Sound Of Silence.

On Free Speech In India.

Akshay Surana
Aug 31, 2018 · 11 min read

Remember Sholay the quintessential Bollywood movie? In the film’s climax scene, one police officer stops Thakur from killing Gabbar with his feet. This was Thakur’s revenge as his hands were earlier chopped off by Gabbar. But at this point, the officer reminds Thakur that being an ex-policemen himself, he should know that one should not take the law into his own hands and allow due process. With Thakur’s sense restored, the movie ends with the police taking Gabbar into custody. Now the question remains as to why I’m telling you about a cult movie half a century later? Well, that’s because this particular ending was a product of the censor board and not what the director had intended.

This movie was due to be released during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency era and the officials argued that, Thakur taking his revenge by killing Gabbar was too violent. Even though the director pleaded with them to let Thakur have his way since the entire movie was about retribution, it did not make any difference. In the end, the Director had to follow the board’s orders. Like others before him had done.

Now this scenario is all too familiar to an artist. Or to any citizen that takes a contrarian stand. There are always two choices. Either toe the line or be relegated to obscurity. What if there is a middle ground between these two extremes? Only make enough changes to stay under the radar and still be able to keep your conscience intact. But then your work is nothing more than a hotchpotch of personal & majoritarian propaganda. Like what the director did. Is there any shame in doing so? No. Is this wrong? I don’t know. It’s upon the individual to decide. But I’ll tell you this. Being afraid doesn’t make one necessarily a coward. It sometimes buys time to prepare for the next confrontation.

This is highly variable depending upon the context. Both in bans and in resistance to them. Consider the recent case of the Jharkhand govt banning a book by Hansda Shekhar after it had been in publication for more than two years. The book, a collection of short stories on the lives of adivasis (tribals) of the state was critically acclaimed in literary circles. But it was still taken out of publication. This is surprising for two reasons. Firstly, the writer belonged to the community about which he wrote. The stories were an insider’s view of the lives of people cutoff from the mainstream consciousness. Thus, the argument of the government and certain adivasi groups that it was an incorrect portrayal of the community is untenable. Secondly when the book was initially published, there was no furore about its content from either the adivasis or the government. It is no wonder then that certain expressions are banned not because of their content but also about how the the content could be manipulated to gain a political advantage.

Forget about the actual content. Many a time when vested interests perceive or claim to perceive a threat to their ideological position in a piece of art, the train to ban-istan picks up speed. One must remember how Salman Rushdie was hounded out of the country because the Muslim fundamentalists’ thought that the book, Satanic Verses, was heretical. However, this is not exclusive to one religion either. In recent times, Hindutva groups rallied against the screening of the movie ‘Padmaavat’ as they believed it incorrectly portrayed a historical figure.

These were instances of one community expressing outrage over artists who belonged to the same community but challenged the conventional notions through their art. What happens when an artist takes a liberal approach in his depictions of a group different than his own. You get a M. F Husain. In February 2006, Husain was charged with “hurting sentiments of people” because of his nude portraits of Hindu gods and goddesses. After of hundreds of lawsuits and allegedly, death threats from the right-wing groups, emigrated to Qatar. Some question his secular beliefs. Why didn’t he paint Mohammad & other Islamic figures in the nude? Would he have suffered the same fate as the cartoonists at the French magazine, Charlie Hebdo? They were murdered by Muslim zealots when they published controversial Mohammed cartoons in 2015.

Even the supposedly tolerant and secular West has had instances of religious extremism. For example, in October 22, 1988, an integrist Catholic group set fire to a theater in Paris while it was showed the controversial film, The Last Temptation of Christ. However in recent times, such instances are nearly non-existent. Perhaps there is a correlation between better access to education, higher income levels and increased tolerance. Adjusted for levels of development, there is no qualitative difference between the West of the past and India of the present in using blasphemy laws to suppress freedom of expression.

In India, written works are banned not only for religious considerations but also to protect personal reputations of those with power and for commercial considerations. In May 2018, the Delhi High Court reinstated a ban on the publication of a book titled ‘Godman to Tycoon: The Untold Story of Baba Ramdev.’ Ramdev had alleged that the book, was “extremely defamatory”, and “infringed his right to privacy”.

Censorship exists in independent India because of two reasons: Firstly, the design of Indian legal system is such that, it is easy and cheap for censorship to thrive. And like in the above mentioned case of Baba Ramdev’ biography, the judicial commitment to free speech is at best, questionable. The perfect blend of these two elements ensure that, writers, publishers and artists are constantly engaged in defending themselves from threats of censorship instead of pursuing their interests.

One thing is clear. Censorship in India is non-partisan. While Congress has been criticized for using it for minority appeasement, the BJP, while in power, does it to promote majoritarian values. Even regional parties are prone to misusing these powers.

But how does the government/judiciary derive powers to curtail freedom? From four sections distributed over three different pieces of legislation.

