Unfree speech

Young people go through iconoclastic phases, for which imprisonment is surely not an appropriate response.

Once again, Kolkata shows the way. Apparently based on public complaints, the city police have tracked down and arrested an MSc student for publishing allegedly obnoxious memes involving national figures and political leaders on a Facebook page with a clearly facetious title, ‘Specified Tarkata (Designated Lunatic)’. Why a self-declared eccentric should be taken seriously by a presumably sane public, or by the police force, poses an interesting question. Why the reaction should be arrest rather than counselling is a question at once less philosophical and more disturbing. Young people go through iconoclastic phases, for which imprisonment is surely not an appropriate response.

Taking advantage of draconian provisions — now rolled back — in the Information Technology Act, West Bengal had taken pole position in the race to arrest those who spoke their mind a little too freely online. In April 2012, a chemistry professor of Jadavpur University was arrested for merely forwarding cartoons disparaging Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. Half a year later, two Mumbai girls became icons of free speech when they were arrested for asking why the city had to be shut down for Bal Thackeray’s funeral. In 2017, West Bengal reprised Maharashtra’s act by arresting a man — and another user who had forwarded his post — for protesting against traffic curbs during Durga Puja. He had had to walk 5 km with his pregnant wife and a child of 18 months to get home. Apart from the provisions of the IT Act, they were charged under four sections of the Indian Penal Code.

But West Bengal was a pioneer by several lengths. About a decade before social media arrived, when the CPI(M) was in power, a Marwari resident was put in the cooler for making a web page abusing Bengalis, at a time when Bengali pride was running high and there was a proposal to rename the state Banga. However, West Bengal and other states, where arrests have been made over trivial transgressions and opinionated speech on the internet, have had plenty of time since then to grow up. The internet has given a voice to millions who had no say before. That should be celebrated, but instead, the authorities and those in power have proved themselves to be ridiculously insecure, and have been browbeating critics and amateur humourists with the might of the law. They are making an example of India — as a nation which simply doesn’t get the idea of free speech.