Current Affairs: Why do we have conflicts in Freedom of Expression in India

In the last few decades, India has witnessed a great surge in the number of conflicts related to Freedom of Expression. Its not very surprising in a society that has in such massive transition since 300 years. Modernity proposes to perform fixing surgeries on the traditional India. The tradition opposes and strives to withstand such efforts. The traditional India seeks opportunity to negotiate the western modern through its own theories of change. But the latter through its hegemonic power obtained from the colonial era is interested in nothing short of bulldozing. The tradition then draws itself inwards within a shell and suspends its own creative and dynamic elements in order to protect itself - often in contradiction to its own past. Most of these conflicts have a typical template - which can illustrated by the following sequence of events.

1. An artist creates a piece of art or is on the verge of its creation

2. It either offends a community or is perceived to be offensive to the community

3. The aggrieved community more often than not reaches out to the artist and the latter takes shelter under the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression. Negotiations are summarily rejected.

4. This invariably frustrates the aggrieved community which looses no time to escalate either by resorting to threat and violence or by knocking on the doors of the courts depending upon the background of the aggrieved and potential of its politics. Over a period of time, the aggrieved community learns to resort to aggression to begin with as that is more effective and is perceived as the only way out. The saner elements pave way to the hot headed.

5. The artist looks upto the government for protection. In a number cases, the need of the electoral politics force governments to remain silent and expects (at times nudges) the artist to negotiate.

6. Liberals lose no time to seize the opportunity and indulge in outrage at the loss of constitutional morality. Artists bemoan the loss of freedom of expression. Academicians/Experts/Historians historians jump to their support by theorising and by making an absurd attempt to highlight that the protests have no meaning since there exists an alternate fact of history as argued by them. Nobody cares to verify these facts.

7. All this is meant to draw the attention of the larger society to a grave situation but ironically society (except the aggrieved community) looks the other way as though the whole matter is not of any concern to it.

8. Eventually the artist comes to the negotiating table or withdraws to an extreme

9. Governments facilitate this through some backdoor negotiations

10. Media emerges victorious milking the situation financially

With a few twists, turns and repetitions, and varying degrees of intensity most incidents will more or less fit into this framework including the ongoing Queen Padmavathy and Karni Sena controversy. Its worth exploring why this happens in India.

It is important to note that this is a colonial and post-colonial phenomenon in India. Recorded history does not have evidence of society indulging in such outrage. Given that India was organized into communities and every community was free to build its own mythology, interpretations, narrative - India successfully passed on multiple and conflicting narratives down the generations. The myriad conflicting narratives were never conflicted with each other because communities were not interested in universalizing or imposing their narratives on the other conflicting side or indeed desperate to resolve it one way or the other. Neither did we have any medium - such as cinema today - which through its massive/powerful reach had the capability to universalize or homogenize one particular version. Even when it conflicted, society could resolve the contradictions without getting into extreme confrontations when it came to expression while on other material aspects communities did confront each other. The absence of a threat of one narrative eating the other resulted in mature responses and a natural protection of the freedom of expression.

However, this equilibrium has been completely destroyed in the modern world. The colonial project deliberately misrepresented or wore a lens that misrepresented huge parts of the traditions, philosophies of India. It created a version of history that was absolutely unacceptable to the Indian society. Worse, it created history, historians, academicians, disciplines and methodologies that were perceived by the Indian society as ingredients of a gigantic Distortion Machinery. Even more disgusting was that, until recently this entire ecosystem of Distortion refused to negotiate with the Indian society and its concerns. Gulping the ideology that Indian society is backward and needs to be FIXED, and armed with instruments of far reaching change this Distortion Machinery went on a rampage and buldozed all creative aspects of Indian tradition to establish its own. With every act it ended up pushing the Indian society into a cultural insecurity. With hegemony established - the Distortion Machinery started ignoring narratives that did not suit their versions and sought to discredit those versions or the methodologies. Over a period of this Distortion Machinery slowly transformed itself into Politics with a political objective to be achieved.

The net result is that the traditional communities of India took it upon themselves to protect their narratives. At times - as Mr. Batra has demonstrated - the Court itself came to its support. The Constitution which disallows religious sentiments being hurt through the freedom of expression came in handy. The hypocritical Distortion Machinery has grown in total oblivion of the Constitution - an institution which it had no qualms in invoking whenever the minority sentiments are allegedly hurt. At other times, the communities themselves chose to resort to extra constitutional measures. Where does this strength come to them to indulge in extra constitutional measures, your honour!

A significant part of that blame lies on those who pretend to celebrate the notion of freedom of expression. Time and again in the last 70 years, the liberals (liberatti/liberazzi is how I would like to call them for they are not worthy of being called liberals), artists, academicians have been partisan in the way they invoked it. This elite group has indulged in hypocrisy and brazen duplicity. It assumed upon itself a distorted version of minority protection - it misunderstood that by protecting the image of Aurangzeb or Tipu Sultan amounts to protecting the interest of minority. Innumerable number of instances can be given over the decade. It even went to the extent of manipulation. For instance - it first argued that there was no Ram Temple in the site of Babri Masjid and ate a humble pie in the Court because of Archeological excavation. The Nation deserved an apology instead it continues to overindulge in itself.

The society is then fed-up. In India, communities have always put harmony and practical considerations above freedom of expression. The Indian communities value freedom of expression but never consider it as an absolute value. Its a value in subordination. Of course, the constitution provides for reasonable restrictions to freedom of expression and even defines the latter. But the society goes beyond. Society expects the freedom of expression to be creative, harmonious and negotiated. Thus freedom of expression - like all other values and principles - is subject to scrutiny and arguments. So, beyond a certain point FoE needs to be earned on the ground through the rigour  of questioning. The Indian Society is not comfortable seeking constitutional protection all the times and as a first resort. If freedom of expression needs constitutional protection at all the time, the Indian society disdains such a version of it.

