrictions on expression.

3. friendly relations with foreign states – friendly relations with foreign states are not maintained by sacrificing your core values or interests. India could probably maintain friendly relations with Pakistan by giving up Kashmir and with China by giving up Arunachal Pradesh...so why doesn't anyone consider that?

4. public order – if taken to mean wide-scale rioting, this falls under the harm principle and a legitimate restriction on free speech.

5. preserving decency – what is the empirical yardstick for measuring decency? There may be a few basic values we might all agree on, such as a ban on public nudity, but what formula does one use to measure decency or the lack thereof?

6. preserving morality – what is this, Saudi Arabia? Should we start stoning women and not let them drive too?

Indians have a choice – they can remain emotionally stunted, psychologically hurt by every little incident, or they can embrace democracy and advanced citizenship. But perhaps India is not ready for democracy, not with around 40% of its population illiterate and most of the literate population accustomed to learning by rote than actual intellectual engagement and original thought. Perhaps lessons in liberty need to be paid for in blood and not enough blood has yet been spilt on the subcontinent...

Echoes of Gokhale

We have talked about the Partition. Now let us talk about Independence. Gopal Krishna Gokhale is not a name you hear too often in the Indian public sphere. And why should you? After all, he was not as exciting as the fiery Bal Gangadhar Tilak or Bhagat Singh. Nor was he the implacable force MK Gandhi became after the Round Table Conference in 1930-1931. He did not even ask for purna swaraj, settling instead for dominion status within the British Empire. How can this man be a hero for the new, resurgent India, brimming with confidence after their rise from the economic doldrums experienced under a socialist Congress? All too often, it happens that the quietest voices impart the greatest wisdom.

I don't know too much about Gokhale - there was never time in class after the hagiography of Gandhi that we

were fed. A quick search on Google will also confirm that there exist very few books indeed on Gokhale written with academic rigour as compared to Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi, Tilak, or Bhagat Singh. However, recent happenings have made me go back to what little I know of Gokhale's message and reappraise his work. The banning of books, the latest being Jaswant Singh's Jinnah – India, Partition, Independence, in Gujarat is not a new phenomenon in India. There are a multitude of reasons for this, none of which I find convincing. There was Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses that caused a furore, and there was MF Hussain's nude Saraswati. Understanding Islam through Hadis by Ram Swarup, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India; The Epic of Shivaji by James Laine, Islam - A Concept of Political World Invasion by RV Bhasin, Lajja by Taslima Nasreen, Nine Hours to Rama by Stanley Wolpert, and The Polyester Pince by Hamish McDonald are but a few of the books banned by some states in India or nationally. Admittedly, some of these works may make us cringe at their arguments or implications, but that is not reason enough to ban them. Some deal with sensitive issues like religion while others like Wolpert's Nine Hours to Rama merely point out the lapses in Gandhi's security on that fateful day in 1948.

In a truly free society, ideas should not be suppressed regardless of their content. Indian politicians have argued that Western standards of liberal discourse to not apply to highly emotive issues such as religion. That is quite disingenuous, particularly in India. With official literacy figures at barely 62%, it is unlikely that the average Indian would have cultivated a habit of reading some fairly sophisticated literature or history. The issue can be highly emotive only if educated people choose to make it so. Thus, the onus for riots and disturbances is shifted upon the intelligentsia of a group, be they Muslims, Rajputs, Marxists, brahmins, women, or homosexuals. If that is the case, why is it that the aggrieved leadership respond to the challenge with a another book arguing just the opposite, or easier, a scathing review? After all, if books like Jaswant's and Rushdie's are read by people of a certain economic and social class, they would be best addressed in their own medium?

The fact of the matter is that the supposedly afflicted intelligentsia is playing a different game. Since it is easy to rile the unlettered

masses into action (Jim Hacker has a wonderful quote in Yes Prime Minister: Ordinary people are stupid), politicians publicise an interpretation of a book that is extremely skewed and champion against it, thereby ensuring the continued support of the particular vote bank that is now aggravated. In the case of Jaswant Singh vs. the BJP (at least the Advani-led faction, if the media is to be believed), that is exactly what happened. Jaswant Singh's (JS) book portrayed Sardar Patel in a less than flattering light just before the Assembly elections in Gujarat. Narendra Modi, whether he cared about JS' argument or not, knew that the opposition would use the 'slanderous' accusations levelled at Patel against him in their election campaign if he did not act on it. The people of Gujarat would see this as Modi failing to protect their honour. Their icon had been attacked, that too by an outsider (JS is a Rajput from Rajasthan). Indians seem to be high-strung divas when it comes to their icons, be they religious, political, or from the world of entertainment and sports. They cannot seem to realise that their heroes most definitely made mistakes as all humans are prone to do once in a while. The average Indian, it seems, cannot bear to see his demi-gods with warts and all. Perhaps a tad politically incorrect, but maybe the British were right when they called their Indian subjects effeminate.

