Shuddhabrata Sengupta New Delhi

(I would like to thank the Campaign Against Censorship and all those involved in the organization of this celebration of free speech for giving me this opportunity to speak freely.  My thinking on censorship has involved a lot of time spent lurking on the CAC list, as also on the Vikalp list and reading, observing, very occasionally saying contributing to the discussion, and I have found it immensely valuable, especially the very fact of witnessing two overlapping communities of practitioners come to grips with the labyrinth of censorship.)

What I am going to do today is not to argue for the freedom of the statements that many of you have been making, which are immensely valuable, but to try and see if an ethical stance that celebrates the liberty of thought and expression can muster the resources to continue to celebrate the liberty of thought and expression when it encounters dangerous, lethal, violent and offensive speech, or what some may call, hate speech. Of course, we must keep in mind that someone's assertion of who they are, is someone else's hate speech. And no matter how innocuous, or reasonable we think our statements are, they are always liable to be interpreted as something that hurts, injures, insults, or offends, or incites violence or assault. Remember, that one is not speaking only of words, but also of a tone of voice, of even, if you like, the timbre of silence. So, if a secular public intellectual who is deeply concerned with the violence in Gujarat, also maintains a stoic silence over the thousands of deaths of unarmed combatants in the Kashmir valley by the security forces of the Indian state and by armed insurgents, then a resident of the Kashmir valley, or a Kashmiri person, could, in my opinion indict such an intellectual of a kind of 'hate silence'.

I have said this elsewhere, but I will risk repeating it for this audience, that I believe that the number of those who have campaigned against 'hate speech' in Gujarat, and yet continued to maintain a 'hateful silence' about Kashmir is legion, in fact it could be said, and I think this needs careful attention, that the overvaluation of the deaths in Gujarat, (which includes a monotonous and consistent critique of 'hate speech' as a factor in ensuring those deaths, in the context of Gujarat), if and when accompanied by a silence about Kashmir, or the North East, can itself lend credence to the argument that the critique of 'Hate Speech' in and of itself can also be a form of Hate Speech. From somewhere in Baramulla or Imphal, the sincere tears of the secular nationalist Indian liberal for his Gujarati Muslim or Hindu fellow citizens can appear hurtful to the Kashmiri or Manipuri person reeling under the violence of the armed forces of the Indian Republic. I do not necessarily wish to go that far, but I am saying this only to try and show how complicated this terrain is, and how difficult it is to get a straight answer to what is in all honesty a very crooked set of questions. All I am asking for is a little self reflexive modesty before we succumb to the altitude sickness of a higher moral ground vis a vis what sounds like 'Hate Speech' to us.

Having argued for an articulative reticence, I am also simultaneously arguing for a certain aural latitude, (a bit of fearless listening, the value of which is a lesson that a young woman called Azra Tabassum in the Cybermohalla project at Sarai taught me a while ago, when she wrote:  bina dare bolne ki azaadi ke liye bina dare sunne ki azaadi ki zaroorat hoti hai - “for fearless speech to exist, it’s necessary that there must be some fearless listening".

I am arguing that for anyone to demand that their speech act, articulating difficult resistant positions - be they voicing the concerns or interests of groups that identify as, or are identified as dalits, women, minorities, oppressed nationalities, oppressed races, or any other impossible for this community to sympathize with group, there must be a respect for, and an attitude of attentive listening to other, or not so different, but equally difficult speech acts, for the speech act that is homophobic, racist, communal, fascist, misogynist.

Let it first of all be understood that the oppressed dalit may well be saying something deeply misogynist, that the oppressed member of a minority community is as capable of harbouring authoritarian and fascist imaginaries as is a majoritarian communalist, and that a woman's speech act in defence of her own freedom can also be deeply and seriously injurious to some group's patriarchally driven religious sensibilities.

Also, it is possible that in a deeply class divided and patriarchal society the feeling of injury that an oppressed group or person feels, often finds expression in the desire to harm or damage or weaken those who can be addressed with violence by the already oppressed. In other words, those who are either the most oppressed, or are at least just as equally oppressed. Thus the horrendous acts of violence perpetrated in the tribal belt in Gujarat onto Muslims, or the persistent problem of misogyny and prejudice against recent immigrants (white or brown or yellow or black)  in black American culture, or the fact that the majority of neo-Nazis in Europe are from the poorest and most disenfranchised sections of society. One must on occasion engage with these expressions with the sharpest criticality, but to argue for their erasure from the discursive field is at times to deny to an oppressed group the only language that it has. The task then is to argue against that language, not to argue for the effacement of the speech act that produces it.

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