This is where the Bhansali Team lost it. It had all the opportunity to demonstrate to the Karni Sena that there was nothing in the movie that might hurt them. The Karni Sen had reached out to Bhansali months ago when there was no conflict. Instead it chose to ignore them probably under the confidence that Constitution will protect them. While Bhansali and team have every right to invoke the constitution, it had to respect the fact that it was touching upon a subject that was close to the heart of a community which derived its moral and social courage from Queen Padmavathy. One would be compelled to agree that such a faith/demotion deserves some respect. At the least it does not call for a contemptuous dismissal that the team initially demonstrated. What made it worse was a casual lazy comment from a lead actor of the movie which further raised the suspicion of the concerned community.

If it were this much the team would have probably realized its folly and negotiated a quick settlement with the community. However, the liberazzi/liberatti and media took over from here sensationalizing in its favour and making all negotiations nearing impossible. This machinery - which is nothing but the original Distortion Machinery - whose credibility is already at an abysmal low, made three different kinds of mistakes.

1. First it clubbed it along with all other similar incidents or situations of the present and past and dragged the governments and political parties that it loves to hate into the frame. In the process, the issue - which may have been solved in its isolation - was converted into a National Problem and brought in all associated and unassociated communities together. In the process, the issue assumed monumental proportions covering a range of population and hundreds of years of history. It contributed to an overall degradation of the entropy of the society.

2. It contemptuously looked down upon the concerns of the said community. It merely chose to remain behind the curtains of the freedom of expression, constitutional morality (rather than social morality), law etc., It demonstrated to the community that it cares a damn about their emotion and concern. It chose to discredit what a community considers close it its heart. That a community draws its energy from certain mythology was of no concern to this Distortion Machinery hiding behind Constitutional propriety but licking its fingers at an opportunity to destroy such a mythology.

3. Worse - it falsely thought that discrediting the mythology - by creating an alternate historical narrative - would be a great way of winning this battle. Thus, it chose to present versions of history denying and discrediting Padmavathy's glorious narrative. The single biggest mistake of this machinery has been this overzealousness. It smelt that victory was close through this methodology and overindulged itself in this hideous act. In the process it fell flat on its face in two ways. One it was negating its own celebration of alternate historical narrations which the machinery has put forward in order to defeat the Nationalist version of history. The responsibility of calling out this hypocrisy and great folly fell upon Pratap Bhanu Mehta who rightly admonished this vulgar lust to discredit an oral history clearly pointing out that the issue is not history but freedom of expression. Secondly, each time it tried to discredit the community's version of history it was well fought from the other side thereby proving the Distortion Machinery as a collection of cheats.

In the process, the Nationalist communities have already won the battle. 

That leaves us with the question - Where does all this leave the Freedom of Expression. I sincerely wish that Freedom of Expression continues to thrive in India. Lets go back to our ethics - the great repositories of ethical conflicts and their resolutions. In the ensemble of Bharata, when it went to prevail upon Lord Rama to return to Ayodhya, there was a Sage Jabali who uses absolute Charvaka methods to convince Rama to return. Such Charvaka arguments considered anathema to the Vedic Rama did not result in a humiliation of Sage Jabali. It merely resulted Rama refusing to accept the narrative. However, all concerned must realize that Freedom of Expression needs to be protected by the Freedom of Expression itself - when FoE is invoked recklessly to hurt the society, it causes a dent in the capacity of the society to absorb the shocks provided by the Freedom of Expression.

India has transitioned itself from a communitarian society into an amorphous society alongside a technology revolution that has resulted in an exponential avenues for expression. This transition is not complete. Every community needs equal opportunity to build its narratives and protect its narratives. Narrative building cannot become the hegemony of anybody. Academicians, Intellectuals if they are impartial, consistent, all inclusive with the right intention will  create a greater capacity for Freedom of Expression. We must learn to appreciate that Freedoms of Expression will result in Conflict and one must not outrage at it. As a society we must learn to indulge in these conflicts creatively give sufficient room and space for each other to negotiate and arrive at a reasonable settlement. We cannot be contemptuous of any concern. Constitutional protection must be the last resort and not the first resort. At the same time, if we indulge in duplicity and take different stance at different times we then run the risk of losing our moral right to seek protection. And in the process the innocent pay a huge price. In this case, Bhansali - if you ignore his initial mistakes - is probably a victim of over-indulgence on all sides.

None of this should seem like an attempt to whitewash the crimes of violent organizations. Acts of violence need to be dealt with as per law - strictly and firmly. They need to be condemned outright. We do not need this, we need a society, situation, security and harmony where Freedom of Expression can thrive. However, we cannot be under false impression that FoE can thrive in vacuum. It needs to be tilled every day. When every community, every opinion is equally heard and engaged with Freedom of Expression thrives. When hegemonies are established and narratives are forced to compete for official space, ugly situations emerge. Worse, when those who are supposed to be neutral take political positions, politicians tend to become worse. Situations get out of hand like the ongoing Queen Padmavathy controversy.

A sensible society mitigates such situations focusing on avoidance rather than painful resolution - where the use of the constitutional hammer will be few and minimum. That is the society that we must strive for. Intellectuals of a society must aspire for and lead us in this direction. Alas! - India seems to be drawing a huge blank there.