The last sentence of the previous paragraph is, I confess, highly unfair. The cause for this sort of reaction is largely due to the high illiteracy in India. When the British left, literacy hovered around 12%. Today, it has risen 50 percentage points after 62 years of independence. To put things into perspective, Sri Lanka has attained 92% literacy despite a civil war and China is at 91% despite the Big Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Without being equipped by the proper intellectuals tools for life in a democracy, such ignorance of civil liberties and due process is bound to persist. Even educated people seem to harbour illogical reactions. Consider the following case: in a TV reality show presently running, the participant is strapped to a polygraph machine and asked various questions. In a recent episode, a woman was asked if she would ever consider being unfaithful to her husband. As polygraph machines measure stress and not veracity, the needle jumped and the crowd howled and clapped. The reaction, judging by letters to newspapers nationwide, was a plea to ban the show as it was obscene and violated the honour of the woman. Now please note that the participant had willingly signed up (it is difficult to get on the show) knowing full well that the questions would hardly be about her favourite colour. Further, given the viewer ratings, there was a significantly large group of people who enjoyed the show and did not think it to be a problem. This sort of black-and-white thinking (by those who wished to ban the show) is the result of a deficient education. So not only is literacy important, the ability to think critically is equally important. Again, this is not to say that ome things may be in poor taste and the great dumbing down of life (by pandering to the lowest common denominator) throws up such incidents. But this is no reason to ban things - subjectong taste to censorship is an express route

to Orwellian Hell!

There is, of course, the diminishing marginal utility of good education. Of what use is a good education if there is no outlet for it? Corruption and nepotism counters the positive effects of a good education. A quick look at the people in power and the contenders for power leave one thoroughly disillusioned - in what dark and twisted world can Mohammad Shahabuddin and Shibu Soren (to name just two) be Members of Parliament? Convicted murderers running the county...can we truly claim to not be a failed state? We are just a little bit ahead of civil war-ravaged Africa. In this situation many people turn inwards, looking at values and concepts rather than practicality - it is their way of dulling the evereyday reality. Others leave the country for greener pastures - why should they waste their lives being unappreciated and working for a near-hopeless cause? The few who remain withdraw from civic life. They are usually urban, upper-middle class voters with good jobs who stop voting and are resigned to bribing their way through everything. One can blame the genetically apatehtic but I personally find it difficult to blame a learned apathy that took 60 years in the making. How else does one react to a murder case dragging on for 21 years (Sayed Modi, eight-time national badminton champion, was gunned down in 1988. The Courts finally declared a verdict last week)? What options do we have when the judiciary is 124 years and over THIRTY MILLION cases backlogged?

And so we come back to Gokhale. More than a freedom activist, he was a social reformer. He warned Gandhi that Indians were not ready for independence because democracy (Gokhale did not even consider other forms of government) required an educated and civic-minded public. Democracy has an inherent danger of being corrupted and devolving to populism or majoritarianism. This is the flaw in the system, and the only thing that can rectify it is a liberal education. Unless children are exposed unreservedly to Aristotle, al Farabi, Maimonides, Spinoza, Hobbes, Mill, Voltaire, and Burke right alongside Bhaskaracharya, Adishankaracharya, and Vivekananada, unless they read from the Torah as well as the Gita, unless they can talk about Valmiki, Virgil, Dante, Goethe, Dostoevsky, and Rushdie in the same breath, they are not ready for life in a democracy. Obviously this is an ideal but it nonetheless points in the right direction. The politicisation of education in India has been a great disservice to the nation. Romila Thapar, Mushirul Hasan, Irfan Habib, Asghar Ali Engineer, Gyanendra Pandey, and others with their own brand of 'secular' axes to grind have crippled the Humanities in India. They have included sub-alterns, peasants, Muslims, women, communists, and Dalits in their national narratives - they have included everything except any sense of reality or even partial truth. Gokhale was right in 1915 - India was not ready for independence. By 1947, India may have been ready for independence but certainly not for democracy.

