Choking of Free Thought

The arrest and subsequent release on interim bail of Ashoka University professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad, and the discussions in and out of court that have followed, ought to concern journalists, or rather those who believe that in a democracy, journalists should question the powerful. 

Prof Khan was arrested by the Haryana police in the early hours of May 18 based on two complaints relating to his posts on Facebook a week earlier.  Both complaints were registered in the same police station in Haryana, close to the private university where he heads the department of political science. One was by a member of the youth wing of the BJP, the other by the head of the Haryana Commission for Women.

After two days in police custody, and after the lower court sent him to judicial custody, the Supreme Court granted Khan interim bail on May 21.

SPEAKING OUT

In the immediate aftermath of the arrest, several national English language newspapers made strong editorial comments against the arrest and the serious nature of the charges brought against Prof Khan, including sedition.

As the speed with which events occurred around his arrest, readers might have overlooked these editorials (which in any case are read by a small number). But for the record, they are worth re-reading, given what followed in the subsequent days.

The Indian Express, in its editorial headlined, “Amid government’s calls for unity, Ali Khan Mahmudabad’s arrest sends a chilling message”, went on to state that fear cannot enforce unity in an open democracy. It argued that the Prime Minister’s call for unity and the strategy to send all-party delegations to present India’s case abroad after Operation Sindoor did not sit well with such actions. 

Deccan Herald was more direct. It wrote that Khan’s arrest “is the State’s strike against the expression of a citizen’s right and it exposes the police and the government which acted against him as partisan, and even communal. It is almost certain that Mahmudabad’s name was the problem here and that shows.” The Times of India suggested that “all thinking Indians must also ask why a professor who praised, logically and cohesively, GOI’s military response to Pahalgam found himself behind bars.”

And The Hindu suggested that the Supreme Court “must reiterate the importance of the freedom of expression and come down heavily on law enforcement agencies that misuse powers to slap serious charges related to sedition, on frivolous grounds.”

NO PRECEDENT

We know from the proceedings in the Supreme Court on May 21 in response to Ali Khan’s bail application that nothing even vaguely resembling this has happened. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

Given some of the remarks made by Justice Surya Kant, it appears that he has a different view of such rights. He was quoted as saying “everybody talks about rights…as if the country for the last 75 years was distributing rights.” Nor has the court ticked off the Haryana police for the alacrity with which it responded to the two FIRs.

In fact, just three years ago, in the case of the bail application by journalist Mohammed Zubair of the fact-checking platform AltNews, the Supreme Court had laid down that “Arrest is not meant to be and must not be used as a punitive tool because it results in one of the gravest possible consequences emanating from criminal law: the loss of personal liberty.” It also said, “Individuals must not be punished solely on the basis of allegations, and without a fair trial...when the power to arrest is exercised without application of mind and without due regard to the law, it amounts to an abuse of power.”  

Instead, in this case, instead of criticising the police for arresting a person “solely on the basis of allegations”, the court has directed the Haryana police to set up a Special Investigative Team “to holistically understand the complexity of the phraseology employed and for proper appreciation of some of the expressions used in these two online posts.”  This task has been given to police officers. How they are supposed to “understand the complexity” of posts that are written in reasonably simple English remains a puzzle. 

More alarming than leaving a team of the police to decide whether the charges against Khan hold is the last part of the order which states: “It is made clear that one of the objects of granting interim bail is to facilitate the ongoing investigation. If the SIT/Investigating Agency finds any other incriminating material against the petitioner, it shall be at liberty to place it on record and seek modification of the interim order.”

In other words, there is more to come in this unravelling drama.

Interestingly, in Zubair’s case, the UP government had argued that Zubair should be restrained from tweeting. The SC ruled against the request, stating, “The imposition of such a condition would be tantamount to a gag order... (which) have a chilling effect on the freedom of speech.”

HOW A SOCIETY DIES

In Khan’s case, exactly the opposite has happened. The court has restrained him from posting anything on the case, or “any opinion in relation to the terrorist attack on Indian soil or the counter response given by our armed forces.”

Khan’s case is one more nail in the coffin of the limits placed today on freedom of expression by this government.  

In his article in Frontline on the Khan case, Saurav Das writes about the “judicial choking of free thought”. Analysing the Supreme Court’s interim bail order in the case, Das doesn’t mince words in his critique. He writes:

“Mahmudabad’s case is a microcosm of sorts. It is a perfect example of how you make a nation of intellectually dead citizens, where critical inquiry is replaced by rote repetition and progressive voices are muzzled to make space for conformist, mediocre opinions. This is how a society dies, where the proliferation of free thought is choked, through a slow, judicially sanctioned suffocation of intellectual life.”

Perhaps free thought has already been choked, if you look at Indian mainstream media, especially TV news. There is precious little that is even mildly critical of recent government actions, even in our newspapers. Or questions, for instance, about how the all-party delegations, which have set out to foreign lands to explain the Indian government’s position on terror and Operation Sindoor, will explain the same government’s actions against minorities, especially Muslims, in India. According to to this piece in Article-14 by Kunal Purohit, there have been 113 incidents of “anti-Muslim hate crimes and hate speeches” since the April 22 terror attack in Pahalgam. 

Despite this, every now and then, even TV news can spring surprises. Such as this interview by Preeti Chowdhury on India Today TV with Renu Bhatia, the chairperson of the Haryana Commission for Women who filed one of the cases against Ali Khan.  Chowdhury did what journalists are supposed to do. She firmly and politely asked Bhatia what part of Khan’s post did she think insulted the women in uniform who appeared at the briefings during Operation Sindoor alongside the External Affairs Secretary. Do watch Bhatia’s effort at explaining what cannot be explained.

* This article has been reproduced with permission by the author. See the original article here.