FEBRUARY 14, 2013

While freedom of speech and expression in India is under attack from all sides, have you noticed how the rich and the powerful can say what they like without getting arrested, facing FIRs and courts, hiring lawyers and so on?

While an innocuous tweet or Facebook status update can land you in police lock-up on a Saturday night or Sunday morning 5 am, a Digvijaya Singh can say sexist crap against Rakhi Sawant and get away with it.

Here’s another example from Twitter recently. Lalit Modi of IPL infamy, who wants us to believe his coming to India and facing the law is a security threat to him, tweeted that the BJP’s  Arun Jaitley would lose his deposit if he contested the Lok Sabha seat from Jaipur. (Lalit Modi thinks he’s the Maharaja of Rajasthan.) In response to that, one Ankush Jain replied…

lalit-modi-arun-jaitley-barkha-dutt-radia-tapes

You can see there, Barkha Dutt’s threat to sue three people,one of whom said nothing, was merely tagged there. Ankush Jain was so terrified he deleted not just his Tweet but even his twitter account! I don’t blame him. He’s probably a student or a government employee or runs a shop somewhere… he wouldn’t want to face legal notices and police stations and court-rooms. Lalit K Modi on the other hand has no such problem. He counter-threatened Barkha Dutt with legal notices. Jain’s offending tweet still exists in the form of a manual RT by Lalit Modi, as you can see in the screenshot above.

You can see here a good summary of what happened on Twitter over this.

Some people then pointed out on Twitter that a similar allegation was made by Vinod Mehta in his book Lucknow Boy but Dutt never sued Mehta. Here is a screenshot from the Google Books version of Mehta’s book:

Lucknow Boy A Memoir - Vinod Mehta - Google Books - Mozilla Firefox_2013-02-13_23-40-57

So while an Ankush Jain is bullied into deleting his Twitter account, a Vinod Mehta can sit pretty.

The Indian Constitution promises freedom of speech and equality. Both promises are just that. The Internet’s democratisation of public discourse hurts the rich and the powerful and they are striking back. The rest of us feel helpless.

Lawrence Liang’s two posts from Kafila archives are worthy of recall:

This sentiment reminds me of Anatole France’s famous statement that the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. The quick equation of an individual blogger with the might of a newspaper or a magazine is a little troubling. Individuals do not have the same kind of power, money or reach to be able to defend themselves in the way that newspapers may be capable of. [Bloggers and Defamation]

And:

So why is the punishment redundant? Because it doesn’t really matter. The mere fact that the provision exists and the fact that it allows for the possibility for someone to file a police complaint or threaten police action serves the purpose of intimidating speakers, reader, organizers regardless of the fact that in most cases if it were to go to trial, it would be highly unlikely that the offending act would be found to be in violation of the provisions. The courts have laid down reasonably high standards for interpreting what would amount to a violation of these laws, and have even acknowledged their misuse. [The process is the bloody punishment]

Where the mind is without fear, where the head is held high…