05 Mar 14 | India, News and features, Politics and Society
In 1993 Nancy Adajania, a 21-year-old student, published an article titled Myth and Supermyth. In it she explored the way in which newly formed nations often fostered a sense of identity by converting their historical figures into national icons. Her article provoked angry protests across the state of Maharashtra, India’s financial hub, where she was charged and arrested for insulting the memory of Shivaji, a 17 century king revered in the state as a Hindu hero. Justice Saldanha considered Adajania’s bail application and said in his judgment: values from “the dark ages” must not be allowed to “turn the clock backwards” on freedom of expression.
And yet the clock has been turned back, and this became clear once again last month when Penguin India agreed to withdraw and destroy all copies of The Hindus, a monograph by the Sanskritist Wendy Doniger. The publishers pulped the book after a four-year legal battle with the Shiksha Bachao Andolan (Save Education Movement), a fundamentalist Hindu outfit that complained the book “insulted” their religion.
In a statement released after the out-of-court settlement Penguin condemned India’s criminal laws, which it said undermined free expression. In no legal system is freedom of speech an absolute, unqualified right. Liberal jurisdictions do, however, recognise that free expression is integral to a free society, and ensure that any qualifications to the right are limited. In India the right to free speech is enshrined in Article 19 of the Constitution, but it is immediately and extensively qualified by Article 19(2) which gives the state licence to impose “reasonable restrictions” – a broad power justifying curtailments based on vague notions such as “morality” and “decency”.
The state and private petitioners have equally exploited India’s penal code to harass, censor or silence individuals. Beyond religion and folk history, politicians and big business have used criminal proceedings to muzzle activists, social workers and political commentators. In 2012 Aseem Trivedi, a satirical cartoonist, was charged with sedition – a crime against the state – for publishing cartoons criticising official corruption. Arundhati Roy, the author and essayist, was similarly threatened with sedition charges for publicly speaking in favour of the Kashmiri right to self-determination. The silencing of personal opinion now also extends to social media. In 2012 a 21-year-old was arrested for hurting religious sentiments after she criticised the decision by authorities to shutdown Mumbai to mark the death of a controversial local politician.
As Faisal Devji, a historian at the University of Oxford, notes, the agents of censorship in India have changed. The colonial-era penal code served the repressive functions of the Raj, but the state has long since been replaced by hard-line extremist groups. For many this shift occurred in 1988 when Rajiv Gandhi, a former Prime Minister, bowed down to pressure from Muslim fundamentalists and banned imports of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.
In the 2014 World Press Freedom Index, Reporters without Borders ranked India 140 out of 180 countries. India’s denial of free speech in Kashmir and other insurgency-inflicted areas is well established. In its report Reporters with Borders go further, noting journalists are “abandoned by the judicial system” and subjected to “threats and physical violence”, forcing themselves to self-censor. Security forces, criminal groups, demonstrators and members of political organisations are all implicated, the report goes on, in the erosion of freedom of speech.
The state has consistently failed in its duty to safeguard the right to free speech, and increasingly stands back to allow extremists to trample on it. As well as opportunistic politicians the courts, as Ramachandra Guha a prominent Indian historian explains, are also to blame. Before M.F. Husain, India’s most celebrated painter, fled India in self-imposed exile, courts across the country entertained spurious cases filed against him from angry Hindus offended by the artist’s portrayal of Indian gods.
Last year Salman Rushdie described the deterioration of free expression in India as a “cultural emergency”. The extent of this emergency was made shockingly clear when Hoot, a media watchdog, published its annual Free Speech report. In 2013 alone eight journalists were killed, 99 counts of official censorship were recorded and India’s surveillance infrastructure grew to include the Central Monitoring System, National Intelligence Grid and ad hoc interceptions of electronic communications.
Free speech in India is under attack on two fronts: top-down state censorship has been matched by the bottom-up moral policing of ad hoc fundamentalist groups. As Pranab Bhanu Mehta, a leading commentator, warns, “If the state gives taking offence such aid and succour, offence will be easily taken.” Indeed, the clock is at risk of being turned back much further. Emboldened by its victory the Shiksha Bachao Andolan is now determined to see Doniger’s other works destroyed. As Dinanath Batra, the organisation’s octogenarian leader said during a recent interview, “Freedom of expression cannot trample our identity, culture, religion and tradition. We cannot allow anti-national writings.”
