Free Speech is a very
difficult thing to understand, if you place restrictions or give the
discretionary powers to a few to determine what is free speech, they
will ruin it. Laws are made to go beyond the whimsical discretion of people in power.
This is my response to M. J. Akbar's op-ed in New York Times, I was
disappointed in him, as an intellectual, I expected him to defend free speech and JNU, but he compromised his interests and turned the issue into sedition. I feel
sorry for the loss of his freedom to express what is right, and instead, he
carefully pandered to the raw sentiments of those who are insecure and want to control
others. I guess that is what it takes to make it in the world for some.
A year ago on Fox News
show, Pamela Geller, Sean Hannity and I had a hell of an argument over free speech;
they wanted to ban Professor Ghannouchi’s speech at Yale University Campus
because he had made anti-American statements. I don't agree with Ghannouchi, but
as a society we cannot stop, and we cannot change the character of our nation
because of him, free speech is free speech and must be allowed. Indeed, I had
defended Pamela Geller's right to free speech in UK, where she was banned at
that time. We have to be consistent as much as we can.
Each one of us has our
own interests to protect, and as an institution that governs, no one in it
should have that discretion. Free speech is an inalienable right of individuals
- God gives that right, if it was not free, humans would not
have had the ability to dialogue.
As they say, Satyameva Jayate, the truth ultimately triumphs, indeed free speech ultimately triumphs. India has come a long way in becoming a democratic pluralist
culture, it is a learned behavior, and it can also learn to respect free
speech. Let no one be hindered from free speech. You have better counter
it with a better speech to put bad speech out of circulation that is the civil
thing to do.
As a Muslim I stand for free speech, this is precisely what those guys have
done to Islam in the past, they have robbed Muslims’ God given
right to free speech through Fatwa and excommunication threats. Of course, it is not just Muslims, the
Hindus, Christians, Jewish and other societies have tight rules to shut people up
through similar authoritative calls.
India will not disappear just because someone shouts it so, her people make
India, I urge the government not to feel threatened, let them do it. We should
instead take pride in our freedom, we are secure enough to allow diversity of
opinions, even if it sounds against the interest of the nation, and we are a
secure nation to give room for differences.
I am against such slogans; but I will stand up for the rights of those who have something to vent, every one should have the right to dissent. I think we are capable of handling the anti-India slogans, in the end;
after all they are our rebel children. If we don't consider them as our children, we need to grow up and develop the ability to deal
with them on an equal footing and not brute force.
Free speech, Zindabad!
Mike Ghouse for free speech
http://MikeGhouseforIndia.blogspot.com
# # #
Free Speech Ends Where Sedition Begins
NEW DELHI - Last month, a flyer entitled
"The Country Without a Post Office" was circulated on the campus of
Jawaharlal Nehru University (J.N.U.), here in Delhi, inviting students to a
"cultural evening" on Feb. 9.
But "cultural" was a misnomer,
and academic freedom would not be on the agenda. Some not-so-small print
further down the page called on participants to "rage" against the
Indian "occupation" of Muslim-majority Kashmir and protest the
"judicial killing of Afzal Guru and Maqbool Bhat."
Afzal Guru, who is also known as Muhammad
Afzal, and Mr. Bhat were both convicted terrorists, found guilty separately
after their cases slowly went up the ladder of due process, all the way to the
highest court in India. Mr. Bhat was hanged in 1984 for the murder of a police
inspector in Kashmir; Mr. Afzal was hanged in 2013 for his role in the 2001
attack on India’s Parliament. In both 1984 and 2013, the Congress Party was in
power.
The date chosen for the Feb. 9 event at
J.N.U. was the anniversary of Mr. Afzal’s execution. Upon learning of this, the
university authorities initially reacted by shrugging and looking away:
Students will be students. But a video made the night of the gathering soon
went viral, and it seemed to show shouting students and activists vowing to
break up India into small pieces. It ended with the calls, “Inshallah!
Inshallah!” “Allah Willing! Allah Willing!”
