Ranveer Allahbadia: Supreme Court Defends Free Speech Amid Public Morality Debate | X @fpjindia
The case of YouTuber Ranveer Allahbadia raises a very old question concerning individual rights and public morality. Every society has to ask itself how far an individual’s rights can be protected and how far they are to be curtailed because of what is construed as the right of the faceless ‘public’ to be protected from things that offend, shock or outrage their sensibilities.
The Supreme Court is to be lauded for providing Allahbadia with a judicial shield on February 18, even though it has criticised his remarks strongly.
The issues of pornography and indecency, in general, have long plagued both philosophers and state actors. We have to decide just how far the right to artistic licence can be allowed and how far people are to be protected from the airing of material that offends their morals or aesthetics. Clearly, there are no catch-all solutions that are applicable across time and space. What is high literature in one context can be dismissed as material that is so offensive that it cannot be allowed to be exposed in public.
But not everything is so cut and dried. The classic case that shows us how attitudes to obscenity or pornography change over time and space is that of English novelist D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was first published in 1928 but remained proscribed in the United States till the 1950s and in the United Kingdom till the 1960s. Now, of course, it is considered to be one of the classics of English fiction. Sticking with literature and relationships not accepted by many in many societies, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was first published in 1952 but was banned in the United States and a number of other countries for a number of years. It is also now considered a classic.
Of course, Allahbadia’s crass comment on his YouTube podcast cannot be compared to literature or an artistic expression of any kind. Most people would consider the remark about parental sex to not only be in bad taste but also juvenile, idiotic and inane. Certainly, a vast majority would find his comment completely unfunny. But, and here is the rub, inanity and a bad sense of humour are not criminal offences. However offended one may be by a certain expression or statement, one cannot press for the criminal prosecution of the person making it. If everyone who ‘hurt the sentiments’ of a group of others, however numerous that group is, is criminally prosecuted, our jails would be filled to bursting point. Being liberal lies precisely in ignoring acts or statements that are offensive but, in the end, not illegal.
As a society, we should be much more liberal. Unfortunately, the game of being offended, shocked, disturbed or outraged has become a national obsession. People can not only be offended, etc., at the drop of a hat, but they can also seek redress from the authorities for their outraged sensibilities. Since, most unfortunately, the right to be shocked and offended seems almost to have become a fundamental right, it has also been politicised. Groups of people that have political axes to grind are, in today’s environment, encouraged to go to court seeking the prosecution of artists of all kinds, as well as ordinary citizens. They can hope sometimes to be successful in their harassment of their targets, and failing that, are assured of a huge amount of publicity for their political causes.
Prosecution can only too easily tip over into persecution. Thus, while petitioning the courts and executive authorities, ‘offended’ groups take the law into their hands with a sense of impunity arising out of tacit official encouragement or the failure of the law-enforcement agencies to protect those whose rights are being violently assaulted. The current regime has made an art of the combination of dog-whistling and benign neglect.
This is where the role of the state comes to the fore, especially over the last decade since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been in power at the Centre and in many states. The BJP has perfected the strategy of weaponising ‘offence’ to steer the state in illiberal directions. How it works is that first a so-called splinter group, which is actually not a fringe element at all, objects to something – a statement, a show, a book, etc. – and petitions the judiciary and the executive authorities, while quite often mounting violent protests against it. Then the government takes cognisance of the ‘offence’ and takes action against the so-called guilty parties. The outcome could vary from the banning of the offending thing through the filing of cases against the people guilty only of expressing their opinion in some way or another to long periods of incarceration. The offending material could be a play, a painting or even a news report.
Thus, the so-called mainstream encourages the expression of offence by the so-called fringe and then cracks down on expressions of dissent or alternative views of the world.
Of course, Allahbadia’s case is not political. But if we allow the executive to take action against him, we’d be guilty of approving the principle of censorship and prosecution.
