Above All Liberties, Give me Liberty to Speak Freely

P. Murugan Author of Tamil Novel
Mathorubhagan

“Perumal Murugan, the writer is dead. As he is no God, he is not going to resurrect himself. He also has no faith in rebirth. An ordinary teacher, he will live as P. Murugan. Leave him alone,” posted Perumal Murugan, the author of Tamil novel “Mathorubhagan” on his social media page. Book burnings and intimidation by caste groups have led the author to quit writing altogether. The protesters went crimson over the author weaving an ancient ritual of consensual sex between any man and woman during the Vaikasi Visakam car festival with the novel’s protagonists Kali and Poona’s attempt to conceive a child. This attempt by the couple to seek a child outside their marriage has been deemed derogatory by the Gounder community towards their womenfolk and the local temple deity, even though such rituals are part of the Temple’s oral history.

Freedom of expression has been a contentious issue since time immemorial; its genesis intricately linked with that of democracy in ancient Greece. Athenian democrats like Pericles d

efined freedom of expression as the feature which distinguished Athens from Sparta, much on the lines of what would distinguish United States and North Korea today. Yet, it was the same Athens where Socrates was ordered to consume poison for encouraging the youth to question authority.

Galileo's Trial after confirming Copernican
Heliocentrism

If anything, the fight for free speech has been long and tortuous. Throughout recorded history, the ruling powers have sought to control opinion and dissent, by way of restricting freedom of expression. In De revolutionibis orbium coelestium, Copernicus hypothesized that the Earth revolved around the Sun, thus questioning Church’s geocentric view. In an age where holding a view contrapuntal to that of the Church was proscribed, Galileo’s confirmation of Copernican heliocentrism was sufficient for the Pope to try him for heresy.

Yet another case that is symptomatic of the struggle to control opinion is the Church’s opposition to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. On the Origin of Species put man on the same page as apes, striping man of his dominant role among all species. England’s highest ranking church official, Henry Cardinal Manning, criticized Darwin’s views as “a brutal philosophy – to wit, there is no God, and the ape is our Adam.” Theological seminaries were rattled when they were forced to reconcile God’s beneficence in a world that was built on survival of the fittest!

Free speech is a tool that ensures mankind doesn’t stray from the path of progress. Science, like art takes human thought to new frontiers; central to this process is the freedom to debate, argue and refine these thoughts. Had Copernicus, Galileo or Darwin kept their views to themselves, we would still have been living in the age of unreason.

However, the context of debate around freedom of expression has changed today. Unlike the past, when monarchs and religious institutions clamped down on dissent with brutal force, today constitutional guarantees safeguard individual rights.  Every time the state infringes upon a citizen’s rights, the courts are quick to move in and restore constitutional liberties. The landmark Supreme Court judgment in the Kesavananda Bharati vs. Union of India case curtailed the parliament’s legislative powers to matters that fell outside “the basic structure or essential features of the Constitution.” Were Parliament allowed unfettered power to amend the constitution, political expediency would have turned the document into an insignificant piece of paper. Freedom of expression thus has become non negotiable today.

State vs. Citizen battles have been long fought and won, and indeed will continue to be won as the example above illustrates. However, a worrying trend emerges when the state has to adjudicate between film makers, writers, painters and those who claim to be offended by the former’s exercise of free expression. In this context, the debate over freedom of expression becomes a matter of subjective judgment. If the portrayal of Lord Shiva in the film PK is offensive to some and acceptable to others, then who decides whether it should be banned or not? What authority does a judge have on matters of creative expression? It is important to note that law provides an objective framework to deals with matters of state transgression into individual rights. But when freedom of expression becomes a point of contention between different sections of the society, there exist no framework within which value judgments can be passed by the state without them being questioned by the contesting parties.

Sulman Rushdie with his controversial
book The Satanic Verses

In the case of Sulman Rushdie’s controversial book The Satanic Verses, the British and the Indian governments reacted in contrasting ways. The Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi banned the book within days of its release, giving in to pressure from clerics and politicians representing the Muslim Right.  The British government despite the explosion of bombs and general threats to anyone associated with the book did not succumb to any form of terror and threats. The then Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe best summarized the government’s position: “The British government, the British people, do not have any affection for the book…It compares Britain with Hitler’s Germany. We do not like that anymore than the people of the Muslim faith like the attacks on their faith contained in the book. So we are not sponsoring the book. What we are sponsoring is the right of the people to speak freely, to publish freely.” The problem with governments passing value judgments is that there is bound to be a set of people which will agree and another which will disagree with the government’s position. Who then is right?

Voltaire on freedom of expression

The debate is incomplete without analyzing the consequence of state action in restricting freedom of expression. When the state allows curtailment of free expression, the demands for curbing it grow even louder and sometimes for reasons that can be at best called devious. For instance, in case of The Satanic Verses, it is believed that Iran’s fatwa against Rushdie was inspired less by theological interpretation of the book but more by a power struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia to become champion of global Islam. Back home, it is surprising to know that protests against Perumal Murugan’s book started only 4 years after it was first published in 2010. Media reports from Tamil Nadu suggest that these protests will help the Hindu Right make inroads in the southern state. Eventually the whole business of banning books becomes a recursive cycle; if you ban one book there will be demands to ban ten others. Can a government allow Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternate History if it banned Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses?  What reasons will pacify those who start seeing the debate through a communal angle?

However, in balance, I may add that till now we have discussed freedom of expression in cases where exercise of the right enticed a violent reaction from those hurt, be it the clerics in Rushdie’s case or the caste groups in Murugan’s. The most recent being the attack on French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo by terrorists offended by the weekly’s cartoon of Muhammad. In an editorial in The Hindu, Devdutt Pattanaik argues that such physical violence is reprehensible, but goes on to question the emotional violence that the cartoons may have caused to practitioners of Islam. The emotional violence that the cartoons may have caused cannot be measured, but the physical violence of the attackers can be. Therefore, do we condemn the actions of the killers but say nothing about the emotional violence caused by the cartoonists?

Unfortunately, the very nature of the debate leaves us in a moral quandary. In the absence of a middle path, we are forced to choose between Objective and Subjective, between All or Nothing. The answers apparently are not only unknown but also unknowable. In situations like these we cling to faith and for now I would repose mine in British libertarian John Milton’s words, “Above all liberties, give me liberty to know, to utter, and argue freely according to conscience.”