Muzzling dissent

The Hindu right wing wants sedition cases slapped on Arundhati Roy and Syed Ali Shah Geelani for their positions on Kashmir.

ON October 21, some Kashmiri Pandits, supported by right-wing Hindutva organisations and activists of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party, tried to disrupt a convention on Kashmir captioned Azadi: The only way, organised in New Delhi. The speakers included leaders who support the Kashmiri people's right to self-determination or freedom of Kashmir from the Indian state. The most notable among them was Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the chairperson of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference and a fervent supporter of Kashmir's secession. The other important speaker was the writer-political activist Arundhati Roy. These two became the targets of the mob, which first disrupted the meeting and then vandalised an exhibition of photographs and documents chronicling the history of Kashmir. The protesters demanded that sedition cases be filed against the secessionist leader and Arundhati Roy.

Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj, BJP leaders, also pitched in to demand that the Centre bring up sedition charges against Arundhati Roy. The Union Home Ministry showed some interest and even gave the go-ahead to the Delhi Police in the matter.

Although the convention was on Kashmir, the participants included leaders and academics who support the right to self-determination of people and have been waging political battles against the militarised regime of the Indian state in their respective regions. The event took a political turn when the protesters picked out Geelani and Arundhati Roy for attack. By the end of the day, the convention had set off a debate on freedom of speech and the right to express dissent in a democracy. Laws such as sedition and constitutional principles such as reasonable restrictions on freedom of speech began to be discussed in intellectual circles. Many people came out in support of the speakers and their right to express their opinions.

However, on October 26, even as the BJP made vehement demands, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government put at rest the idea of slapping sedition charges on the speakers. It felt such an action would harm the dialogue process that the government's interlocutors the journalist Dileep Padgaonkar, the academic Radha Kumar and Central Information Commissioner M.M. Ansari had begun with the people of Kashmir. Government sources felt the BJP would capitalise on the issue. As such the government had to keep in mind the impact of any action it took as it could be seen negatively by the Kashmiri people. Arun Jaitley accused the government of looking the other way when separatist groups met in the capital city. He said if the Indian government thought Kashmir was an integral part of the nation, it should take action against the secessionist leaders.

A Kashmiri Pandit group, Roots in Kashmir (RIK), has filed a case against Geelani, Arundhati Roy and the others who spoke in favour of azadi. Aditya Raj Kaul, the leader of the RIK, said the content of the speeches was defamatory to the authority of the Constitution of India but the Government of India had failed to initiate any action. So he was left with no choice but to file a case directly in the court. Geelani was quoted on national television as saying that there were 90 cases against him and this could be the 91st.

The convention was organised by the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners (CRPP), a group formed in the light of the ongoing struggles against issues such as displacement, state terror, brutal and militarised regimes and draconian Acts such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. The majority of the arrests made in the past few years involved political activists. The CRPP, with the underlying assumption that the people had the right to dissent against state oppression, has been demanding the release of political prisoners.

For the last few years, the democratic and struggling people in almost all parts of India have been subjected to a series of measures and state terror continuously by the governments of different States. Thousands of people have been put behind bars in large areas in most parts of the Indian subcontinent, particularly in regions such as Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Assam, Manipur, Kashmir, Punjab, Tripura, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Orissa and Madhya Pradesh. The intensity of state repression and the methods adopted by different State governments might have varied from one area to another. Innumerable cases of fake encounter deaths have been reported from Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and other areas, says a concept note of the CRPP.

All the speakers at the convention were of the opinion that Kashmir was never a part of India historically and that Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, had admitted that Kashmir was the subject of an international dispute and that the matter could be taken to the United Nations so that the people of Kashmir could decide whether they wanted to remain with the Indian Union. But in 1994, the Indian Parliament passed a resolution calling Kashmir an integral part of India. This, they thought, was a betrayal of the aspiration of Kashmiris.

Expressing her strong views on the military regime in Kashmir Valley, Arundhati Roy urged the people of Kashmir to forge a broad political alliance with other democratic struggles against state repression and for the right to self-determination.

Geelani said azadi was the only way forward to resolve the Kashmir dispute and everyone in the valley wanted it. He said dialogue was possible with the Indian state only if it was opened with the presumption that Kashmir was not an integral part of India but was a disputed territory. He pointed out that more than 110 civilians had been killed in the valley by the Central paramilitary police force since June, whereas not even a single military personnel had been killed. More than 2.5 lakh Kashmiris have been killed by the armed forces.

