Threatening Ananthamurthy: Will Modi-led BJP say no to right wing thugs?

In what he now admits was a moment of overreaction, Kannada writer UR Ananthamurthy said he’d leave India if Narendra Modi was elected prime minister. Now Modi is going to be the prime minister, and Ananthamurthy is still very much here — ironically, under the protection of the Indian police. The protection has been given because Ananthamurthy has said he has received threatening phone calls from unknown persons. A group called the NaMo Brigade has also sent him a one-way travel itinerary to Karachi. [caption id=“attachment_1537433” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] UR Ananthamurthy. AFP[/caption] The itinerary is a perfectly acceptable tongue-in-cheek riposte to Ananthamurthy’s emotional outburst. The same freedom of expression that covers his sentiments covers that reaction from the NaMo Brigade. Threats however are a different matter. And that distinction seemed to escape the BJP’s Seshadri Chari when he appeared on CNN-IBN with Sagarika Ghose along with Mr  Ananthamurthy as well as Javed Anand and Shabana Azmi. Mr Chari, had he wanted, could have seized the moral higher ground and set the tone. He could have said that the BJP vehemently opposes Mr. Ananthamurthy’s views and thinks of them as insulting and retrograde. But it just as strongly opposes any threats to him for his dissenting views. He could have categorically disassociated his party from the threatening callers who are after all “unknown miscreants” anyway and condemned them. End of story. But instead Mr Chari said “it takes two hands to clap,” suggesting that somehow Mr Ananthamurthy brought this on himself. He asked if Mr Ananthamurthy himself was not being intolerant when making such statements about India’s prime minister elect. Mr Chari neatly elided over the fact that there is a huge difference between dissent and intolerance. Mr. Ananthamurthy had said he would leave India – an action which threatened no violence to any other person. That is qualitatively different from those who call and try to intimidate him. Freedom of expression can never be the same as the freedom to threaten. Yet that is exactly what most political parties in India routinely do. Mamata Banerjee’s government arrested a man for forwarding a cartoon she didn’t funny and threw a farmer in jail for questioning her about fertilizer prices. Two Mumbai girls were arrested for questioning on Facebook the city’s shutdown after Bal Thackeray’s death. Kapil Sibal tried to formulate rules to “purge” the Internet of “offending” content and force Google and Facebook to pre-screen content. At that time Arun Jaitley fought back fiercely. “The days of censorship, of withholding information is all over,” he said . “I believe if the Internet had been in existence, the Emergency of 1975 would have been a big fiasco.” It is far easier to be a brave votary for freedom of expression from the benches of the opposition. But the real test is in government when one holds the levers of power. Now Mr Jaitley should walk his talk and draw the clearest, brightest line possible. The Ananthamurthy case is probably much ado about nothing. No one is really going to frogmarch the Jnanpith winner to the Wagah border. And this incident is hardly an indicator that all the liberal doom and gloom scenarios are coming to pass and dissent in India has had its mouth taped shut by Modi’s mandate. It’s not like Amit Shah’s minions are making calls to Mr Ananthamurthy. But it is an opportunity for the new BJP government to set a tone, to establish that it is a different kind of government. It is very easy to be a champion of freedom of speech and expression when you agree with what’s being said. The acid test for freedom of expression comes when you disagree strongly with what is being said and yet are steadfast in defending the speaker’s right to say it. The same freedom of expression that protects a Dr. Subramanian Swamy when he calls Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi Vishkanya and Buddhu publicly, also protects Mr  Ananthamurthy when he voices his opposition to Narendra Modi. No one should threaten Dr Swamy with any dire consequences for disrespecting the demi-gods of the Congress pantheon. The same holds true for Mr  Ananthamurthy. The Ananthamurthy story should not even have gathered this much steam had not the BJP’s foot soldiers overreacted to Mr Ananthamurthy’s overreaction. The American director Robert Altman said he’d leave the US and move to Paris if George W Bush was elected president. After Bush was elected Altman joked he had meant Paris, Texas. He continued with his movie career and died peacefully in West Hollywood at the age of 81 in 2006. He didn’t need police protection and didn’t complain of intimidating phone calls. In the end, a robust democracy understands that neither Altman nor Ananthamurthy’s protestations have any real impact on anything. But the response to them is a measure of the maturity of a democracy and its ability to absorb dissent. Freedom of speech is routinely trumped in India by the freedom to get offended. But John Stuart Mills spelled it out pretty clearly back in the day when he wrote there should be “absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment” unless there is a threat of “harm to others.” That’s where the difference between a threatening phone call and a one-way travel itinerary comes in. As Mills said : “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” It’s a lesson our political parties are loath to absorb. The BJP, already strongly secure in its numbers, actually has a golden opportunity to be different and demonstrate that it is going to a staunch defender of values other parties pay lip service to. Mr Chari would have done well to actually take his cues from Sandalwood actor and fellow BJP member Malavika Avinash on Mr Ananthamurthy. She tweeted “He has an opinion now that I hope will change by 2019 or earlier but until then, may I request all my friends to give-up making digs at the Jnanapitha awardee, URA. C’mon guys, let’s show some grace!" A little grace, on all sides, would be nice. But real progress for the BJP requires distancing itself from the ugly bullying of the many fringe groups who threaten and intimidate dissenters in its name. It would also give Modi himself an opportunity to lay to rest the alarmist concerns about his authoritarian style of governance. But what we got instead was the same old wink-and-nudge endorsement of rightwing thuggery, ducking the need to take a moral stance by resorting to a false equivalence between URA’s comment and outright threats. As Hartosh Singh Bal points out in Caravan after Modi’s sweeping victory “There is no shortage of cheerleaders for this verdict, but for democracy to function, the sceptics have to find their voice. We will all have to recognise that no mandate is a mandate to silence opposition. Neither is this mandate reason to silence oneself.”