A Rudderless Party

I usually refrain from commenting on currently active stories because calm reflection yields more positive results than hot-blooded rants. However, in the case of Jaswant Singh (JS) vs. Sangh Parivar, it is of utmost importance that I speak immediately. On the surface, the halla-gulla seems to be yet another intra-Parivar squabble, perhaps the RSS asserting its power over the BJP. Politically it may be so, with some deft manoeuvring by some BJP member(s) who held a grudge against JS. The questions raised in this scuffle, however, are of paramount importance and the answers we find will set the course India takes in the future.

The gist of the matter is that JS wrote a book, Jinnah – India, Partition, Independence, that was more sympathetic to Muhammad Ali Jinnah than Indian historiography has been willing to allow. Jinnah, for most Indians, was the villan of the partition. He demanded a separate state to be carved out of the British Raj for Muslims against the wishes of Gandhi and Nehru, and he was responsible for the carnage that followed (in which over a million people died). History is never so clear, and this is what JS' book reminded us. In a more sympathetic portrayal of Jinnah, the blame shifts somewhat to Nehru and Sardar Patel as well as Jinnah.

The critical question this biography raises is how did the man they called the Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity in 1916 end up as the Qaid-e-Azam of Pakistan in 1947? The answer: he was pushed by the Congress's repeated inability to accept that Muslims feared domination by Hindus and wanted "space" in "a re-assuring system." The British divide-and-conquer policy added fuel to the fire, particularly with the introduction of reservations in 1909 and communal electorates through the Government of India Act in 1935. Language riots favouring Urdu over Hindi despite the 1900 declaration by Raj authorities that both languages will be given equal status further hardened the position of prominent Muslim intellectuals such as Muhammad Iqbal (author of Sare Jahan se Accha) and Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (friction between Hindi and Urdu had existed decades before the language riots and even the formation of the Muslim League). The 1937 elections shattered the aspirations of the Muslim League, and Congress concomitantly refused to share power with an organisation that sided with the British and opposed its policies (of communal electorates). This difference in vision led to Iqbal's idea of a separate Muslim state (1930) being adopted as the policy of the League at the Lahore sitting in 1940. For JS, Nehru and Mountbatten share equal responsibility. He argues that while Gandhi, Rajagopalachari and Azad understood the Muslim fear of Congress majoritarianism, Nehru could not.Had the Congress accepted a decentralised, federal India, then a united India "was clearly ours to attain". But "this was an anathema to Nehru's centralising approach and policies."

Although JS is right in that Jinnah was not the archvillain of the Partition, he was not as angelic and innocent as one may gather from the book. Jinnah was nothing if not the archopportunist. Power hungry, Jinnah used the Congress and then the League to rise to a position of prominence that his money and connections alone could not do in revolutionary India. JS does not, however, give Jinnah any agency - throughout the book, Jinnah is acted upon by either Muslim intellectuals, the Congress, the British, or the League. Jinnah needs to be 'un-demonised' but I am not sure this is best achieved by inducting him into the Hall of Angels. besides, that would be biased history of another kind. In any case, it is time Indians recognised that the founders of the nation were also ordinary mortals, better than some but prone to making errors nevertheless (Guilty Men Of India's Partition, by Ram Manohar Lohia, is an excellent place to start reading on the Partition. A more common view can be found in The Tragic Story of Partition, by HV Seshadri).

JS opens up, inadvertently or not, the question of federalism. Would an American model, in which states have power in most areas but relinquish foreign affairs, defence, and a few key sectors to the centre (to put it simply), have served India better? What if Pakistan had been an autonomous part of an akhand Bharat along with Bangladesh and perhaps parts of Hyderabad? This is a counterfactual, not quite in the purview of academics. However, it does not mean that we should not consider it. However, the pitfalls must be clear - there is no evidence to cite in favour of federalism in India because it has never been tried. Furthermore, given the vast differences in language, culture, worship, and cuisine, the dangers of separatism must be considered before advocating a federal system. Especially now, what would stop Maharashtra, Punjab, Gujarat and haryana from seceding to avoid having to pick up the slack from Bihar, West Bengal, and other non-performing states? India has had problems with Punjab already as well as Tamil Nadu and the problem in the North East has still not abated. An argument against federalism, however, is that stronger states tend towards centralisation. Take the American case again - as America changed from a backwater of the British Empire to the superpower it is today, Washington became stronger and stronger. The sharpest difference can be seen in pre- and post- Civil War (1861-1865) under Lincoln, the New Deal (1933-1945) under Roosevelt, and the Cold war (1945-1991). The Executive Branch became so powerful that in 1973, the US Congress passed the War Powers Resolution (did not become an Act and is hence not a law of the land even though all Presidents since have followed its guidelines - its constitutionality has been challenged but since it has not gone to the Supreme Court, there has been no decision) to restrict the President.

