Terrorism must never destroy freedom of speech

How does one define terror? The best definition, to my mind, is in a book published in 1901, a time when terrorism as we know it today, didn’t exist. Christopher Hitchens quotes from it in his memoir Hitch 22. It comes from HFB Lynch’s Armenia: Travels and Studies: “Terror, the most abject terror, is in the atmosphere about us — a consuming passion, like that of jealousy — a haunting, exhausting spectre, which sits like a blight upon life. Such a settled state of terror is one the most awful of human phenomena. The air holds ghosts, all joy is dead; the sun is black, the mouth parched, the mind rent and in tatters.”

Terror

Over the last few weeks we have seen a spate of terror attacks, each one very different from the other. There was the lone wolf attack in a Sydney cafe. There was the unprecedented massacre of more than a hundred schoolchildren in Pakistan. And then, most recently, the terror strike in Paris.

The horrific shooting at the offices of French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo though is different from the usual. It was more than mere bloodshed. It was an attack on something abstract, a treasured French value — the freedom of speech, which also includes the right to insult. The gunmen violently attacked individuals who stood for and executed these values, every working day of their lives. The French have a grand tradition of satire, and Charlie Hebdo had its own glorious past. It was not just fundamentalist Islam that their cartoonists lampooned. The Pope wasn’t spared either. Neither were governments around the world. Nor were homophobes and racists. The idea being that there are no holy cows. Everything that should be sent up was sent up. Behind the joke lies something very serious. It’s about questioning and critiquing the world around us. And doing so in as provocative a manner as possible. You ruffle feathers, you ruffle feathers. There is no polite way of going about it.

The freedom to mock is crucial to any vibrant democracy. From political authoritarianism to religious bigotry, Charlie took on everything and everybody. You might disagree with some of it. But you can’t stop people from expressing themselves. You certainly cannot kill them for doing so. On the contrary, as Voltaire said: “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”

Expression

The right to "say it" is what has been defended by tens of thousands of people in Europe. The pen, pencil and paintbrush have become symbols of freedom. In marches, people have held up the pen to show their solidarity with the dead cartoonists. The pencil has featured prominently in the cartoons published in the aftermath. One shows pencils raining down like missiles. Another one shows two pencils crashing into the twin towers like aeroplanes.

What we need to grasp is that freedom of speech is absolute and total. The right to offend and the right to insult is part of it. It’s a cornerstone of European and American society. You can take on one "offensive" cartoon with, maybe, another cartoon, but never with the gun. In America, the First Amendment guarantees the right to preach hatred. Words and images don’t kill anyone. Culture is all about debate and discussion, which, after all, is the business of words.

Implications

What are the implications of this for us in India? For here, it is the opposite. The right to insult is replaced with a hypocritical "right to respect". We don’t poke fun at anything. No other liberal democracy bans as many books as we do. PILs are filed at will because the "sentiments" of an individual or community are always "being hurt". There is no question of questioning the orthodoxies of religion because we "respect all religions". As the cartoonist Sudhir Tailang said, “It’s very difficult for a cartoonist living in this part of the world to be able to freely express opinions on religion.” This makes us a very unquestioning society. We blindly and unthinkingly respect everyone and everything. You respect your parents, your teachers, your elders, the boss.

You agree with everyone. At the same time we are also an extremely intolerant society where demagogues deliver inflammatory speeches at will, but creative people self-censor, or don’t question anything at all in the first place. And it’s not just about being humourless. As a society, we lack innovation, something that Nandan Nilekani never tires of pointing out. Creativity stems from irreverence, which we singularly lack. We might work more hours every week than anybody else, but at the end of the day, we remain a nation of underachievers.

You ask an average Indian why we are like this, and he’ll say: this is India. What works in Europe and France doesn’t work here. This is hardly an argument. It’s this very rigidity that prevents us from borrowing ideas and values from other cultures. It’s what prevents us from realising our dreams of becoming a "world power". We need to realise that freedom of speech is about the right to question. It’s an absolute right that has to be protected at all costs. Without it, no progress is possible.