More footage of the protest soon appeared
online — followed by allegations that some of it had been tampered with. The
local Delhi government, which is headed by Arvind Kejriwal, a vitriolic critic
of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, sent seven videotapes to a laboratory for a
forensic probe. On Tuesday, India’s leading news agency, PTI, reported the
results: Two of the tapes had been doctored, five were authentic. (The Indian
Express reports that three had been manipulated.)
I saw one of the tapes deemed to be
authentic, and I heard those fever-pitch chants calling for India’s
dismemberment. And so to my mind the issue isn’t what was or was not said that
day; it is whether freedom of speech should be stretched to include the
adulation of terrorists and calls for the destruction of India, or if it ends
where sedition begins.
When free India’s first Constitution
became the law of the land in 1950, it included an article treating freedom of
speech and of expression as a basic right. The very first amendment to that
text, passed by the republic’s founding fathers in 1951, added “reasonable
restrictions” to the free-speech clause, partly in order to protect the
“security of the state.”
This happened while India’s prime minister
was Jawaharlal Nehru, a self-proclaimed socialist and a liberal icon, after
whom J.N.U. was named. In 1963, while Mr. Nehru was still prime minister,
Parliament passed another constitutional amendment clarifying that the security
of the state meant “the sovereignty and integrity of India.”
Mr. Nehru had good cause for caution.
During the volatile 1940s, during which India won its independence from
Britain, he saw how Islamism posed an existential challenge to the nation’s
unity, and Communism to its democracy. Pakistan was born in 1947, at the same
time as India, becoming the first Islamic republic of the postcolonial era. A
year after that, the Communist Party of India, instead of joining Mr. Nehru’s
efforts to build up the fledging Indian nation, declared its independence a
“fake” and began an armed struggle.
By 1951, that red revolution had mostly
died out, partly because of limited popular support and because Moscow, which
backed Indian Communists, was wary of alienating Mr. Nehru as the Cold War was
picking up. Yet some Communist sympathies continued to smolder. In 1962, when
India suffered a devastating defeat in a war against China, a powerful section
of Indian Communist leaders backed China. They were imprisoned, briefly, and in
1963, the Nehru administration clarified the scope of free-speech laws.
"As Mr. Nehru himself well
understood, freedom of speech is not a license to undermine the sovereignty and
integrity of India."Free speech...
SEE ALL COMMENTS
Within a few years, India’s Communists had
split three ways. Two parties joined the nationalist mainstream; the third,
which identified itself as Maoist, started a violent revolution to overthrow
the Indian government. Many of that group’s younger followers found sanctuary
at universities, knowing that by longstanding tradition, the police were loath
to enter campuses.
But as the violence grew more intense in
the 1970s and thousands of people died throughout eastern and northern India,
police forces began crossing university gates to arrest Maoist radicals. Then
in the 1980s the old specter of religion returned to haunt India: In Punjab,
demands for the creation of a separate Sikh state turned into a full-fledged
insurrection, which encouraged Muslim separatists in Kashmir to rise up as
well.
Many Indians today are still wary that
religious separatists and Maoist extremists continue to threaten India’s unity,
and that they have supporters among students. Some try to explain away such
activism by pointing to anti-Vietnam War protests at U.S. universities in the
1960s and 1970s. But to do this is to overlook the scars that terrorism’s long
and lacerating history in India has left on us here. Mr. Afzal, whose rights
the J.N.U. students were rising to defend, was involved in the 2001 terrorist
attack on India’s Parliament. I wonder how Americans, after 9/11, would react
to a “cultural evening” celebrating Osama bin Laden.
Some reactions to the J.N.U. protest were
ugly. A group of lawyers assaulted the students who came to court to face
charges of sedition. A videotape of a speech made by the most prominent J.N.U.
student leader reportedly was doctored in ways designed to incriminate him.
Such things are unacceptable.
But many Indians are livid about one thing
that is not in dispute: that some of that talk on Feb. 9 was aggressively
secessionist. As Mr. Nehru himself well understood, freedom of speech is not a
license to undermine the sovereignty and integrity of India.
M.J. Akbar is a member of India’s
Parliament from Jharkhand for the Bharatiya Janata Party, and the author, most
recently, of “Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan.”
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