Last week, the excision of passages in an NCERT textbook about Mahatma Gandhi’s politics appeasing Muslims, or banning RSS soon after Nathuram Godse’s assassination of the Mahatma, made much noise. The RSS was banned thrice in its history. The first time was soon after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, then during the Emergency, and again, for the third time, after the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992. These facts would not go away because a paragraph or two in a textbook is removed. The information is everywhere.
A day later, this issue was overtaken by the SC’s lifting of the government ban on MediaOne, a TV channel owned by Kerala’s Madhyamam Broadcasting Limited. The ban was punishment for its broadcasting news and views that compromised national security. But the government could not clearly define what constituted a breach of national security.
The same day, perhaps to balance it all out, the SC dismissed a joint petition by the Opposition that accused the BJP-led NDA government of misusing the CBI and ED to suppress dissenting views, a free speech concern.
The Madhyamam case inspired much media celebration. One view that resonated the more was R Jagannathan’s (The Times of India, April 7, 2023), which argued for the need for clear free speech guidelines independent of the biases of the judges of the moment:
‘The SC must not leave it to individual judges and specific cases to decide the law, which can only result in contradictory guidelines on free speech. It is time to constitute a full bench of seven or nine judges to review all free speech judgments (or those curtailing them) of the past, both at the apex court level and the high court.’ On the face of it, this sounds like a reasonable proposal. It is not, as we will see in a moment.
In the same week, a Bollywood star, Salman Khan, said at a function that vulgarity, nudity, and abusive language on OTT platforms must stop. According to reports, he said: “Ab 15-16 saal ka bacche dekh sakte hai. Apko acha lagega apki choti se beti ye sab dekhe… padhne ke bahane. I just think the content should be checked on OTT.”
Those familiar with Bollywood’s inner workings know that many politically sensitive topics are already self-censored out of existence. Indeed, if you have the budget, mythological action dramas are preferred. In movies with lower budgets, heroes and heroines are traditionally Hindu characters that are portrayed in a positive light. Incorrect stories are shelved. Salman Khan’s suggestions can be seen as asking for censorship. He is not likely to think it is a question of censorship, though; he probably thinks he knows what the Indian sensibility is all about, having made many successful, if anodyne, movies.
And that is the reason why Jagannathan’s argument for a full bench looking into free speech guidelines is unlikely to work. Because it is not about a formula. It is about the sensibility of a people.
Salman Khan’s India is not, say, the sensibility of a great filmmaker like Saeed Mirza, or Sudhir Mishra. (In fact, in a recent informal conversation with me, Mishra said he was considering making a movie on Mahatma Gandhi. A very different Gandhi, Mishra said. Be careful, I said. Nothing will happen, woh mera Gandhi hai, Mishra said, I will do what I please. Oh, well, we will see.)
Whether it is NCERT textbooks, TV news censorship, OTT/movie space, or a weaponised Press Information Bureau, the problem we are looking at is not so much about free speech and censorship as a nation’s spirit that shapes it.
Our present sensibility, as manifested by the dispensation in power, is to think of history as essentially what can be left out of a narrative so we feel good. It is a kind of victimhood from which a kinship, a folk-spirit, a sense of unity might be forged. We are still talking about the perceived wrongs of the past to such an extent that our sense of time/history has been warped: we are preoccupied with ancient and medieval India than of the future. And history could be deceptive. Consider Eliot’s lines:
‘Think now/History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors/And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions/Guides us by vanities. Think now/She gives when our attention is distracted/And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions/That the giving famishes the craving.’
We could go back in Hindu India’s history and find in its myths, scriptures, and temples a sensibility of freedom, imagination and thought that Abrahamic religions, for instance, lack.
Indeed, in which other religion can you deny god and still be a good Hindu human being? Buddhism and Jainism, fundamentally nastik offshoots of Hinduism, went against the core of Hinduism as understood then. That is how open Hinduism really is at one level. But we have now devolved into some Victorian Press Information Bureau version of it.
And, so, we tend to define free speech (Article 19 of the Constitution) in terms of not what can be said but what can offend us. We look at the thought in terms of the victimhood that can be sourced from it, a prescriptive formula for a free speech that preferably offends none, neither the government in power nor the language and gender-sensitive progressives. This happens not to be in consonance with the spirit of the argumentative Indian.
A court can never sort this matter conclusively, simply because free speech is not prescription-bound. The court can, at best, pronounce judgments on individual cases. For what is at stake is an abstract sensibility, the spirit of a people sharing a history of thought. Not the Supreme Court, but a people formulate it—if only we focus on ideas, not smash the offensive skulls that grow them.
C P Surendran is a poet, novelist, and screenplay writer. His latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B