Even in times when it was believed that one man’s freedom to be nosy ended where the other man’s nose began, the borders were hazy. Today, with cultural and geographical barriers melting away in the heat of high voltage communication tools and media options, drawing out lines of control for freedom of expression is akin to making markings on water or in the air! In this context, the raging debate on free speech seems tiring and outdated.
Even more silly and superfluous is the cliched call for self-restraint. After all, ‘expression’ happens only after one’s tolerance threshold is touched, whence the shackles of silence are broken. Free speech is post restraint, not a part of it. And with an impatient or immature populace having their hearts on their lips, with provocations galore for words to slip off them in a jiffy and with an array of gadgets waiting to display your pearls of wish-dom, self-censorship is actually a non-starter. Discretion is no longer valorous and might actually set you back in the race for facebook fame or twitter chatter. Think before you talk is passe. Only Talk is paramount and Talk first is the rule. No sales pitch intended here.
Irreverence is the flavour of the media today, more so the web. The verbal explosion in it has not only destroyed the grammars of English but also manners in engagement. No doubt it has empowered and emboldened the silent multitudes to speak out freely but it has also eased essential etiquette and ethics. Your own spouse or ward, sitting right next to you in the drawing room would be saying things on a social network, that he/she dare not say in front of you. For that matter, you would be doing the same, leading a different life, having a different persona and saying different things that would have shocked your near and dear and even yourselves probably a decade back. Today, if a person is to be judged by what is uttered on realtime and airtime, you will only find split personalities of not just Jekylls and Hydes, but even Jydes and Hekylls and many more!
If an individual’s tongue can be forked thus, imagine the multiplicity and of course, duplicity of opinions and info that can float on the web and that in turn can spill over to terra firma. And when one cannot be insulated from one’s own or close one’s views, where is the ‘protection’ for those in public life? Also, the web not just disseminates news and views but is itself the news with views in it and of it varying by the second. It is an ever evolving media on an uncharted path with an open ended destination. In short, modern virtual media is a real monster that simply cannot be contained. Any attempt to tame or tutor it is not only futile but will also backfire. For, there’s a whole lot of trigger happy loose canons out there blazing away at will.
Small wonder that the laws and leaders of the land are clueless on the nuances of this new-fangled media as also the ways to handle it. While the legal system still remains archaic, politicos, obsessed with their corrupt deals and methods to camouflage them, are reacting in a typical way: Unleashing muscle power, of the State or party, on critics. Arrests, defamation cases and sundry other intimidating tactics are not working even with the traditional media as they used to in the past. Even if a politico in power succeeds in gagging one newspaper or journo, someone else will pick up the baton, given the competitive milieu and also in a scenario where most politicans themselves own media and are waiting to pounce on an opponent’s scandal. The web, on the other hand, is too invisible, too tenuous and too pervasive a medium to come into the politicos’ grasp. There is also the ignorance barrier to cross. Enter, sedition, as the new addition to the their arsenal against the agitating class!
It is wholly unnecessary to invoke such lofty characters as Gandhiji, Nehru and Tilak to pit sedition against free speech. Indeed, as a colonial tool, both the British as well as G, N & Co had good reason to use it and oppose it, respectively. Legal luminaries have also pointed out the SC’s conditionality on sedition: Incitement to violence. But what is scary to a layman like me is the not-so-scholarly ingredient of the definition of sedition: ‘…bringing the government into hatred or contempt or exciting disaffection towards it …’. In a simple sleight of hand patriotism has been downgraded from ‘love for country’ to ‘love for Government’! And possibly further down to ‘love for leader’! Remember ‘Indira is India’?
So, free speech is freedom to praise the regime and its reigning leader! If that gets a bit tough, you should at the least choose words not to cause ‘disaffection’ unto them. Hatred and contempt towards them are totally taboo. But are our rulers, assuming they personify the nation as the sedition law suggests, worthy of our ‘love and affection’ and befitting sacrifice of our freedom of expression? Maybe, if they bring back all those billions beyond borders; maybe if they refund the spectrum, coal and sundry other loot; maybe, if they behave in Parli; maybe, if they respect national symbols that they want us to respect; maybe, if they get sensitive and tolerant to citizens’ angst and intolerant and merciless on neighbouring enemies; maybe if they hang those who waged wars against the nation; maybe if foreigners are not allowed to rule by proxy; maybe, if they make good laws instead of breaking them; maybe, maybe & maybe.
And since all that are in the realm of dreams, sedition, even if only through harmless or empty free speech, will ever remain a seductive option for many!
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