Daily Archives: February 14, 2012

Booksellers offering their wares in Old Delhi, India. (Photo: Natalia Antelava)

Dozens of books have been banned in India because of their themes and topics. The country is trying to get Google and Facebook to devise a means of pre-filtering religiously objectionable content. All this, taken together, has many saying the country's freedom of speech is disappearing.

Book sellers in Old Delhi spread their goods on the pavement along one the city’s busiest streets every Sunday.

People push and shove as they scan rows of books laid out on the road. From Tolstoy in Russian to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, it looks as if you could find anything here. But you can’t.

A bookseller offers an obscure tome on Siberian railroad systems by Salman Rushdie. But ask instead for a copy of India’s most famous author's best known book, “The Satanic Verses” and the conversation is over.

The man just grins and looks away.

Rushdie’s 1988 novel infuriated some Muslims for its portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad. More than 20 years after its publication, the book is still banned in India.

Last month, Rushdie canceled a visit to India after he was told it was too dangerous for him to take part in a literary festival in Jaipur. He accused the Indian government of fabricating threats and preventing him from coming, just to please Muslim voters ahead of a key regional election.

Nilanjana Roy, an Indian literary critic, said whether Rushdie’s right, people who are running the world’s biggest democracy are failing to protect free speech.

“This entire business about having to cave in because the other side is being violent means you are allowing yourself to be bullied,” she said. “It is the state’s job to stand up and say we will not allow that to happen.”

It’s not just the Satanic Verses. Dozens of books and films are banned in India, often because of what’s deemed offensive religious content, though one of the Indiana Jones movies is banned for its so-called imperialistic tendencies and racist portrayal of Indians. Roy said she worries where things are heading.

“If everyone is free to claim offense, it will become less and less possible to accuse a politician of corruption, for example,” Roy said. “We love comparing ourselves to China in terms of how free we are, but if you look closely on it we’ve slid down to 122nd place in the list of countries when it comes to media freedom, to Internet freedom. That isn’t a happy ranking.”

Comparisons with China are growing increasingly common in India. Last year the country’s communications minister asked social networking sites to devise a system to filter and block “objectionable” comments. And the Delhi High Court is currently reviewing a case filed against 20 companies, including Google and Facebook, demanding that they pre-screen religiously “offensive” comments.

Vinay Rai, editor of Akbari magazine, who filed the criminal lawsuit, said India is a country that needs some censorship.

“Posting offensive content in a socially conservative country, which has a history of religious violence, presents a real danger to public,” Roy said.

But even when there’s no obvious danger to the public, the Indian government may still take offense.

Recently, a joke on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno turned into a diplomatic incident. The Indian government complained to the U.S. State Department after Leno showed a photo of India’s Golden Temple, which is sacred to Sikhs, and described it as Mitt Romney’s summer home.

The issue of free expression has prompted heated discussion in India. In a debate that was later televised, Shoma Chaudhury, managing editor of the liberal Tehelka magazine, recently took on Justice Markandey Katju, the government-appointed head of India's press council.

“India is different,” Katju said. “For many in India, freedom is food and security.”

“But how do you change a society unless you push the boundaries?” Chaudhury asked. “How will the boundaries of the society be pushed unless we question them?”

But pushing boundaries can be dangerous here. There is a growing list of artists, writers, academics and journalists who have been beaten, harassed and pushed into exile.

In central Delhi, an artist named Balbir Krishan, a double amputee who is also openly gay, was attacked during a recent exhibition by masked men who pushed him to the ground and kicked him. His most recent work deals with gay themes.

The men shouted “Get out of the country, you don’t belong here.” It was only after 24 hours of media pressure that the police launched an investigation.

“It’s going to become more dangerous,” Krishan said. “I am scared.”

Krishan said his role as an artist is to show people things they don’t want to see, to make people uncomfortable and make them think.

But he added that unless politicians step in and protect his right to do that, then the voices of those who are against him will become louder and clearer than his.

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In India, free speech a wavering ideal

13-02-2012 01:02 Dr.Nick Feat Monarch and Mr.HK (of Free Speech Syndicate) track recorded on 2/12/12 at SEM studio prod. by Russell Rock

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Dr.Nick feat. Monarch and Mr. Hk (of Free Speech Syndicate) -"Been Too Long" - Video

13-02-2012 13:45 The ACLJ is an advocate for your religious liberties, free speech and constitutional rights.

