Later, this amendment was used by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi during the Emergency in 1975 to cripple the freedom of the press. Few periods in India’s history can ever be as dark as the years of Emergency, and its abject disrespect for our freedom of expression.
The trend continued. The Congress government under Rajiv Gandhi was quick to ban Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses even before Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against it in Iran.10
The Hindutva extremists have been notorious in this regard too—in 2006, M.F. Husain was forced into exile by a series of court cases filed against him by them.11 Ultimately, the greatest Indian artist of our times relinquished his Indian citizenship to become a citizen of Qatar.
The eastern part of India has suffered the same fate. The Communist government in West Bengal banned Taslima Nasrin’s novel Dwikhondito in 2003. In the south, politicians J. Jayalalithaa and M. Karunanidhi did not protect the novelist Perumal Murugan when he was coerced in 2014 by a group of caste vigilantes in Tamil Nadu to stop writing.12
In India, the worlds of Bollywood and the press enjoy the same legal status and rights as far as constitutional freedom related to the expression of ideas is concerned. This is contrary to, say, the United States, where a 1915 Supreme Court decision established that the legal status of cinema was not a part of the press of the country or an organ of public opinion. Films in the United States are, therefore, not protected by the US constitutional guarantee to free speech, as is the case in India. Yet, Indian films have been far more liable than American ones to prior censorship. In the United States and also in the United Kingdom, an independent film classification body made up of industry committees with little official government status decides movie ratings. In India, however, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) is a government body, which, for the past seven decades now—no matter which political party has been in power—has been known to cut up movies or ban them.13
Just a few of the many examples of this: the plot of Aandhi (1975) seemed to be loosely based on the life of Indira Gandhi, and the film was banned when the Congress government, led by Indira Gandhi, was in power.14 In the recent documentary Argumentative Indian (2017), based on conversations with Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, the CBFC asked for four words or phrases—‘cow’, ‘Gujarat’, ‘Hindutva view of India’ and ‘Hindu India’—to be bleeped out.15 The reasons for film censorship in India—ranging from being prudish to obtusely ideological—can be astounding.
Successive governments in India have sought to restrict freedom of expression in varying degrees. The Modi government reimagines India as an ancient territory having a homogeneous Hindutva identity. This specific form of nationalism was, as I have mentioned earlier in this book,16 posited by pro-Independence activist Savarkar in the early years of the twentieth century, developed further in free India, and often used to deal with dissenting voices.
For instance, in February 2016, Kanhaiya Kumar, the former president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union was arrested by the Delhi Police and charged with sedition for allegedly raising anti-national slogans in a student rally. The rally was actually organized to protest the 2013 hanging of Mohammed Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri separatist convicted for the 2001 Indian Parliament attack. Elsewhere, the state government of Uttar Pradesh set up ‘anti-Romeo’ squads in 2017 to keep a check on any public display of affection.
In the World Press Freedom Index, India has consistently been ranked abysmally low. In the first year of the publication of the index in 2002, India was placed at eighty out of 139 countries. Since then, its performance seems to have only worsened. India’s latest move in 2017 has been a slide to three ranks lower from the previous year, to be placed at 136 out of 180 countries.17
Ramachandra Guha, in his book Democrats and Dissenters, deplores the loss of the freedom to express ourselves in India. He points to the rise of identity politics and the ease with which any group of people can complain that its sentiments have been hurt or offended by a statement or product. Guha writes that freedom of expression is threatened also by the disinterest of politicians—no major or minor Indian politician or political party has ever supported writers, artists or film-makers against thugs and bigots.18
I believe that one of the greatest threats to our right to speak freely is our tendency to be subservient to any authority that asks us to compromise on our freedom. We are prone to believing that doing so is necessary for us to transform from our supposedly ‘barbaric’ selves to more ‘civilized’ beings. In the face of authority, we do not trust our own selves and let go of our sense of judgement.
Why do we do so? Perhaps because centuries of colonial rule have made us guilty about expressing joy, anger, sorrow, desire—we had been told by our colonial rulers that it was ‘barbaric’ for us to do so. When the Europeans came to India, they brought with them their need for order. We were asked to cover up our bodies (like wearing a blouse under our sari to cover our naked breasts) as well as our emotions. Their rationale was the same as our politicians’ today—freedom of thought and expression makes a public hard to control.
But the foundation of India has been the freedom to express even dissenting voices. Kautilya opposed the Nandas of Magadh when the latter were complacent in the face of Alexander’s invasions. The mutinous soldiers of Barrackpore and