This article was published on March 5, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
20 Feb 14 | Asia and Pacific, India, News and features
(Image: Lok Sabha TV)
India’s lower house of parliament – the Lok Sabha – though capable of witnessing introspective and impressive debates, is often in the news because of the bawdy and boisterous behaviour of its elected members. Obstructionist behaviour – unacceptable in streets, schools and other workplaces – is employed to register protest, all under the watchful eye of Lok Sabha TV – a government channel dedicated to broadcasting the proceedings. The transmission is used by private TV channels, to report on important debates of the day, but most often to highlight “unparliamentary” behaviour.
Only last week, a member of parliament from Vijaywada, Andhra Pradesh used, not logic or reason, but pepper spray on fellow parliamentarians to protest the tabling of the “Andhra Pradesh Reorganisational Bill”. Just five days later, on 18 February, the same bill was tabled in parliament amidst much uproar, and the house was adjourned three times due to disruptions. Then, around 3:18pm, the bill was tabled on the floor of the house, but the live proceedings that usually accompany it were “blacked out”. The government called it a “technical error” while the leader of opposition in the lower house, Sushma Swaraj of the BJP, called it a “tactical error”. Thus, for the first time in its history, the lower house of Indian parliament passed a law as important as creating a new state – by reorganising Andhra Pradesh into two states; Andhra Pradesh and Telangana – away from the media glare and the public eye. The upper house has also passed the Telangana bill, which the president — a Congress appointee — is expected to sign.
The history behind the controversial bill is long and emotional; however in a nutshell, the demand is to carve out a new state from the existing state of Andhra Pradesh, which would absorb the current state capital of Hyderabad. Protestors against such a move have argued that bifurcation would cause detriment to new Andhra Pradesh, also known as Seemandhra, as the more developed city of Hyderabad, water bodies and income opportunities would no longer be easily accessible to them. They also believe that they would be more vulnerable to the threat of naxalism, a communist ideology. The protests have been raging since 2011, which have seen many incidents of violence, vandalism, arson, ransacking, petrol bombs, tear gas, and most recently, pepper spray.
The history behind protests in the well of the house leading to disruptions and adjournments over crucial issues, of course, extends well beyond the issue of Telangana. In 2013, a report by the Times of India indicated that since the 1950s, the hours spent working in the Lok Sabha have been gradually decreasing; from about 3784 hours on average between 1952-57 (during the 1st Lok Sabha session) to 1157 hours since 2009 (the current and 15th session of the lower house). Lok Sabha floor management seems to be dismal, resulting in critical legislation still pending consensus. Further, members seem to be “trying to impress their voters back home with their commitment to the cause they are espousing” by their interruptions, using the live broadcast of Lok Sabha to their advantage. The infamous pepper spray incident wasn’t just about the MPs who were wheeled off to the hospital. Glass screens on the tables were smashed, microphones were uprooted, papers flew everywhere, and the parliamentarians were in fisticuffs with each other. The images of the day shocked the media and viewers alike, with reports calling it a “day of shame”.
On 17 February, a day before the “black out” the Indian Express reported that the government had made arrangements for the Finance Minister P. Chidambaram to read out the 2014-15 Interim Budget in the Lok Sabha TV studio, should the MPs disrupt the proceedings once again. The report also stated that: “If the speech is read from the studio, it would be the first such instance. Government managers said they hope the step won’t be necessary, but have alerted the studio authorities to be prepared.” Luckily for him, the house listened with minor interruptions and passed the bill.
However, it was just the next day that the government chose to manage the disruptions in the lower house, caused by the tabling of the Telangana bill, by ordering Lok Sabha TV to stop both, broadcasting the proceedings of the House and transmitting its live feed to other private media channels. The Economic Times reports that: “The House looked like a virtual battle-ground during the 90-minute proceedings as members resorted to slogan-shouting to protest against passage of the bill. Live telecast by Lok Sabha TV was stopped, perhaps the first time.” Many members of parliament called it a “black day” in the country’s democracy, and others likened the move to the heavy censorship employed during India’s Emergency, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi heavily censored the media. Despite a statement from Lok Sabha TV’s CEO who has called it a “snag”, the Parliamentary Minister, Kamal Nath, confirmed that the black out was “a decision of the Lok Sabha secretariat”. There are hints that the opposition, while protesting the black out loudly in public, knew about the plan to stop transmission.
