By M D Nalapat
The
control through intimidation of what is said and written is not the
monopoly of any particular party, but has infected most of them.
Gauri
Lankesh was a woman of enormous courage and a certain daredevil
attitude, and this is probably the trait that aided those who took away
her life. A more cautious individual would have sought—and insisted—on
being provided protection against the many who daily poured vitriol at
her. Not that she was alone in getting such attention. There are dozens
of journalists and writers who have received threats as ugly as those
directed at Ms Lankesh. In just a single case, the individual concerned
began getting telephone calls and SMSs mentioning where his daughter or
wife was at the time the particular call was being made, and explicitly
being told that their lives would be cut short, were he to continue to
write what such callers described as “lying filth”. Needless to say, his
writings have become way more anodyne and a lot less padded with
sensational facts after that series of calls was made. His
understandable explanation is that he has no right to subject his family
to the risk of being killed just so that he continues to enjoy the
luxury of writing or saying in public what he pleases. Rather than
freedom of speech, what he has been experiencing may be described as
“feardom of speech”. Such control through intimidation of what is said
and written is not the monopoly of any particular party, but has
infected most of them. In the immediate aftermath of the killing of
Gauri Lankesh, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi held the BJP guilty
of the crime. Either Rahul is talking through his Gandhi topi, or he has
facts about the case that he is concealing from not only the public but
the investigating authorities. The Congress heir apparent’s continuing
silence as to the evidence on which he has based his sensation
allegation of the BJP’s culpability is being interpreted by the
overwhelming majority even of traditional Congress voters as evidence
that he has no evidence.
The shooting to death of Gauri Lankesh
should not be viewed as an isolated act, but part of the dismaying
reality that freedom of speech, although mentioned as a right in the
Constitution of India, remains distant in practice. Some of the most
smelly colonial-style legislation came about during the decade when
Manmohan Singh was Prime Minister. Aided by a BJP Parliamentary Party
that seemed during that decade to specialise in spending more time in
walkouts over a miscellany of issues, the UPA passed laws that would
have pleased Winston Churchill and other racists, who believed that the
birthright of the Indian was slavery to the government and not control
over his or her own destiny. Assisted by a plenitude of laws, it has
become child’s play to fling a citizen into the criminal justice system,
a construct where hundreds of thousands remain in jail, sometimes for
more than a decade, without a single court having found them guilty of
any crime. In other major democracies, people are sent to jail only
after being found guilty by a jury of their peers. In those countries
where the justice system regards imprisonment as the exception rather
than the rule, those convicted are given notice of a month, and
sometimes more, to put their house in order before going off to prison.
In India, they are taken away a few minutes after the judge pronounces
sentence. Very often, those convicted come to court to hear the verdict
from the jail they are in as under-trials. The power to reform India’s
colonial-era justice system vests with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and
Chief Justice Dipak Misra. Should either or both decide to re-format the
justice system so that the bar gets raised substantially for taking
away the liberty of a citizen, including for issues involving freedom of
expression, a significant step forward would have been traversed in the
reconfiguration of India into more of a 21st century construct.
Why is freedom of speech so important,
and conversely, why is “feardom of speech” so harmful to the future of
our country? Because of the impact of either on the Knowledge Economy,
the success of which hinges on a culture permissive of ideas that
mainstream opinion may disagree with. Apart from the regulatory system,
which is still a mass of weeds choking initiative and activity, another
difficulty faced by the knowledge sector in India is that
Chidambaram-Sibal creation, the Information Technology Act. Bureaucracy
everywhere lusts for power over citizens, and once this is given in the
form of measures that make it mandatory to get permissions serially from
miscellaneous authorities, dilution of such control systems gets
resisted by the civil service. This band remains as convinced as the
British were that the natives of India are a collection of potential
hooligans, needing constant chastisement and supervision. Before her
death, Gauri Lankesh had been harassed multiple times through use of the
anachronistic laws of defamation so tenderly preserved in India.
Admirers of Narendra Modi anticipate that he will brave the fury of the
bureaucracy and take an axe to the jungle of unproductive (save for
bribe generation) laws and prohibitions that keep India at the bottom of
the international ladder on the ease of doing business. Until “What You
Know” becomes more important in the success of a business than “Who You
Know”, India will continue to be denied the double digit growth it
needs to stave off a future societal catastrophe. At the root of the
many ugly manifestations of anger that are shown on television screens
are tens of millions of the young who lack work that is productive for
the country. It is they whose interests need to be tended, not fund
managers based in London, New York, Dubai, Singapore, Zurich and
Frankfurt, who collectively promote government policies that cause mass
misery, so that they increase their own wealth at the expense of ours.
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