Free speech is not negotiable
There is a message for the political class in Supreme Court’s reiteration of the constitutional right
The Supreme Court Friday reiterated that the right to free speech is non-negotiable. The two-judge bench, while quashing an FIR against a Congress MP booked for tweeting a poem, said that police officials are “bound to honour and uphold freedom of speech and expression conferred on all citizens”. Citing a procedural safeguard in BNSS, the new criminal procedure code, the court said the police must conduct a preliminary inquiry before registering an FIR in cases involving “spoken or written words”.
The apex court’s reiteration of the right to free speech should force people in authority to reflect on the prevalence of intolerance towards criticism, including when the medium is humour, satire and other forms of comedy. This tendency cuts across the political spectrum: Parties and leaders speak up for free speech only when the aggressor is their rival. For sure, the right to freedom of speech and expression in the Indian Constitution comes with reasonable restrictions. But as the court echoed in its order, the restrictions need to be reasonable and proportionate. The order says, “The reasonable restrictions provided for in Article 19(2) must remain reasonable and not fanciful and oppressive. Article 19(2) cannot be allowed to overshadow the substantive rights under Article 19(1)(a).” The emphasis has to be on reasonable, not restriction. The onus is now on the “aggrieved parties” — often, politicians — to imbibe the spirit of the judgment. There is always an outside chance that the administration may try to sidestep the Court’s directive and overcome the layer of immunity in the BNSS by turning the preliminary inquiry into a farce and book an accused. So, while legal guardrails are welcome and essential, the political class needs to accept that satire, ridicule, caricature, humour and other instruments of the comic form are an integral feature of a combative and boisterous democracy, which is what India should be. This is why, ruling in favour of a cartoonist in Tamil Nadu (2018), Justice GR Swaminathan of the Madras High Court held that the cartoonist has the right to ridicule. India, of course, has a great tradition — oral, written and performative — privileging the right of artists to challenge authority.
Ironically, the right to ridicule was accepted by the political class in the early years of Independence. The turnaround was the Emergency (1975-77), which saw a crackdown on all forms of dissent — humour, which can be a great instrument of dissent, naturally, was censored. In 1987, the Tamil Nadu assembly imposed a three-month jail term on a magazine editor for a cartoon that ridiculed legislators. In May 2012, Parliament near-unanimously censured political cartoons in an NCERT political science textbook. The apex court’s order is a reminder to the State — and the political class — to uphold the Constitution’s commitment to free speech. And to do it with a smile.
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