The state recently arrested actor Chetan Kumar and sent him to judicial custody for 14 days before granting him bail for his tweets on Hindutva and threatening to revoke his foreign citizenship. file | Photo credit: The Hindu
heyn March 30, the Lahore High Court quashes the crime of ‘sedition’ In Pakistan Penal Code. Embarrassingly, around the same time in India, police in Delhi and Ahmedabad filed a series of complaints, and arrested several people, including owners of printing presses, for posting anti-government (and specifically, anti-Modi) posters . across town. The detainees were not charged with ‘sedition’ but were booked for criminal conspiracy to cause public mischief and damage to public property. The printing press is accused of violating some of its provisions The Press and Registration of Books Act, 1867.
A rose by any other name
The law that was repealed in Lahore is almost the same as in India section 124a, which seeks to criminalize words “inciting hatred or contempt, or disaffection” towards the government established by law. In India too, a challenge is pending before the Supreme Court. law hangs in the balance, although not formally killed. Nevertheless, the logic of the law of sedition, which demands respect for established views and those who espouse them, lives on. Pakistan has a flourishing practice of using blasphemy laws, usually applied to its poorest citizens. India, which is secular and does not criminalize blasphemy, is a closer approximation in “hurting feelings”. The state recently arrested actor Chetan Kumar and sent him to judicial custody for 14 days before granting him bail for his tweets on Hindutva and threatening to revoke his foreign citizenship. It appears that when constitutional courts are examining the validity of the law of sedition, its defining logic has already gone further and implanted itself in the many different provisions of law that criminalize speech. .
Editorial | frozen treason
socially, we’ve always understood insolence (Rude) Not so much in terms of the content of speech, but more in terms of who and to whom spoke. An older man could be railing at a sad teenager but insolence Happens when the teen answers back. In my old fashioned school in Patna, hitting back was one of the gravest sins. This understanding of indecent or offensive speech applies to all kinds of social relations in an equally hierarchical manner. It’s always a security guard, domestic worker, or street vendor in a gated apartment. Insolent, [A book called Dancing to the Precipice suggests that the French had recognised this understanding of badtameezi as being contributory to inequality of status. After the French Revolution, the more polite form of ‘you’, which is vous (aap) was proscribed. It became obligatory to use tu (tum), since it was believed that it would lead to more fraternity, and consequently to more equality.]
Of course, modernity and capitalism have long been envisioned as breaking down such hierarchies. we can imagine insolence truly thrive in our professionally operated TV studio. However I would argue that although this may be true in form, it is not true in substance (as is much of capitalism’s challenge to social hierarchy). In fact these debates reinforce social and political power.
The state (through its officials) has appointed for itself a station at the very top of the hierarchy of social positions. Thus, the lowest state functionary addresses the citizen in the most dominant voice, as if it were the natural order of things. In pointed encounters between civilian and state authority, who would ever imagine, or describe, commanding pushy colonial policemen as disruptive Insolent, Law and order issues arise only when the policeman is challenged – when the citizen harasses the policeman, or bangs on the barricades – but never in the policeman’s own arbitrary orders to the citizens.
In the present day, this association of power and its attendant etiquette (of generalisation, support) is extended more explicitly to political power and to all ideas that support such power. The application of law, unless controlled by constitutional courts, often tends to reflect these socio-political relations of power. It is now increasingly reflecting this.
The practice of prosecuting speech offenses borrows from the understanding that ‘abusive or disruptive speech’ originates from those who are either low in established social/political hierarchies, or outsiders to the ruling narrative of the time. As a result, crimes are mostly framed against those who challenge political or social power and its supporting narratives. Theoretically, anyone can be prosecuted for vandalizing public property, regardless of the content of the graffiti. In the event, the prosecution usually follows the logic of insolenceor treason, focusing mostly on content.
We have always had a problem with deeply rooted hierarchical relationships, most prominently in the form of caste. Our understanding of violence (and sexual violence) is mediated by this understanding. But for those hierarchies to be reflected in law now, in a way that makes speech prosecutable on the grounds that it is targeted, points to the tangled relationship between law and society. What else would explain the difference in political and legal perception of some statements as defamatory, while others make popular political meaning and persist: all terrorists are Muslims; All the beneficiaries of reservation are lazy. We often see prosecutors treat some speech as egregious and damaging to one’s reputation while tolerating other violent speech as innocuous. Of course, the courts do not always support the views of the prosecutors, and sometimes there is a power play.
The changing logic of treason
Supreme Court ruled in media one case, which addresses the sedition argument (and insolence, It quashed the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s decision not to renew the broadcasting license for the channel on the grounds that their programming was ‘anti-establishment’, and a threat to national security. The Court held that “the critical views of the channel, Media One, on the policies of the government cannot be termed as anti-authoritarian. The use of such terminology itself represents an expectation that the press should support the establishment”. The action of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in denying security clearance to a media channel on grounds of views with the channel is constitutionally entitled to produce a chilling effect on freedom of speech and freedom of the press in particular. And further, that “Restrictions on the freedom of the press compel the citizens to think with the same touch. A homogenous approach on issues ranging from socio-economic policy to political ideologies would pose a serious threat to democracy. The Court specifically decried the bungling manner in which the State uses ‘national security’ as a catch phrase to censor speech. “The state is using national security as a tool to deny citizens treatment that is due under law. It is not compatible with the rule of law […] We also believe that claims of national security cannot be made in the air.” The judgment speaks of the changing and re-arranged logic of the law of sedition. In this context, it is more important than scrapping section 124A. Only if it’s a persistent association, of course.
Shahrukh Alam practices at the Supreme Court of India