Congress Minister Rajeev Shukla defended the move by saying that the media gallery was open, therefore there was no intention to keep anything behind closed doors. Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi stated in a TV interview that, “why is so much noise being about the live transmission? Eight years ago there was no live coverage. Does it mean parliament didn’t function or people did not speak? There were 200 correspondents were in the press gallery who were witness to what happened during the passage of the bill.” Others, on the winning side, like Telangana supporter KT Rama Rao felt that “people have no problem if the TV channels did not receive their TRPs. The Speaker might have decided to stop the telecast to save some lives at the moment when emotions were high.”
In an interesting analysis, Sevanti Ninan, of the Hoot, looks back at the role of Indian media in creating and sustaining movements such as Telangana. She writes: “In the case of Telangana, newspapers and TV channels have come into existence in the last few years primarily to articulate the statehood demand. If the media pre-2009 was owned largely by businessmen and politicians from the Andhra region, there are now entrants such as T News, V-6 and others on the Telangana side of the divide.” In fact, such was their role that in January 2010, the Andhra Pradesh High Court observed that “on account of some of these abusive visuals, people are becoming violent…”
Therefore the issue boils down to a few either/or questions. Did the Speaker of the House cancel the broadcast on purpose, and if yes, in today’s television era, is the move justified? Do people have a right to see how their MPs behave in parliament – good or bad – or does the Congress argument that other forms of media can report on the proceedings of the House hold water? Is this a dangerous precedent set by the ruling UPA? Is the move to simply deny private channels/political parties who oppose the government’s position their TRPs for the day, by cancelling live footage of the ruckus of the House? Can the Lok Sabha simply choose to switch off live proceedings in order to pass a contentious bill, or can this be categorised as “floor management”?
And the elephant in the room – without the free publicity by Lok Sabha TV cameras, did the MPs finally get down to actually doing the work — vote — that they are meant to instead of prolonged disruptions?
This article was published on 20 February 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
17 Feb 14 | Digital Freedom, India, News and features
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal called off the 30-hour protest (Dharna) outside Rail Bhavan on January 21, 2014 after few of his demands were considered.
Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s erstwhile chief minister, gained popularity among the ‘aam aadmi’ – ordinary citizens – because of his tough anti-corruption stand. Many saw his newly formed party, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) as a breath of fresh air. His antics and strategies to grab media attention didn’t disappoint either.
During his campaign for Delhi’s highest seat, he cut off electricity wires outside peoples homes to mark his defiance of what he said are corrupt electricity meters that overcharge people. Once in office, he sat in protest against Delhi’s own police force, demanding that the Central Government that controls the Police in Delhi, the country’s capital, immediately transfer its control to his government. Kejriwal has become an urban icon. Always wrapped in his trademark muffler, with a seemingly constant cough, his image is being parodied intensely on the internet. He insisted on being sworn in as Chief Minister of Delhi, in an open –to-all public function at one of Delhi’s biggest grounds instead of at the office of the Lt. Governor of Delhi, as is practice. For a while, he was adamant about holding a special session of the Delhi Assembly, called for legislating the Jan Lokpal Bill seeking to establish an anti-corruption ombudsman, in one of the capital’s largest stadium instead of inside the Assembly itself. On 14th February, after unsuccessfully trying to introduce the Jan Lokpal Bill on the first day of Delhi’s State Assembly, he held a press conference in the pouring rain to announce that he was resigning over this issue. This capped his 49 day tenure, and just before ending his press conference, he declared that che is ready to “sacrifice his life for the country” in his fight against corruption.
In terms of theatrics that inescapably accompanies his politics, Kejriwal is caught the imagination of India’s common man. He is always on television. That any politician willingly resigned as chief minister will not be lost on Indians, used to seeing politicians hang onto power with dear life. Many are looking to Kejriwal to make a sizable dent in the national elections, projected to be held in April 2014.
While campaigning and during this term in office, Kejriwal unveiled an arsenal of ideas to battle status quo – and take on people in authority head on – including his idea of asking the common man to use the mobile phone as a “weapon” to secretly film government and police officials demanding bribes. This proof then could be turned over to his government, which had set up an exclusive hotline to deal with corruption charges. Don’t get mad, get even – seems to be his motto as he urged residents of Delhi, “setting kar lo” – or fix them.
Media reports confirm that as a result of “open season on sting operations” the sale of spycams have increased in Delhi, with some shopkeepers estimating that the sale of these hidden cameras have shot up almost 90%. Spy cameras are available in the form of pens, keyrings, buttons, watches, pen-drives and eyeglasses, and on a more expensive scale, in jewellery and other bespoke items.
