The problem with laws criminalising speech is that they wind up being the opposite of what laws should be: They will be applied indiscriminately. Everyone eventually uses them, or becomes their target.
Consider the recent arrest in Delhi of the defence analyst Abhijit Iyer-Mitra. He was arrested, apparently, because the Biju Janata Dal-run Odisha government took offence at a sarcastic video he posted at the Konark Sun Temple. In the video, Iyer-Mitra riffed on the erotic sculptures for which Konark is famous, and jokingly argued that, given the attitudes to sexual morality of the current ...
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