A New Idea of India: Individual Rights in a Civilisational State

by Harsh Gupta 'Madhusudan'

The right to offend is fundamental to free speech. Free speech is also about the State protecting individuals from being at the receiving end of physical attacks from others.

These ‘reasonable restrictions’ were inserted by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. This First Amendment was supported by B.R. Ambedkar and staunchly opposed by Syama Prasad Mookerjee.

Nehru told Parliament that the free press was ‘poisoning

the minds of the younger generation, degrading their mental integrity and moral standards’. He accused some of the media properties of propagating ‘vulgarity, indecency and falsehood’.141 Jawaharlal Nehru, feted by historian Ramachandra Guha as a man who ‘respected the press’,142 succeeded in pushing through the amendment, including vague generalities like public order, decency or morality, friendly relations with foreign countries and other arbitrary causes in the interest of which restrictions on speech could be imposed.

Time magazine, reporting on the issue, said at the time that Prime Minister Nehru was more interested in muzzling criticism of his foreign and domestic policies from news weeklies such as ...

For America, the State is but a constitutionally restricted agent of the individual. In India, the onus is on the individual to show that he or she is within their rights to do something. In the US, the government has to prove that it is constitutionally valid to regulate an undeniable freedom. This is the difference between lip-service to freedom and true freedom. The State should exist merely as a guarantor–protector of rights that individuals inalienably have.

The defence of free speech as the cornerstone of individual rights should not be merely on normative or utilitarian grounds.

in the name of a dubious multiculturalism, Dutch politician Geert Wilders’s speech was banned in some countries but Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary was allowed free reign—while being on government welfare.

Even if we had a Solomon to sieve art into sacred and sacrilegious, it would inevitably be perceived as unfair by one party or the other. That is why it is better to allow all speech in the public sphere.

(284). Clearly, India has under-invested in law enforcement. No wonder then that it chooses the easy way out by silencing the Tiwaris and the Rushdies of the world rather than trying to control the mobs baying for their blood.

Kamlesh Tiwari’s murder has echoes of the assassination of Swami Shraddhanand by Abdul Rashid in 1926. Shraddhanand’s crime was to propagate shuddhi, or re-conversion to Hinduism,

It would be a travesty to treat defamation of a politician by a citizen and defamation of a citizen by a politician equally.

The legendary Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s advice is in order here. In 2003, the Maharashtra state government had banned a book on Shivaji Maharaj by American academic James Laine after protests by Maratha groups. Prime Minister Vajpayee, who had been invited to unveil Shivaji’s statue at Mumbai airport, told the audience that he ‘could understand criticism of books but not ban or boycott … If you want to make a line appear short, do not erase it but draw a longer one beside it,’ he said, with none other than Balasaheb Thackeray sitting on the dais.

Lala Lajpat Rai, writing in 1924 from the vantage point of undivided Muslim-majority Punjab, would probably have disagreed with Mookerjee and Vajpayee.150 He believed that ‘unity has a price which they will have to pay before it can be achieved’. Rai was speaking in the context of Hindu-Muslim unity and the price was the compromise that adherents of both the religions needed to make so as to live together peacefully. He wasn’t a votary of absolute rights, be it religious freedom or speech. ‘I contend that there is no such thing as an absolute right vested in any individual or in any community forming part of a nation; that all rights are relative, that no society can remain intact even for twenty-four hours on the basis of absolute rights,’ he wrote.

One cannot emphasise enough the impracticality of arriving at such an arrangement which would require consensus among tens of millions of people. Lofty idealism is often the graveyard of common sense.

From the perspective of enforceability, Rai was essentially advocating the present-day French model which actively discourages all public displays of religiosity.

In an interview152 to the Financial Times, when asked why she had not acted earlier to stop the violence during Assam’s Nellie massacre of 18 February 1983, when the state was under President’s rule, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had said, ‘One has to let such events take their own course before stepping in.

As part of the Accord, 310 charge-sheeted criminal cases related to the Nellie violence were dropped by the Union government155—a curious case of the Union government exonerating itself, given that the violence took place when Assam was under President’s rule and hence under the control of Indira Gandhi.

‘When a big tree falls, the earth shakes,’ Rajiv Gandhi had said, referring to his mother’s killing.

H.K.L. Bhagat and his supporters beating their chests and shouting “Khoon ka badla khoon se lenge” (Blood will be avenged with blood).

Singh claimed while campaigning during the 1999 general elections that the 1984 pogrom had been orchestrated by the RSS and that the Congress party had nothing to do with it.

In October 2017, Manmohan Singh shared the stage with Sajjan Kumar.161 In December 2018, Sajjan Kumar was convicted for his role in the riots.

The 1984 pogrom wasn’t even investigated properly till the A.B. Vajpayee government constituted the G.T. Nanavati Commission in 2000.

Not only did the Special Investigation Team (SIT) constituted by the Supreme Court fully exonerate Modi, the 541-page SIT closure report recorded that ‘Modi was busy with steps to control the situation, establishment of relief camps for riot victims and also with efforts to restore peace and normalcy’

According to an article in the Mainstream Weekly published in 2010, the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front coalition that governed West Bengal from 1977–2009 committed over 55,000 political murders.

we wholeheartedly agree with Amartya Sen when he says that there is no philosophy of attacking minorities in the Congress party—because they can actually kill in practice, there is no need to kill in theory.

Nehru went a step further when, in a May 1964 interview, he said that ‘Hindus … are not a proselytising race … Muslims were keen on proselytising and getting converts. Nearly all Muslims of India are descendants of Hindus. Only a handful came from outside.

