Certainly, freedom of expression, like other rights, is not absolute; it can be limited by the principle of serious harm. If an inflammatory speech leads to communal or caste riots in which other persons are seriously harmed, the speech giver is culpable under law. What else counts for serious harm? Consider incidents in which either ‘this’ group or ‘that’ has demanded that a book be withdrawn, or a film not be screened. In India, increasingly groups who tend to belong to one particular ideology get agitated over representations of Saraswati by M.F. Husain on the grounds that this representation ‘hurts’ their sentiments. Deepa Mehta was not allowed by the same kind of group to film Water on the same pretext. Irate mutterings accompanied her earlier film Fire; the film, it was said, was against Indian culture. Historians cannot criticise Shivaji because he is an icon of Maharashtra. The film Fanaa could not be shown in Gujarat because the hero commented adversely on the Narmada issue. Now Parzania cannot be shown in the same state, because it might perchance harm the interests of the state.

But what is the notion of harm that is being employed here? Husain’s sketch of Saraswati followed a well-known and historical genre of representation in India. The film Water documents the plight of widows, not unknown to the newspaper-reading public. The film Fire deals with a phenomenon which is again not unknown — alternative sexualities. Fanaa was banned because the hero said something that had been documented in hundreds of government and non-government reports: That lakhs of people in the Narmada valley have been displaced without proper compensation. And hundreds of published and unpublished reports about what happened in Gujarat are in the public domain.

... contd.