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ACLJ Fighting for Your Rights - Video

Underlying the heated political discussion surrounding the Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions conference last weekend was an issue that has long been intertwined with the University’s history: the First Amendment.

However, the BDS conference is not the first time that controversial speakers brought to campus by student groups have caused tension and debate over freedom of speech.

From student protests during the Vietnam War era to various racially charged disputes, Penn is no stranger to questions of what types of speech it will protect — and where, if ever, it should draw the line.

BDS and beyond

In the weeks leading up to BDS, students and faculty debated the administration’s policy to allow the conference on campus.

In a Feb. 2 Daily Pennsylvanian guest column, Penn President Amy Gutmann and Board of Trustees Chair David Cohen wrote that, while the University disagreed with the positions espoused by BDS, “we recognize and respect their right to open expression.”

Penn Friends of Israel President and College sophomore Noah Feit said he was pleased that Penn allowed BDS to take place on campus.

“It sends a clear message that we’re open for free speech, and I hope it will extend to everyone,” he said.

While Feit disagrees with the political message behind BDS, he added that he does not think it should have been censored.

“It’s an issue that’s really important and deserves to be debated in the academic setting,” PennBDS member and College freshman Clarissa O’Conor added. “There was no hate speech whatsoever on the part of the organizers or the people who attended the conference.”

Others, however, have said that Penn should not have allowed the BDS conference to take place.

“Allowing such rhetoric on campus amounts to an implicit, if not an explicit, endorsement of BDS,” 1958 Wharton graduate Eugene Jaffe wrote in an email.

Looking back, previous Penn administrations have also had to address outcry over events dealing with free speech and sensitive topics.

In 1988, for example, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan — who is known for his radically anti-Semitic views — was invited to speak at Penn by 10 campus groups.

“Many people harshly criticized the administration for allowing him to come on campus and preach hate speech,” University Archives and Records Center Director Mark Frazier Lloyd said.

Soon before the speech took place, Sheldon Hackney — who was Penn’s president at the time of the Farrakhan visit — told The New York Times that “I’m hoping it will be an occasion for some educational discussions of race relations on campus. But it could be confrontational and arouse a lot of emotion in which nothing constructive can take place.”

Racial controversy also came to the fore of discussion at Penn during the 1993 “water buffalo incident.”

In the incident, Eden Jacobowitz, a freshman at the time, was charged with racial harassment under Penn’s Code of Conduct for shouting, “Shut up, you water buffalo!” at a group of black sorority sisters who were making noise outside his room in a high-rise College House. The charges — which were later dropped by the women and the Office of Student Conduct — brought Penn’s racial and sexual harassment speech policies under fire, according to Lloyd.

The incident “marked the beginning of an awareness of speech codes on campus and its impact on students … In the years since then, Penn has done a really good job of reforming its policies to be protective of student speech,” said Samantha Harris, director of legal and public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit organization that defends students’ free expression rights.

However, Penn’s free expression policy was once again brought into question in 2006, when the OSC brought charges against an undergraduate who took photos of two students having sex against a high-rise dormitory window. Although the charges were later dropped, the University drew criticism for its handling of the case from FIRE and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

How Penn stacks up

Despite these past disputes, Penn today is considered a leader among universities in promoting freedom of speech and expression.

Penn currently has a “green light” ranking from FIRE. Receiving this highest possible ranking indicates that Penn’s written policies have been found to promote unrestricted free speech.

“Although private schools are not bound by the First Amendment the way state schools are, private universities are required to uphold the promises they make to their students,” Harris said.

Harris added that many universities routinely violate their speech codes, citing the recent firing of a Harvard University professor who expressed controversial views about Muslims in an Indian newspaper as an example of free speech restrictions at peer institutions.

“Academic freedom is fundamental to the central value of a university, and academic freedom demands that universities protect freedom of inquiry and freedom of speech,” Gutmann said. “The university must be a place of unfettered debate and the free exchange of ideas.”

Last year, FIRE named Penn one of the seven best colleges and universities in the country for freedom of speech. Among other Ivy League schools, only Dartmouth College also made the list.