Nehru, who was the first prime minister to abuse Article 356 and dismiss Kerala’s elected state government in 1959.

This Stalinist template, where no distinction is made between the party and the State, and the executive is debased at the expense of the party, was pioneered by Nehru and has been followed by almost all successive Congress prime ministers—Sonia Gandhi carried it to a new high during the UPA government years.

Speaking at the launch of the Swatantra party in August 1959, he said: I have come to the conclusion that a movement for freedom, as important and as serious as the movement for independence against British rule, has now to be inaugurated against this misconceived progress of the Congress towards what will finally end in the suppression of individual liberty and the development of the State into a true Leviathan.

‘The Congress Party has swung to the Left, what is wanted is not an ultra or outer-Left … but a strong and articulate Right,’ he wrote in his essay Our Democracy

Threatened by the fact that Swatantra was gaining traction and had secured forty-four seats in the 1967 general elections to become the principal opposition party, Indira Gandhi went out of her way to crush the party’s backers—the former royal families and the business community

Patel had said that before any ideas of nationalisation could be considered, a vibrant environment for private industry needed to be created.

Only Patel commanded the political heft to counter Nehru, and with his demise the ‘conservative’ wing within the Congress lost its strongest ballast. K.M. Munshi, who was an ally of Sardar Patel and had been instrumental in the re-establishment of the Somnath temple, also joined the Swatantra Party in 1959.

The charge of not being inclusive is also inaccurate. The word ‘inclusive’ has become a euphemism to justify irresponsible and wasteful government spending, usually based upon identity, and is parroted by all those who promote the type of socialism that kept India impoverished for decades.

Savarkar understood that an agrarian society, fractured by the caste system, could not become a nation. Consequently, along with advocating the embrace of industrialisation and the modern world, Hindutva was also an anti-caste movement.

Patel unreservedly condemned the methods adopted by Communists as being against the rule of law—he said, ‘Their philosophy is to exploit every situation, to create chaos and anarchy, in the belief that, in such conditions, it would be possible for them to seize power.

The same charges—fascist, communalist, capitalist—were made against Patel during his lifetime and since his demise have now been levelled against Modi.

Yet, ensuring one person’s (say, Ram’s) negative liberty does not significantly affect another person’s (say, Shyam’s) negative liberty unless one insists that murder or theft is liberty.

But to pretend that mandated redistribution is somehow consistent with negative liberty and individual freedom—indeed, is the very essence of liberty or freedom—is to indulge in Orwellian sophistry.

But inefficiently run programmes are certainly not consistent with individual freedom, especially of the taxpayer, and it must be remembered that the poor also pay indirect taxes and, perhaps even more perniciously, the ‘inflation tax’.

It is presumptuous to assume that only people who agree with Sen’s statist philosophy care for the poor, while others do not.

The Second Five-Year Plan noted that India would ‘provide sound foundations for the development of cooperative farming, so that over a period of 10 years or so, a substantial portion of agricultural lands are cultivated on cooperative lines’.10 Fortunately for India, collectivisation of agriculture was prevented due to resistance from farmers along with leaders like Sucheta Kripalani and Chaudhary Charan Singh—who went on to become prime minister in 1979.

Jagdish Bhagwati wrote in his book In Defense Of Globalization about this garbled state of affairs: Deconstructionism … amounts to an endless horizon of meanings. … Derrida’s technique will deconstruct any political ideology, including Marxism. Typically, however, it is focused on deconstructing and devaluing capitalism rather than Marxism. … Foucault’s emphasis on discourses as instruments of power and dominance has also led to what is often described as an ‘anti-rational’ approach that challenges the legitimacy of academic disciplines, including economics, and their ability to get at the ‘truth

As part of the Atmanirbhar Bharat economic reforms package of 2020, certain agricultural commodities were removed from the Essential Commodities Act, 1955, reducing market distortions.21 Minister of Agriculture Narendra Singh Tomar described farming as a ‘business’, saying that: Farmers … are perhaps the only producers who neither decide the price of their produce nor sell it to the buyer of their choice. Moreover, they are tied to all sorts of rules and regulations. If you take any other business, the producer is free to produce his goods, sell to whoever he wants, and at any place of his choice. Therefore, these big reforms were badly needed for boosting farmer income.

All the opposition parties simply adopted different hues of the same socialist thinking that the Congress, as the pre-eminent political party in independent India, championed under Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. Apart from the Swatantra Party, only the Bharatiya Jan Sangh differed sharply from the Congress.

Democratic capitalism, in contrast, creates space for individual self-discovery without an obsessive regard for material outcomes being equal.

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi acknowledged during a May 2019 interview, in the Dharmic system, even the hedonism of the Charvaka worldview has been given due recognition,27 despite a large number of people disagreeing with it.

An infographic capturing the leading causes of death in the twentieth century,29 published by a London based journalist in 2012, is now a popular and powerful internet meme.30 The artwork shows that 142 million had been killed because of ideology, of which 94 million deaths were caused by communism, with massive killings taking place in its name in China, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and North Korea. The death count because of communism exceeds deaths caused by fascism, terrorism, and even both the World Wars.

Cato Institute research fellow Swaminathan Aiyar published a paper in October 2009 titled ‘Socialism kills: The human cost of delayed economic reform in India’.32 Aiyar wrote that ‘14.5 million more children would have survived, 261 million would have become literate and 109 million more people would have risen above the poverty line’ had India initiated economic reforms in 1971.