There would, perhaps, be no better time in which Sukumar Muralidharan could write a book reflecting on the political implications of the right to free speech in India. At a time when citizens, activists and intellectuals are being put behind bars because they spoke against the government, against the draconian laws from the colonial period, and against the exploitative economic policies of the state, Muralidharan asks the right questions, at the right time. Can freedom of speech survive in a market-driven society where civil liberty is overridden by consumer choices? What kind of journalistic practice protects free speech and journalistic freedom in a fascist state? And, lastly, can social media save the civil society from fake news?

Muralidharans book offers an insiders perspective but from a distance. Although having been a journalist all his life, he is a practising academic. This discursive interface is manifested in the manner he handles intertwined contexts like nationalism, public, civility, state, and media with clinical detachment on the one hand and absolute care on the other.

The book contains eight chapters apart from the introduction and epilogue. Each chapter unfolds with a truth, followed by the deconstruction of that truth in light of freedom of speech. Muralidharan engages extensively and unapologetically with the idea of freedomwhat goes and what remains. Chapter 1 is titled A Patchy Freedom: Commerce, Class and the Value of Speech. It opens with political and historical contexts leading to the emergence of the universal idea of freedom of speech. However, soon it also asks the obvious questions: Who can speak after all? Can freedom of speech be absolute? Or is it class-specific? Whose freedom of speech do we protect and whose do we not? Here, one is reminded of Gayatri Spivaks (1990) legendary and undeniable question: Can the subaltern speak? Echoing similar concerns, Muralidharan suggests that the rise of a corporatised democracy in India is the ultimate blow to free speech and only those with power have the right to speak. Taking Vilfredo Paretos (1991) elite theory forward, Muralidharan asserts that we are living amidst a major democratic deficit where only the power elite enjoys absolute freedom of speech to the near exclusion of the public at large. In that light, what once constituted a universal and fundamental right of citizens in India, is now reduced to an exclusive coterie. Speech is valued only where the money flows.

Taking this point further, in Chapter 2 Nationalism: Citizens Great and Small, he argues that the way nation-building and nationalism emerged in the postcolonial period in India has created a visible social cleavage between the Hindus as the majority and the Muslims as the so-called minority. Consequently, nationalism or the communal manifestation of jingoism is a big roadblock to free speech. Print media in post-independence India has systematically fuelled this anti-Islam feeling to the extent that media neutrality sounds banal today. On the other hand, privatisation of media houses and gradually of every other enterprise in India has produced a standardised consumer behaviour that though indicates growth but demonstrates little cultural diversity that is the backbone of the Indian society. One is reminded of Noam Chomskys (2011) five filters that media houses apply to the news-making process before disseminating them. In a similar fashion, Muralidharan here asserts that anti-Islam sentiments (like the anti-communism sentiments of post-war America) have been mainstreamed in India through print media and popular culture, especially since the post-Babri Masjid demolition (1992) period.Ramayanaand Mahabharatabecame two pinnacles of Hindu culture that Arvind Rajagopal (2001) later critiqued in his extensive works on the Indian public sphere. The usage of the terms great and small in the title of this chapter reflect upon the terms great and little traditions that Yogendra Singh (1986) coined inModernization of Indian Tradition: A Systemic Study of Social Changewith the implication that Brahminical Hindu caste culture has indeed been the great tradition in India. Consequently, it is not just the elite and the powerful but the Hindu high-caste citizens who have the privilege to free speech.

In The State: Exceptions and the Uses of Ambiguity, Muralidharan offers several illustrations from the recent past in India to prove his point. In the last six years under the present regime, India has witnessed random arrests, police brutality and state-sponsored terrorism systematically meted out against tribals, Maoists, activists, journalists and intellectuals. In view of this, Muralidharan asserts that the states that hide the inconvenient truth do not allow journalism to report on the ordinary human sensibility (p 139). He adds that the present Indian states engagement with the Constitution is shrouded in mystery and media freedom to reporting of truth is heavily compromised as a result. He blames the corporate media and rapid commercialisation of the industry for this.

A Glimmer of Hope

However, the future is not totally grim, since the public always find ways to assert, to resist and to have their voices heard. With this high note, he writes Chapter 3 titled Civil Society: Media and the Politics of Anti-politics. Anti-politics here implies the rise of the spontaneous movements led by young people, students and farmers all across the world; for example, the Arab Spring. As part of the new social movements, these spontaneous uprisings defy organised, hierarchical and often misogynistic politics of the mainstream; they are organised around direct participation of young people with lived experiences they are trying to resist and bring in substantial changes in society at large. The political position of these kinds of anti-politics is based on faith in the power of the people. This chapter brings the famous Chilean song back in our everyday conscienceY el pueblo unido Jamsservencido(And the united people will neverbe defeated).

However, rise and sustenance of the anti-politics of the people is not possible, at least, in its present, fruitful sense without the virtual platform of social media, Muralidharan acknowledges. Like Rajagopal, he asserts that the internet has indeed emerged as the digital public sphere, but he is cautious to point out that such digital spheres are constantly under police surveillance. In other words, as Foucault suggested, there is no escape from governmentality. Next, Muralidharan also warns us against the brutality of the social mediaone should not be nave to consider social media as the holy grail of resistance. More often than not, the state uses the digital spaces not just for stalking, but also for systematic hate speeches against its own citizens. In fact, debates around what constitutes counter speech while what is hate speech have been doing rounds for quite some time in public discourses now. Taking them forward, Muralidharan says that civility of the civil society suffers a major setback in social media as the digital spaces are infested with fake accounts and hate speechesboth created by information technology(IT)cells.

