December 7, 2011

It's so easy to jump up and down shouting Free Speech! and to castigate anyone who doesn't as conservative and other bad things. My problem is that it's too easy—it's the way the uninformed manufacture instant opinions on every issue, as soon as they see the ticker. Or the way it's manufactured for them, and they don't even notice.

Kapil Sibal wanting to block internet sites which are "threatening, abusive, harassing, blasphemous, objectionable, defamatory... or otherwise unlawful in any manner whatever" is vague and constitutes a threat to the free speech it's supposed to preserve.

Omar Abdullah's exhortation to practicality is much more attractive (and so is he): "For me, this isn't an airy-fairy ideological issue, it's a real problem." Of course readers want to be understanding of the government's compulsions, and to act mature. Because, if you notice, it's the same sort of rhetoric parents use on kids who yearn to be all grown-up.

It's important to curb violence, and so incendiary sentiments (think Congress leaders in 1984), unlike expletives describing political leaders, are a problem. It's the classic face-off between paternalism and violence. Ideally, the State should stop this at the level of the violence itself, and not the speech. But the fact that we recognize reasonable limitations to free speech recognizes two things: one, that violence as an effect of speech cannot always be checked at the level of the violence itself, and second and more importantly, that speech itself can constitute an act of violence. Perhaps politicians focus on the first because the second is perceived as subjective and nebulous. Perhaps the second is more important because in India we have not arrived at any consensus in public discourse on what is free speech and what is incendiary. And when we are confused, or have arrived at another of those split-second decisions, we go burn a bus to get it all out.

To put all this into perspective: Anna Hazare finally has a point. He says that people get too worked up about symbolic violence, like slapping a minister, and too little about real violence, like farmer suicides. Or maybe more that it's powerful people being insulted versus powerless people getting hurt. Or maybe it's politics versus development. Point being, he says "Just one slap?" (killer line) and a bunch of NCP activists pour into his fiefdom and break stuff. But this Gandhi of the digital age has it all under control. He's got the incident recorded on CD, to be revealed "at an appropriate time". This is perhaps why his movement is eternally To be continued.