It was with heavy hearts that the coordinators of the Jaipur Literary Festival cancelled the web link planned for Salman Rushdie, who was set to address an audience of thousands for the festival’s finale last Tuesday. Rushdie had initially been invited to speak at the festival, but, following threats to assassinate him in the event that he went, the author opted to stay away. It was only on the afternoon of the final day, however, just hours before an interview in a London studio with Rushdie was due to be broadcast live in Jaipur, that protesters, intimidation, and the promise of bloodshed if the interview went ahead, caused the festival organisers to capitulate to the browbeating of those intent on silencing the writer’s voice.
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of free speech as a part of the bedrock of society. Freedom of expression is a crucial ingredient in any of the recipes that societies might follow in order to create the conditions for a good life. Radical opinion is softened as people are exposed to others and their ideas, and not the straw men they imagined them to be. Authority is (better) kept on the straight and narrow, and in the interests of those over whom it is exerted. Progress is made, in all fields, as creativity is fostered and ideas shared. The miasma of conformity is averted, as individuality is given a free reign to express itself and differentiate itself from others. Most importantly, people are granted the fundamental freedom to say what they want without fear of reprisal.
The recent curtailment of Salman Rushdie’s right to self-expression is worth noting because it is symptomatic of a political and cultural disposition towards a lack of respect for the importance of basic freedoms. Rushdie arrived unannounced, in 2007, at the then comparatively anonymous Jaipur festival, without any entourage or security. He talked freely, signed books, and doled out advice to an admiring host of relatively unproven authors. But this time, politicians were loath to speak out in defence of Rushdie’s right to return to his home country to talk about his work, in the wake of calls for the author to be banned from India altogether. This is to some extent a result of the fact that Rajasthan, the Indian state in which Jaipur is the largest city, will soon hold elections, the result of which is expected to be largely determined by the Muslim population – the group most offended by Rushdie’s provocative novel, The Satanic Verses.
Groups monitoring censorship are generally agreed that India is reasonably free. But the events at the Jaipur Literary Festival bring into focus the widespread perception of freedom of expression as expendable, and lightly traded away. The ease with which political expediency led to curtailment of freedoms is what is distressing in this episode. Rushdie conveyed this idea himself in the aftermath of the cancellation of his speech, bemoaning religious extremists’ power to suppress free speech, and politicians, who he says are “in bed with these groups… for narrow electoral reasons.”
That freedom of speech, and the State’s built-in reluctance to curtail it, is of paramount importance to a flourishing society, is not at odds with the fact that people shouldn’t be free to say whatever they want, whenever they want. Falsely pronouncing a fire in the Oxford Playhouse is not something that I am, or should be, free to do. Nor does ‘Free Speech’ entitle me to preach words of incitement outside a mosque. There are instances in which we value an individual’s freedom to express himself less than we do something else: say, the safety and wellbeing of those who have come somewhere to worship. The most recent and pertinent example of this is that of the British press. British culture is so irrevocably imbued with the value of freedom of expression that any contravention of that freedom is met with a healthy dose of wariness, lest any initial step in the direction of censorship take us plunging down an irretrievably slippery slope. Such is our aversion to limitations on what the papers can say that it took the hacking of a murdered girl’s voicemail to make us look somewhat askance at the press. But there is reason to be more quizzical of its activities. Why is it so important, in any given instance, for an individual’s sexual indiscretions to be aired publically and his life thrown into turmoil? Why do we balk more at the thought of stipulating what can and can’t be published, than at the notion that a news-hungry reporter is at leave to disrupt another human being’s life for the sake of a story? ‘The public interest’ is an ephemeral and often meaningless reason proffered in defence of stories whose aim is malicious. Why shouldn’t someone be awarded a super-injunction if it might really preserve their quality of life, at the expense of a scandal that will, at best, be of mild interest to people for a few weeks?
The problem with all this is that, while it may be that individuals’ wellbeing trumps freedom of expression in a lot of one off cases, any regulatory system or cultural backdrop which has this censorship as a feature is a bad one. If one footballer’s anonymity could have been preserved, with no wider ramifications for what papers can report when it really matters, then give the man a super-injunction. But it’s doubtful that things work like this. Cultural norms and practices are fluid. Right now we recoil from constraining people’s right to speak freely. And how much any one instance of censorship sends us down a slippery slope is debatable. All I know is that I’d prefer that the default approach was tolerance of people’s words and their right to say them, rather than a climate in which an author can’t even appear via a web link to air his views.