Satire and Laughter

While digital space in social media is a cautionary tale, one cannot stop disseminating, one cannot stop resisting, and one cannot stop expressing. Here, Muralidharan turns to political satires and cartoons to express the truth. Focusing extensively on Charlie Hebdo and the attack in its office in Paris in 2015, in the next chapter Satire: The Power of Laughter and the Laughter of Power, he highlights the boon and the bane of satire in authoritarian regimes. One cannot deny that several cartoonists and satirists have been targets the world over for a very long time. Banksy, one of the most popular and prominent satirists of recent times, is anonymous. What does that tell us about the dystopic world we live in? While we revel at the power of laughter in satires, we employ anonymity to cherish that laughter.

In Chapters 5 and 6 Market: Free Speech and the Commercial Imperative and Advertising: Transparency as a Virtue Admired at a Distance, Muralidharan throws light on the reasons behind the dystopia that is now so hard to defeat. In a market-dominated economy and society, free speech is a fiction, he says (p 265). In that sense, if there is no free speech, how can there be media freedom? Whoensures medias access to space and time without unnecessarystate intervention? As a matter of fact, one is not sure whose freedom is moreimportantthe freedom of the public tochoose or the freedom of the advertiser to enforce? In view of that, when news is a commodity, readers are the consumershence, truth, like consent, can also be tailored and manufactured to suit the emotional demands of the latter. Here, advertising plays a significant role.There was a time in the pre-liberalisation,privatisation and globalisation(LPG)era when advertisements financiallysupported news making; now, the advertisement is the news. The global takeover of advertisement corpuses implies gigantic corporate control of airspaces to the extent that media houses close to the regime create and disseminate advertisement contents camouflaged as news. Muralidharan offers the excellent example of brand Modi created by theTimes of India,Dainik Jagran, etc, just before the run-up to the 2014 general elections in India through mediated buzzwords likeModi Wave, Ab ki Bar/Modi Sarkar, Har Har Modi/Har Ghar Modi, NaMo, to name a few. Hence, it is no exaggeration to say, as Muralidharan does, that news has been replaced with advertisement and caters to the demand of the market. This renders the entire discussion of media freedom irrelevant.

This brings us to the last and bare-it-all chapter Journalism: Paid Speech in Sold Media. We have travelled from patchy freedom to paid speech. Be prepared to be Kafkaesque in a world of post truth where one pays their way through the news they want to read. Paid media has witnessed catastrophicsuccess, meandering through fake newsand branding (p 397). Readers have already reached a point of deconstruction from where there is no return. However, the author does offer a slight ray of hopewhat if we are ever able torebuild the journalistic discourse to accommodate freedom back? There is no denying that these are the hopes one lives withnotwithstanding their absurdity.

A well-researched book with an essential ingredient of primary data for anthropological validation, it stands out and is all set to survive the test of time. One is continuously reminded of Faiz Ahmed Faizs famous lines:Bol, ke labh azad hain tere/Bol, zubaan ab tak teri hain.Muralidharan has weaved through the idea of free speech intricately throughout the text and driven the point substantially homefreedom of speech goes hand in hand with freedom of expressionhence, a free media is not an entry point but an end product of the right to free speech, especially in a neo-liberal world. This book points out that it is worth preserving the pragmatic identification of the range of the media as the portals of free speech, truth and free expressionfrom news reports to cartoons and satires to cinema to digital media. Muralidharan has not compartmentalised his vision of freedom, restricting it to print or television. Rather, he tests his hypothesis with conviction across spectrum, but sadly, yet diligently, yields the same resultsfast erosion of freedom of speech in a corporatised society. Kudos to the author for daring to include civility instead of civil society in the title, rightfully reminding the readers that meaningful participation in public life begins with being civil. In our journey from personhood to citizenship, civility is the critical minimum.

One could compare this book with Sanjay AsthanasIndias State-run Media: Broadcasting, Power, and Narrativepublished in 2019. Both Asthana and Muralidharan focus on state-media interface, but the former does so from the perspective of the nation while the latter from the standpoint of the media. Moreover, unlike Asthana, Muralidharan addresses the crucial question of what the location of free speech is if one has to assess the possibility of media freedom in India today.

References

Asthana, Sanjay (2019):Indias State-run Media: Broadcasting, Power, and Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chomsky, Noam (2011):The Media Control: The Spectacular Achievement of Propaganda, New York: Seven Stories Press.

Pareto, Vilfredo (1991):The Rise and Fall of Elites: Application of Theoretical Sociology, New York: Routledge.

Rahman, Sarvat (2002):100 Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, New Delhi: Abhinav Publications.

Rajagopal, Arvind (2001):Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Singh, Yogendra (1986):Modernization of Indian Tradition, New Delhi: Rawat Publications.

Spivak, Gayatri (1990):The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, New York: Routledge.

Udupa, Sahana (2015):Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Free Speech and Media Freedom in Corporate India : Countering Their Negative Image - Economic and Political Weekly