A legacy of activism

As Penn’s speech codes have evolved over the years, so have the causes that Penn students have chosen to speak out about.

In the 1960s and 1970s, students and faculty organized anti-war rallies on College Green and protested local issues like the construction of Meyerson Hall and the University City Science Center. More recently, campus activism has taken form in the Occupy movement — through OccupyPenn’s teach-ins outside Van Pelt Library, as well as Occupy Philadelphia’s demonstrations inside Huntsman Hall on Oct. 21.

The issue of race relations has also continued to play a role in campus discourse, with last year’s silent protest against racism on College Green as the latest in a history of race-based discussions.

For History professor and FIRE co-founder Alan Kors, Penn has come a long way in its protection of freedom of speech over the decades.

“As long as Penn continues to protect freedom of expression with no double standards, which I believe it is currently doing, we all can and should live with speech we find wrong or wicked, to which the best response is further speech, legal protest and both intellectual and moral witness,” he wrote in an email. “A university should be a place that encourages debate.”

INTERACTIVE TIMELINE: Free speech at Penn

Link:
From ‘water buffalo’ to BDS, Penn faces free speech questions

On several occasions already, in what is still a very new year, various arms of the Indian state have recused themselves from their duty of protecting free speech, citing the threat of violence as fair justification. The Rajasthan police have been accused of inventing a plot to kill Salman Rushdie, in order to prevent the disruptions to public order that were promised by some Muslim organizations upon Mr. Rushdie’s visit to the Jaipur Literature Festival.

In Lucknow, a play satirizing the Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati was banned. In Hyderabad and Pune, police “advised” the organizers of seminars – on Mr. Rushdie and on Kashmir, respectively – to cancel their events. On Twitter, Taslima Nasreen claimed that the “Kolkata police asked Kolkata Book Fair committee to cancel my book release program.” In all these instances, the potential for actual violence was unclear; what was more apparent was the state’s eagerness to choose the easiest way out by simply suspending the exercise of free speech.

Perhaps the most biting legal opinion of such spinelessness came in 1989, in a Supreme Court case called S. Rangarajan vs. P. Jagjivan Ram. Mr. Rangarajan, a film producer in Chennai (then Madras), was fighting for his right to release “Ore Oru Gramathile,” a movie that criticized the caste-based reservation policy in Tamil Nadu’s educational institutions. Members of the Dr. Ambedkar People’s Movement and the Republican Party of India had already embarked upon protests, and the general secretary of the Republican Party had warned that demonstrators “would not hesitate to damage the cinema.” In response, the Tamil Nadu government had stopped the film’s release, fearing “very serious” law and order problems across the state. Professing himself by turns amused, troubled and anguished, Justice K. J. Shetty wrote: “The State cannot plead its inability to handle the hostile audience problem. It is its obligatory duty to prevent it and protect the freedom of expression.”

The plot of “Ore Oru Gramathile” (“In a Single Village”) runs as follows: Shankara Sastry, a Brahmin, procures a fake lower-caste certificate for his daughter Gayathri, worried that she will otherwise not be able to attend university. Gayathri turns out to be a good student and, later, an excellent civil servant, but when she is working on a flood-relief mission in a village named Annavayil, she is recognized and her true caste exposed. In rousing court scenes, Gayathri and her father argue that the reservation policy should be based on economic backwardness and not on caste. Improbably, the case against Gayathri is withdrawn when the people of Annavayil flood the government with petitions demanding that she be restored to her job. (“As usual,” Justice Shetty wrote in his judgment, the film “contains some songs, dance and side attractions to make the film more delectable.”)

S. Rangarajan, the film’s producer, passed away a few years ago. His son Ramesh, as well as Aryama Sundaram and S. Raghunathan, two senior lawyers who worked on the case, helped reconstruct the chain of events that led to Justice Shetty’s landmark judgment.

S. Raghunathan: The movie was based on a script by a poet named Vaali. That was called something else – I don’t quite remember that title now. By that time, S. Rangarajan had been producing films for a number of years. He made “Gauravam,” which was an excellent movie.