Whether JS can sell his book and argument or not, the key issue here is freedom of expression and the value of an open debate. Other issues JS' book has raised like history and federalism take a back seat to this. India claims to be a democratic country and I will, for now, give her the benefit of the doubt. JS' expulsion from the BJP for his personal views he expressed in publication is nothing other than the Talibanisation of Parivar politics. The appropriate response to a book is a review, or better yet, another book. The book has been banned in Gujarat (held by the BJP in the May 2009 elections), a move supported by the Congress Party as well. Worse, it had been barely two or three days since the book came out that the Parivar machinery went into gear to expel JS. It is unclear how many people actually read the book and contemplated on the argument before taking such an extreme measure as expulsion. JS is - was - a senior member of the BJP having held the position of Foreign Minister and Defence Minister in the 1998 - 2004 BJP government. Moreover, given the history of the relations between Jinnah and the Parivar - remember LK Advani's trip to Lahore in 2004 - the anti-intellectual psoition the BJP-led NDA coalition has taken is apparent.

I am not one to believe in the universality of ideas. That is not to say that no idea is universal, but the chances are fairly high that the context may render a noble idea in Europe meaningless in South Asia. In our intellectual clumsiness or for purposes of propaganda, we use words from one context, history and evolution in another entirely alien enviroment (Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincialising Europe does an admirable job of explaining this point further). A quick illustration of the multiple valences of 'progress,' for example, comes in the form on a couple of anecdotes - in one, Ramanujan, the famous mathematician, is caught by GH Hardy consulting a horoscope, and in the other, Nobel laureate CV Raman excuses himself from his laboratory so that he could get home early and shower before a solar eclipse arrives at his location. Two unquestionably brilliant men of modernity still clinging to ancient extra-rational (I use the suffix extra- because ir- has a pejorative connotation) practices: is this progress or regress in the far reaches of the Raj?

The idea in danger here is open debate. I believe the concept holds the same meaning in its Western incarnation as it does in its Eastern trajectory - there is ample evidence of philosophical and theological debates occurring in India for at least the past three millennia. Similarly in the West, open debate has meant publications and counter-publications, speeches and counter-speeches, and the free exercise of the scientific process (hypothesis-thesis-synthesis). As such, even if one vehemently objects to JS' interpretation of history, it must be done in open discussion. Unpalatable, unfavourable or unpopular ideas cannot be quashed by using the state machinery but must be rejected, appropriated, or allowed to modify our own views only through a process of exchange and consultation. Otherwise, there is no difference between the banning of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses and this. Intolerance towards free expression has been more visible of late. Besides the JS case and the Satanic Verses, there was also MF Hussain's painting of a nude Saraswati and the reaction in India to the Danish cartoons that portrayed the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) as a terrorist with a bomb in his turban. No doubt, one may find some of these more distasteful than others but the principle is still the same - should we use the powers of the State to suppress ideas we don't like? If the answer is in the positive, the next question becomes, who is the 'we'? And, what do 'we' do when 'we' are not in power and 'not-we' decides to supress an idea tha 'we' like but 'not-we' don't?

Clearly, in a democracy, self-restraint is necessary. The best means of opposition to an idea is economic - boycott MF Hussain's exhibition, don't read the Satanic Verses, refuse to buy JS' book but don't ban them. Ideas become more dangerous when suppressed than when dismissed after due consideration. A glaring example is the Congress Party itself - putting on blinders and creating (and believing) its own myths, it did not see the rise of a viable opposition in the form of the BJP because more and more people were become tired of secularism, Congress-style. If the BJP does not accept occasional challenges to Party orthodoxy, it will very soon morph into the RSS (because much of the official Party position when not in power is remarkably similar to that of the RSS). It will lose its distinct flavour as a party of free thinkers who refuse to abase themselves in the cults of Mao, Marx, and the Gandhi dynasty. More importantly, as a major national party and the only viable opposition, the BJP's actions will set a precedent and serve as an example or an excuse for future generations of not only BJP leaders but also other politicians and officials. Once it is established that the truth is what is politically correct and exigent for the national meta-narrative, people in all walks of life in India will follow the set example. Objectivity, query, and discussion would have lost their use, and any action that takes away the intrinsic property of an idea breeds instability and chaos.