The recent controversy over the Gujarat government’s ban on Jaswant Singh’s book is sadly illustrative. On the one hand, proponents of the ban relied on hackneyed arguments to justify it — raising fears of law and order concerns, asserting that the book undermined the image of long-dead luminaries, or that it hurt “patriotic sentiments”. Given that each of these grounds is mirrored in provisions of the Indian Penal Code, one may fault the Gujarat government for demonstrating a lack of imagination, but not a lack of strategic judgment, in defending the ban. What is more perplexing, however, is the uninspired nature of the response to the state government’s decision. For the most part, the liberal response was wholly reactive to the justifications supporting the ban. Liberals argued the ban was bad because law and order concerns were insufficient to justify restricting free speech, that the concerns of the dead should not trump the speech rights of the living, and that the term “patriotic sentiments” was not sufficiently definite to justify curtailing expression. They rarely offered their own justifications for the defence of free speech. This reactive defence of free speech is problematic, because it makes the right to speak one’s mind dependent on empirical factors, like the possibility of riots, not on normative considerations.

It is interesting to compare the poverty of the liberal response to state censorship of expression with the invigorating defence of Delhi high court’s reading the IPC’s Section 377 down. Liberal commentators employed a two-pronged analysis then: on one hand, countering the arguments of reactionaries who believed that homosexuality violated India’s social fabric, and on the other, making a strong positive case for the value of same-sex relationships. You never got the impression from that debate that the sexual freedoms of millions depended on the paucity of convincing homophobic arguments.

... contd.