He said that for some years now the separatist struggle had been by and large peaceful and non-violent, yet Kashmir was not free from military occupation. Kashmiris had to prove their nativity to a foreign army everyday in their own land, he said, questioning India's right to govern the State.

Arundhati Roy said in defence of herself: I spoke about justice for the people of Kashmir who live under one of the most brutal military occupations in the world; for Kashmiri Pandits who live out the tragedy of having been driven out of their homeland; for Dalit soldiers killed in Kashmir, whose graves I visited on garbage heaps in their villages in Cuddalore; for the Indian poor who pay the price of this occupation in material ways and who are now learning to live in the terror of what is becoming a police state in the papers some have accused me of giving hate-speeches', of wanting India to break up. On the contrary, what I say comes from love and pride. It comes from not wanting people to be killed, raped, imprisoned or have their finger-nails pulled out in order to force them to say they are Indians. It comes from wanting to live in a society that is striving to be a just one. Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free.

Her house in New Delhi was attacked on October 31 by a mob mostly comprising members of the BJP's Mahila Morcha (women's wing). In her statement on the attack, Arundhati Roy accused a section of the media of actively collaborating with the attackers as some of the media OB vans were present in front of her house even before the mob came. What is the nature of the agreement between these sections of the media and mobs and criminals in search of spectacle? Does the media which positions itself at the scene' in advance have a guarantee that the attacks and demonstrations will be non-violent? What happens if there is criminal trespass (as there was today) or even something worse? Does the media then become accessory to the crime? This question is important, given that some TV channels and newspapers are in the process of brazenly inciting mob anger against me. In the race for sensationalism, the line between reporting news and manufacturing news is becoming blurred, she said in her statement.

A democratic set-up allows its people to express their opinions freely even if it is a matter of dissent against the state. The progressive section of the populace is of the view that even if a large majority of people do not agree with the speakers' views, the latters' right to express themselves freely must be defended in order to prevent a curb on other dissenting voices across the country.

A group of human rights activists, lawyers and academics issued a public statement terming the sedition charges absurd. We condemn the demand of the BJP to take the strongest possible action' against Arundhati Roy for her seditious comments' at the seminar. There is recorded evidence to prove that the views expressed by her are not new and have also been made by innumerable others before and after her. If Arundhati Roy or Syed Ali Shah Geelani (or any other speaker from that seminar) is to be arrested for what they have said, then by the same logic a number of us would have to be imprisoned, not to mention the entire population of Kashmir, the statement by 42 signatories that included the human rights lawyer Vrinda Grover, the photographer Dayanita Singh, and activists Harsh Mander and Shabnam Hashmi read.

ARCHAIC TRADITION

It further added that the concept of sedition was archaic and had no place in a modern democratic imagination. The Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution did not include sedition' among the reasonable restrictions' to Article 19(1) (a). In 1962, the Supreme Court ( Kedar Nath Singh vs the State of Bihar) read down Section 124A IPC [Indian Penal Code] to argue that only a call to violence or armed rebellion qualified to be considered as sedition'. The same judgment reiterated the importance of not allowing the provision to interfere with the Right to Free Speech and Expression. As the present controversy proves, the Supreme Court's worst fears have been confirmed. The Bajrang Dal's threat that they will hound Arundhati Roy like [it did in the case of] M.F. Hussain provides further confirmation that sedition' will now be the new pretext for censorship. When the British charged Gandhi with sedition, he famously said, Sedition in law is a deliberate crime but it appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen.' Expressing dissent about the nation-state and re-imagining its future is certainly the right of every citizen if not the highest duty', it said. This group believes that the Sangh Parivar's jingoistic attack against the two speakers is an attempt to deflect attention from the Ajmer blast case in which a few Hindutva campaigners have been accused. It also feels that bringing sedition charges against the two would amount to imposing censorship.

Indian polity abounds with resistance movements against anti-people development policies and human rights violations. In such a state of affairs, many believe that if India still wants to call itself a democracy, the government has to hear the voices of the people, especially dissenting ones, rather than curb their opinions through censorship or cases of sedition at the slightest provocation.

According to the 19th century liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, dissent is vital for a democracy and helps it grow because it helps preserve truth and that truth can easily become hidden in sources of prejudice and dead dogma. Mill defines dissent as the freedom of the individual to hold and articulate unpopular views.

Perhaps, such a thought would be the most appropriate in reading the views of leaders such as Geelani. India's mainstream leaders can take a page or two out of Mill's philosophy in governing a large democracy such as India.