BackViews | The right to disturb the peace
Views | The right to disturb the peace
PremiumThe Wikipedia website is arranged on a laptop and tablet computer. Photo: Bloomberg
It’s interesting how freedom of speech has suddenly become a burning issue in the last couple of weeks. All the largest Internet players in the US—from Google to Facebook to Yahoo—are up in arms against the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) which comes up for vote in the US Congress a few days from now. As I write, Wikipedia.org is maintaining a 24-hour blackout of its English-language site in protest. In the Delhi High Court, lawyers representing Google and Facebook are arguing against what they are terming “government censorship"—the Union government wants them to be responsible for anything that appears on their sites that may be seditious, affect communal harmony, and so on. There’s uncertainty whether Salman Rushdie will visit the Jaipur Literary Festival, after Islamic seminary Darul Uloom Deoband demanded that he be prohibited from entering India.
But the SOPA-enraged point out that the language of the bill is broad enough to justify the blocking of almost any site. SOPA, they say, will make sure that that there will never be another Youtube or Wikipedia, and definitely not Wikileaks. Besides, a site that has millions of pages can be blocked in its entirety if only one of its pages falls foul of the law. SOPA supporters point out that a site like Google gives links to pirate sites and makes money by selling ads around them.
In India, a lower court judge has already told Google that if the site could censor its search function for China, it could very well do it for India. Whatever the final outcome, the point which neither the US Congress nor Kapil Sibal, the minister who started it all here, do not seem to understand that it’s virtually impossible for these sites to check the massive amount of content generated, hosted or linked by them, so it’s totally unfair to penalize them. India already has an uber-draconian Information Technology Act, which gives the right to a junior policeman to arrest anyone on mere suspicion. Some years ago, the CEO of auction site baazee.com had to spend a few nights in jail because among the thousands of items put up for sale by the site’s members, there was one piece of “obscene" material.
Filters are not fool-proof, and may inadvertently cause real—and often ridiculous—inconvenience. I have worked for a business paper, where the overzealous IT department put in a search filter on words like “sex" and “job". The immediate fallout: we would get no search results if we keyed in “sensex" or “Steve Jobs". This, in a business daily. The whole thing became a joke.
To come to Rushdie, as my friend Nilanjana S Roy put it in her column in Business Standard: “In all the arguments made against Salman Rushdie’s attendance at the Jaipur Literature Festival this week, the gist of them is just this: he disturbs the peace." But all great literature (or work of art) disturbs the peace in its own way—by questioning tradition, urging us to see in new and different ways, even by being a call to arms. At its core is the concept of “doubt", without which there can be no progress, no equity, and above all, nothing at all that is new. A world without doubt is a world of endless recapitulation. There can be no freedom of anything, at any level, if doubt is stamped upon. The Deoband clerics have every right to protest peacefully, and Rushdie has every right to seed doubt. It will be truly sad for Indian democracy if Rushdie is barred from coming to India (Disclaimer: I personally think he is a pompous ass, the quality of whose literary output has been going downhill rapidly).
As for SOPA, I must admit that I have never downloaded a pirated movie or song in my life (OK, I am a fool). I believe in the sanctity of copyright and the right of a creator to earn the fair and due income for his work. But all such legislation seems to always fail in its primary objective, and become a convenient tool for harassment and intimidation for governments. And in the context of Facebook’s troubles in India, terms like “disturbing communal harmony" are broad and flexible enough to serve the motives of anyone in a position of power, whether legally vested or not.
I think it’ll be many years—if ever—before lawmakers and judges are able to make sense of what the internet is. And why blame them? Can anyone grasp even a small fraction of the extent of its power and possibilities—both overt and insidious? It would be much better if we drew all our opinions from some basic principles: freedom, inalienable rights and the necessity of doubt.
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