Letters to the editor: Undiscerning law

Lower courts have often been tardy in applying that test, even though higher courts have generally stood by serious authors and artists.

3 min readFeb 28, 2014 12:41 AM IST First published on: Feb 28, 2014 at 12:41 AM IST

Undiscerning law
Jyoti Punwani’s ‘For Doniger row, don’t blame the law’ (IE, February 26) misses the central point of the petition signed by 3,700 academics from all over the world asking Penguin India to continue its legal defence of Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History and appealing to lawmakers and jurists to consider strengthening the law to protect serious scholarly and artistic works against motivated and frivolous harassment through the use of Sections 153A and 295A of the Indian Penal Code.

Those laws do clarify that an offending speech or publication must be the product of deliberate and malicious intent. Lower courts have often been tardy in applying that test, even though higher courts have generally stood by serious authors and artists. But the very prospect of long and expensive legal battles to clear a scholar or artist of these criminal charges appears to have become sufficiently intimidating for many publishers, as is shown by Penguin’s decision to settle out of court and pulp their stocks of Doniger’s book. Punwani’s examples show that in its current use, the law appears to make no distinction between a renowned scholar such as Doniger and mob inciters such as Bal Thackeray, Akbaruddin Owaisi and Madhukar Sarpotdar. Surely there is something wrong here.
— Partha Chatterjee
Kolkata