Ramesh Rangarajan: My father felt very strongly about [reservation policy]. He saw that some people who got the barest passing mark would get into college, and others who got 90 percent would not. It was a bold movie, and nobody was prepared to make it, so it came to him. He took it as a challenge. In a way, maybe he knew he was going to face this [legal challenge].

S. Raghunathan: At the time, Aryama and I were part of a firm called Natraj, Rao, Raghu & Sundaram. We were partners. S. Rangarajan being my brother-in-law, this case came to us, and Aryama got really deeply involved with it. It was immediately apparent that this could be a landmark case.

Aryama Sundaram: “Ore Oru Gramathile” was clearly a movie on reverse discrimination. It was very hard-hitting, because it criticized the Supreme Court’s upholding of reservation, and it criticized politicians who were using reservation as a method of stirring up passions. It had gone for censorship approval [in August 1987], and first the committee refused the certificate. Then an appellate committee granted it, and a second revising committee [in December 1987] also approved a certificate. At which point, a writ petition was filed in the Madras High Court.

S. Raghunathan: There had been a few demonstrations outside the offices of The Hindu [where S. Rangarajan was publisher] by the Dravidar Kazhagam and the Dr. Ambedkar People’s Movement. So this was what the government was pointing to, when it said that there might be law and order problems.

Ramesh Rangarajan: By this time, the distributors of the film had started to worry. A lot of money was stuck. Anybody else, I think, would have just shelved the whole bloody project.

The writ petition was dismissed by a single judge in the Madras High Court, but on appeal, a Division Bench allowed the petition and revoked the censor certificate that had been granted.

Aryama Sundaram: So it came up before the bench, and there were long arguments on it, and on a Thursday, judgment was reserved after hearing these arguments. But in the meantime, the government of India had given the film a national award, in the “Best Film on Social Issues” category. It hadn’t even been released, but we had sent it in.

Ramesh Rangarajan: It won an award! That was the beauty of this whole thing!

S. Raghunathan: I must have watched this film at least four times in that period, including once with the judges in the Division Bench. There was a brilliant performance by Lakshmi [Narayan, the starring actress], I remember.

Aryama Sundaram: The award was supposed to be presented by the president on Monday, in New Delhi. On Friday, at 3 p.m., the bench sent for us and told us that the film was banned for opposing reservation policy and going against the judgments [on reservation] of the Supreme Court. They also said that they were restraining the government from giving this award. It was a very long judgment – a hundred-odd pages – which was in a way a blessing in disguise, because it gave the Supreme Court a chance to reiterate the Constitution’s values of free speech.

Ramesh Rangarajan: I was in my first or second year of college when this was all happening, and I remember my father coming home every day from his office to tell us what had happened in court.

S. Raghunathan: Rangarajan was initially not very worried about this process, but in its later stages, he started to become very tense. I don’t remember him personally appearing in the high court, or even in the Supreme Court. But he never really expected the decision to go against us, I think, because this was such flimsy ground.

Aryama Sundaram: After the Division Bench gave us its judgment, we prepared an overnight appeal to the Supreme Court and filed it on Saturday morning. We got special permission from the Chief Justice of India to have the case listed. It was the first case listed on Monday morning, and the Supreme Court immediately stayed the order as far as the award was concerned.

S. Raghunathan: Ramesh had to rush from the
court to Siri Fort Auditorium to receive the award from the president that Monday.

Aryama Sundaram: Justice Shetty was an excellent judge, and I think the others on that bench were Justices K. N. Singh and Kuldip Singh. They heard really elaborate arguments and saw the film as well, with English subtitles. Then [on March 30, 1989] they upheld the right of the producer to release the film, and they held that freedom of speech could not be suppressed. And I had expected exactly this. I remember there were huge demonstrations outside the Supreme Court on the days of arguments, by people thinking they could influence the court. But fortunately they couldn’t.

S. Rangarajan: There’s no doubt about it: The spirit of that judgment is being violated today [with the Rushdie affair and others].

Aryama Sundaram: Look at this situation today. If people want to suppress somebody saying something, threatening some violence is the line of least resistance. This is exactly what Justice Shetty was talking about. Rangarajan believed in his film, and he felt it had a right to say what it did.

More:
India Ink: From Tamil Film, a Landmark Case on Free Speech