This isn’t the first time AAP has recommended the use of spycameras. Days before the New Delhi vote, the media reported that AAP were fitting slums with spycams to ensure that candidates of other parties did not go there to try and buy votes – and if they did – they would be caught. Over 2,000 spycams were reportedly used for this operation.
The AAP party is not the first — and certainly won’t be the last — in suggesting the use of cameras, especially through mobile phones, for citizen empowerment. In fact, when Delhi’s traffic police first launched a page on Facebook, citizens began posting pictures of cops breaking traffic laws in hopes that they be reprimanded. Similarly when the Municipal Corporation of Delhi started its Facebook page, people took advantage of the platform to post pictures of shoddy or incomplete works in their neighbourhoods.
Community video project, India Unheard, has armed citizen journalists from small towns and villages with cameras, and they report on development and other issues, and publish these videos on the internet. In many areas, due to the spotlight on them, government officials have responded to these negative reports and taken action. The parent outfit, Video Volunteers, even ran a campaign to check the “real” progress of India’s Right to Education Act, by bringing out over 100 videos that document the real implementation of this act on the ground.
The use of technology “from below” to hold those in power accountable is also known as sousveillance, a word that comes the French word “sous” (from below) with the word “viller” coined in 1998 by Professor Steve Mann of the University of Toronto. In the West, sousveillance is being looked at by some as an foil to mass surveillance; a manner in which citizens can watch those watching them. Others, however, express some doubts at a society where citizens are pointing cameras at a state that is watching them, and perhaps ultimately leading to a situation where everyone is watching each other. Surveillance is normalized because it is so institutionalized.
However, sousveillance is not necessarily targeted towards government and law enforcement officials alone. In New York, a project called Hollaback asks women to take pictures of their harassers and upload it to their site. The movement has expanded and extends to Indian cities as well. And gadgets like Google Glass will make humans capable of recording their perspectives on a 24/7 basis, amassing huge data.
So it appears that at a time when civil society is up in arms against big brother surveillance schemes run by the government because of their privacy breaches, we are simultaneously doing the same to ourselves, with what some call little brother surveillance.
Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst at ACLU writes, “Under the old expectation, the default expectation was that any given event would not be photographed… That is rapidly being replaced by a new mindset in which the default expectation is that something taking place in public will be recorded. Thus you often hear expressions of disappointment when a disputed or dramatic public event is NOT caught on video.” He also raises the point that citizen video footage might give the state a reason to scale down their mass surveillance activities, because video evidence can simply be collected from private photos and videos. However, it seems unlikely, given what we know about governments world wide, that most countries will be ready to give up their schemes to the off-chance that somebody-recorded-it.
Of course, one can argue there is a subtle difference between CCTV cameras that clearly announce their existence, people pointing mobile phones at each other on the street, and the proliferation of spycams to “fix” people. There is also legitimacy attached to this process when the chief minister of a state asks its citizens to collect proof of wrongdoing as the basis of taking action, as has been done in New Delhi. In fact, in a speech made just about three weeks after he took office, Kejriwal announced that he is quite sure that corruption must have come down at least 20-30% in Delhi, to thunderous applause. A helpline the new government has set up even offers to tutor citizens in how to conduct sting operations against corrupt officials. In an editorial by the Indian Express, the paper advises that, “Sting operations are an ethical minefield. They are based on lies and entrapment, even if in the service of a larger cause. They are easy to manipulate at several levels, including editing to convey the desired impression of a meeting. This unease about the subterfuge and distortion of using undercover cameras is the reason stings are not admissible as legal evidence. How can they be the basis of prompt government action, then?”
The truth is that India has a problem of entrenched corruption, and the AAP’s ride and subsequent anti-graft ideas address these concerns head on. Previously India’s Central Vigilance Commission in 2010, had encouraged people to conduct stings on government officials, even as a draft privacy law, yet to be passed by the Indian parliament, said such operations could violate individual privacy. Others worry that programs like these need protections such as a Whistleblowers Act and provisions to protect anonymity. However, the concept of sting operations, made popular by a vigilante media has become so popular that there is now an Indian website that collates India sting operations for anyone to see.
The government of India’s capital is installing more and more CCTVs for safety reasons, the Central Monitoring System is being deployed to track citizens online behavior, and now the Delhi government is glorifying sting operations through radio ads and billboards. Ultimately, the AAP, consciously or unconsciously, has given its vote to a society based on sousveillance.
