My right not to be censored

As ‘Parzania’ is kept out of theatres in Gujarat, the question is: Can a ban on a book, play or painting ever serve a larger cause?

The Indian state banned Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988 and 27 years later film exhibitors ruled out the screening of Parzania in Gujarat. In both cases it was feared that an otherwise creative work might enrage political passions, cause law and order problems, lead to the destruction of private and public property. What on earth, defenders of censorship can ask, is wrong with this? Individuals, howsoever creative, sometimes need to be curtailed in the interests of the public good. Reportedly activists of the Bajrang Dal warned owners of cinema houses in Gujarat that any decision on whether the film on the human consequences of post-Godhra riots should be screened, should keep in mind the interests of the state. That the theatre owners’ decision is prompted by commerce more, and by considerations of ethics less, is not as important as the basic question: why is censorship of a book, a film, a play, or a painting wrong, if the ban serves a larger cause?

We can only answer this question when we ask the reverse question: Why is censorship wrong? What does censorship do to the authors of a text? At an obvious level, censorship denies the author the basic right to freedom of expression. Human beings have the right to articulate their opinions, and give form to their creativity, their notions of how things are and how they should be. This is what being human means — to reflect on what it means to belong to society, to critique social practices, to dream of a desired society and to give expression to these yearnings. I may not agree with the precise way in which you frame your opinion or your creativity. But as the philosopher Voltaire put it, ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’. Censorship denies basic rights to the creator of the text, and thereby the right to be human.

Certainly, freedom of expression, like other rights, is not absolute; it can be limited by the principle of serious harm. If an inflammatory speech leads to communal or caste riots in which other persons are seriously harmed, the speech giver is culpable under law. What else counts for serious harm? Consider incidents in which either ‘this’ group or ‘that’ has demanded that a book be withdrawn, or a film not be screened. In India, increasingly groups who tend to belong to one particular ideology get agitated over representations of Saraswati by M.F. Husain on the grounds that this representation ‘hurts’ their sentiments. Deepa Mehta was not allowed by the same kind of group to film Water on the same pretext. Irate mutterings accompanied her earlier film Fire; the film, it was said, was against Indian culture. Historians cannot criticise Shivaji because he is an icon of Maharashtra. The film Fanaa could not be shown in Gujarat because the hero commented adversely on the Narmada issue. Now Parzania cannot be shown in the same state, because it might perchance harm the interests of the state.

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But what is the notion of harm that is being employed here? Husain’s sketch of Saraswati followed a well-known and historical genre of representation in India. The film Water documents the plight of widows, not unknown to the newspaper-reading public. The film Fire deals with a phenomenon which is again not unknown — alternative sexualities. Fanaa was banned because the hero said something that had been documented in hundreds of government and non-government reports: That lakhs of people in the Narmada valley have been displaced without proper compensation. And hundreds of published and unpublished reports about what happened in Gujarat are in the public domain.

In all these cases, the basic freedom of the author of the work has been violated, even though the exercise of his or her right has not resulted in serious harm. But our rights as readers, as watchers of films, as art lovers, and as citizens have also been violated. To watch a film is to engage in a dialogue with the filmmaker, to respond to the issues raised and the manner in which they have been raised, to criticise them and to mull over them. A good filmmaker shakes society out of its complacency, forces people to think.

Censorship deprives us of this ‘waking up’. It violates two rights — your right to tell me a story, howsoever wracking that story might be. It also violates my right to learn from that story. Either way, censorship prevents communication. This defeats the purpose of democracy; the rights of authors not to be prevented by the actions of other agents from communicating their ideas to others who might wish to hear them.

–The writer is a professor of political science, University of Delhi