The right to offend

It took a judge to point out what should be obvious in a democracy — freedom of expression includes the right to express ideas that may not be liked by everyone and that India’s “new puritanism” debases our values and, in a fundamental sense, threatens our freedom. So as we thank the Delhi High Court for its uncompromising judgment on the M.F. Husain case, we should also examine why the “puritans”, a minority, can engender such fearful indifference in most of the majority. Husain’s self-imposed exile in Dubai condemns Liberal India, and Liberal India must read the court’s observations very carefully.

Freedom of speech must include the freedom to offend. Democracy is not a luncheon party, and some people are bound to be upset by the views of others. The commitment to free speech is tested precisely by the idea that is unpalatable — that everyone has the right to free expression, backed by the full force of law, and ideas can only be countered by other ideas, not extra-institutional campaigns. As Rushdie put it, “it is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.” Besides, the very impulse of art is to confront and unsettle — to expect creative expression to confine itself to some bland consensus strips it of its essence.

During the worst of the culture wars in the United States, when Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs and Andres Serrano’s artwork raised Republican hackles, the response was to propose cuts in federal funding for such art. Republicans didn’t say Mapplethorpe should be banned, hounded, targeted, etc. But in India, politicians, whether on the Right or the Left or the centre, use mobs to set the entire discourse, cowing local authorities. The courts sadly have not been unwavering in their defence either, despite landmark judgments like S. Rangarajan vs P. Jagjivan Ram stating that “freedom of expression cannot be suppressed on account of threats of demonstrations and violence” and the reminder that the judging perspective should be that of “an ordinary man of common sense, and not that of a hypersensitive one”. The high court’s progressive, enlightened judgment distils the debate; let’s hope that future judgments on the matter uphold the rights of imagination over the demands of bigotry.