  1. The Constitution itself: Though the Article 19 of the Constitution provides for a fundamental right of expression that’s guaranteed by the Supreme Court, it is still restricted in favour of public order, decency or morality, defamation or incitement to an offence etc.
  2. The section 95 of Code of Criminal Procedure (1973): It allows the Indian govt. to ban publications without having to prove it in a court of law. According to this section, if a piece of work ‘appears’ to the govt to have violated any law, it can be banned.
  3. The section 295A of the Indian Penal Code (1860): A colonial creation, it was enacted to prevent hate speech that insults or attempts to even insult the religious beliefs of any class of citizen with deliberate and malicious intention to outrage their religious feelings. But the main stated purpose of this law has been to maintain “public order in a multi-religious and religiously sensitive society.”
  4. Sections 124A of the Indian Penal Code (1860): Popularly known as the sedition clause, it allows the government to imprison anyone who ‘excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the Government established by law in India.’ The imprisonment can extend from three years to life.

One common thread among all the above instruments is that, they are all vague. Vagueness is the handmaid of tyranny. When clear-cut definitions aren’t provided, wildly contradictory interpretations can be made. Anything can be construed to be a threat to public order. This gives wide latitude for those in power to stifle dissent and suppress criticism. Thus, any expression can be construed as acceptable or profane everyday depending on the party or leaders in power.


Indians, since the very beginning, have loved to speak their mind. Or in any case, someone else’s mind. Argumentation comes very naturally to us. In the medieval times, a philosopher was not considered to be competent unless he had traversed the length and breadth of the country and engaged in dialectic with scholars of different schools of thought. Such appreciation for open discussion & debate was not reserved only for the elite few. Amartya Sen notes that, even the everyday easy-going people loved a good dialogue. Such intellectual types we were!

As we go further back to around the time when the foundations of Indian culture, society and economics were being laid, sometime around the 6th century BC, we find great thinkers engaging & contradicting each other even on the the basic fundamentals. While Buddha rebelled against Upanishadic Brahmanism with full force, Mahavira accepted and rejected parts of both. Carvaka ridiculed the singular focus of philosophers on moksha, soul and God. Even in the orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy, the philosophers differed profoundly. While Samkhya school is atheist, Nyaya school is theist.

No idea was sacred. There was no place for dogma. Every assumption was put under scrutiny. Even the trivial matters. Free speech was answered by free speech, not by suppression. Even supposedly ‘dangerous’ ideas were not quelled into oblivion by physical force. All battles were fought with the sword of reason and mind you, not all swords are created equal. The not-so-sharp ones inadvertently lose out. However, it was all not rosy. Instances like Pushyamitra Shunga, a Brahmin king ordering the massacre of Buddhist monks, are all too common in India’s chequered record with protecting freedom of expression.


Power & dissent have a complex relationship with each other. Without dissent, those in power become complacent and die a slow, painful death. They need to keep things interesting & charged to justify their lordship. On the other hand, dissidents need the iron hand of authority to justify their rebellion. If the self-righteous underdog, David has to be heralded as the saviour of the masses, then we need a Goliath, a giant blinded by his arrogance. And unlike in the fictional story where the story ends with David overpowering Goliath, in politics, the battle continues with the players switching places. Again and again. As Alphonso Karr famously said, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The question arises if every piece of art or writing is political. Aren’t there expressions that are made only for aesthetic purposes? It’s commonly assumed that not everyone is hungry for power. Some people just want to dwell in the realm of ideas with no ulterior motives. It’s probable that this is true. But it should be noted that, neither ideas nor people exist in a vacuum. Ideas and expressions are inherently suggestive. That is, they have the ability to influence actions of people. Everyone influences and is, in turn, influenced by everyone else. Ideas are also not static. They are volatile and highly unpredictable in how they take shape and develop across space and time. Hence, the need to suppress them early on.

Every ideology is incomplete. Thus, distribution of power it advocates among individuals and groups in a society creates both support and opposition. This plays out in the intellectual arena. Thus, the thousands of -isms like liberalism, conservatism, feminism, post-modernism, Naxalism, Communism etc., are engaged in a war of ideological superiority.

Is one idea better than other? Depends on who you ask. But the vein of hypocrisy runs very deep among them all. That’s the human condition. While liberals support an extreme form of freedom of expression, they see no wrong in filing an online petition against Netflix. They wanted the media giant to take down a newly-released series because it hurt their sentiments. The other side is no saint either. The cry of ‘democracy in danger’ or ‘totalitarianism’ or ‘dictatorship’ are thrown around as per convenience.

Also, repression of free speech takes place not only through official or legal means like putting activists in jail or banning books. It’s more covert than that. For social beings like us, how we are perceived by others and how we perceive ourselves shapes our identity. This is an inescapable fact of existence. We are a bundle of labels put together. By demonizing certain ideas and vilifying certain positions through news and social media, a self-fulfilling prophecy is created. Less and less people will take up the contrarian stand and thus, even lesser people be exposed to it. Eventually, the ‘different’ ideas are reduced to obscurity without any use of force. And we will never know if all ideas are created equal and if they get an equal chance of fighting. This game of ‘free speech’ then becomes the linguistic or intellectual equivalent of Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest.’


In one of Western canon's monumental work, On liberty, JS Mill discusses the historical “struggle between authority and liberty.” He provides four cardinal reasons to why opinions ought never to be suppressed. The first two, in his own words, are:

First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.

There can never be absolute freedom of expression for the simple reason that, we are all human beings affected by confirmation bias in equal measure. And partial freedom is no freedom at all. The gap between the ideal and actual will always be exploited by someone who can and the game of cat and mouse will continue. Forever.

Akshay Surana

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