Can the encouragement of spycams and secret mobile tapings end up in people spying on neighbours, and perhaps even blackmail them? Could Delhi’s public spaces shrink because of the “spycam moral police”? Are adequate privacy frameworks in place?
The AAP needs to think about these questions, especially if it plans to field these ideas during the national election campaign trail.
Point and shoot are never orders to be given lightly.
This article was published on 17 February 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
13 Feb 14 | India, News and features, Politics and Society
The Indian judiciary, with its prickly ego and halo of righteousness, has always wielded the sword of “contempt” in a swashbuckling manner.
In 1995, the movie Gentleman had some scenes in which judges were shown as being subservient to politicians, and susceptible to bribery. The filmmaker had two options- delete those “offending” scenes, or face prison for contempt of court. Needless to say, he settled for the former. Then in 2001, a fortnightly magazine carried out a performance evaluation of some judges of the Delhi High Court, and published a Report Card, grading them on integrity and competence. The court saw red at this “scandalising”, and slammed a sentence for conviction. Of course, the court praised itself: the judiciary was the “messiah” which protected the press and media from state interference. Meanwhile, when it comes to allegations of personal misdemeanour and malfeasance by judges, nobody needs to even petition the court. It swoops down on its own and muzzles the press.
However, this imperiousness pales in comparison to the Delhi High Court’s award of a gag order in the case of Justice Swatanter Kumar, a retired judge of the Supreme Court, accused of sexually harassing one of his female interns. The 16 January order is nothing less than a generous reward to a SLAPP suit, and worse, it also reveals a manifest bias in favour of the plaintiff, almost as if there was a concerted effort to stifle accountability.
On 30 November 2013, a former intern filed a complaint of sexual harassment against the judge, and when the Supreme Court declined to intervene, on 10 January, she took recourse to a PIL (Public Interest Litigation) before the same court. Coming right on the heels of another similar case, it made to all the front pages and television channels. Though there were some headlines which could have been phrased better, not a single paper or channel even remotely speculated on the veracity of the allegations. All they did was quote from the complainant’s petition and disclose the name of the judge. On 14 January, a phalanx of legal eagles threw their lot in with the accused judge and made a beeline for the Delhi High Court. Their vociferous assertion was tha newspapers, television channels, and the intern had colluded to tarnish the reputation of an upright judge by leveling malicious and scurrilous charges.
Two questions hit us at this juncture. One: when the petition was pending before the Supreme Court, why would the plaintiffs rush to the Delhi High Court, unless of course, forum shopping was their objective ? Two: if their beef was with the allegedly defamatory reportage, why would they also sue the intern?
Parsing the order granting an interim injunction might hint at some answers. The issue before the court was a simple one – whether the defendant newspaper and television channels’ actions amounted to trial by media and resulted in adverse publicity against the accused judge. (Un)surpringly, Justice Manmohan Singh starts by praising the judge’s sterling record on the Bench, and arrogates to itself the right to decide whether there was a smidgen of truth in the allegations. He also holds forth on the need for a statute of limitations in cases of sexual harassment. Then he cites a Supreme Court judgement which had justified prior restraint on reportage and in one fell swoop imposes a blanket ban on reporting of the case. This ban’s scope is scary- besides media houses, “any other person, entity, in print or electronic media or via internet or otherwise” were also drawn in.
Effectively, it means that no one, not even a person or a blogger not connected with the case, could write, or even tweet anything about it. When in most jurisdictions bloggers are being granted the same protection as journalists, could there be a more regressive step?
Legally India, a web portal had used a heavily pixelated image of the judge, so as to eliminate any identifying marks and carried a report totally in accordance with the court’s injunction. Despite that, the fire-and-brimstone emails it received from the plaintiff’s solicitors leave no room for doubt- that intimidating into silence is the only objective. The plaintive plea about irreparable damage to reputation is only a chimera.
A free press is indispensable for speaking truth to power, even the vast powers of the judiciary. Moreover, the Constitution of India makes it incumbent upon the judiciary to protect the press so that accountability and rule of law do not remain mere shibboleths. And when this same august institution clearly appears to champions SLAPP suits, it is indeed a mockery of the rule of law, as a livid Editors Guild said without pulling any punches.
This article was published on 13 February 2014 at indexoncensorship.org
