Opinion Freedom,for the privileged

The past few weeks have seen an enormous amount of commentary on the state of free speech in India. The predominant view,for obvious reasons,seems to be that free speech is in a bad state. Cynical politicians,cowardly organisers,barbaric religious fundamentalists and other enemies of free speech have conspired to run a cherished freedom into the ground. On the face of it,there is nothing to deny,and much less to defend. Rushdie has suffered. Nasreen has suffered. M.F. Husain suffered. Presumably,Facebook and Google’s executives might also be suffering.

But I wonder if India really suffers from a lack of freedom on the scale that it has been made out to be. Literary festivals are booming. Media commentary is booming. Universities are teaching more viewpoints presumably than anything we heard in college even a couple of decades ago. The books of authors who denounce India as a near-fascist,totalitarian state are sold and read freely. Activists with deep grievances against India’s government (if not its existence altogether) are seen and heard at public forums. Authors are given visas,welcomed,granted places of honour at literary festivals; festivals that often take place mainly because of the support they have from that bête noire of freedom,the Indian government.

The problem,frankly,is not that India lacks free speech,but that we have failed to notice the growing disconnect between speech and reality. This is not to suggest that free speech must be tempered by a recognition of India’s practical considerations,its religious hordes and masses or its cynical politicians. It is not about that sort of concession to practicality at all. It is simply the fact that we are living in an age when all sorts of wild promises about communication and its new technologies have become sacred cows. Even before there were Facebook and Twitter revolutions,the French scholar Armand Mattelart wrote about the shift in Western societies from an ideology of progress to an ideology,or mythology,even,of communication. Like salvation in ancient times,or development in the last century,communication and its avatars like free speech have become an exalted goal in itself. We have stopped considering that speech is often about something,and that it has consequences. We do not seem to worry any more whether words carry responsibility to reality,to nature,to ourselves and to others.

And unlike the Internet,television studios and heady literary and academic jamborees,most of the world lives in a place where the consequences of communication cannot be escaped. It may be the case that the mobs that call for the banning of books may have never read them,but the obvious class overtones of those who take the side of free speech,and those on the side of religious offence,are quite obvious. It was clear in Jaipur,and it is clear in almost every incident where the genteel middle-class world of books and authors appears in stark contrast to that of everyone else.

It has become too easy,and convenient,for us to overlook the economic disparities that underlie the free speech and religion debates. We have privileged writers and academics and activists on one side,and the real,raw,poor ethnics on the other. When it suits us,we claim to speak for them,to represent them,and to empower them. When their religiosity shows in ways that are inconvenient to our expectations of them,and it does,we deny it,and them,in all sorts of ingenious ways. We like the poor except when they seem to occasionally get their way against our self-proclaimed right to make fun of their gods,or whatever gives their life meaning and value. We would never admit it though,because we believe we are not against them. We think we are just against the intolerance,the fundamentalism,that sometimes co-opts them. We think that gives us not just the right to speak,but something called the right to offend.

Without a reality check,it seems to me that free speech runs the risk of becoming to those of us of the global,liberal,cosmopolitan,intellectual class,something quite similar to what we think religion has become to the rest of the world.

Vamsee Juluri is an author and professor at the University of San Francisco,US,express@expressindia.com