Freedom

The Police Should Not Police Hate Speech

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A recent report (of which I was a co-author) looked at the way in which hate speech provisions in the Indian Penal Code, 1860 (the IPC) need to be reconfigured to fulfil their function and prevent their abuse. The report recommended replacing certain existing provisions in the IPC with narrowly constructed alternatives that do away with vague standards and instead hold liable only that speech which incites violence.

As I think more about how this will be an improvement on the status quo, I also believe that more must be done to further reduce the scope for abuse. One way of achieving this is by rethinking the way these hate speech provisions (in particular, sections 153-A, 295-A, and 505 of the IPC) are categorised under the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 (the CrPC).

These provisions are cognizable offences at present. What this means is that a police officer receiving a complaint about one of these offences can arrest anyone without an order or a warrant from a magistrate. The subjective satisfaction of a police officer that this entails is a recipe for disaster. This is particularly so for complaints regarding hate speech, where there is a need to evaluate the content of the speech itself and its proximity to violence before taking any action. It is too much to expect police officers to perform this function. Thus, in addition to reworking the provisions of the law, it would be prudent to classify them as non-cognizable offences under the CrPC to ensure an additional layer of scrutiny.

What Hate Speech Is Not

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The CEO of Twitter, the social media platform, recently found himself the subject of some heckling on, irony be damned, Twitter. The reason was a photograph taken of Jack Dorsey holding a poster that read ‘Smash Brahmanical Patriarchy.’ Some claimed that this amounted to hate mongering and hate speech, a notion that is as misguided as it is dangerous.

To begin with, the plain text of the poster is not directed against any individual and arguably, it does not target a particular community either. What it does is call for the end of a regressive tradition of patriarchy that anyone can subscribe to.

Which brings us to the second point: the inordinate amount of focus on the use of the word ‘smash’ and how this is tantamount to a call for violence. It is almost as if the hecklers have seen one too many movies containing a certain green-skinned comic book character who likes to wreak havoc and now cannot help but associate the said word with violence. In reality, the word is little more than an example of the usage of a forceful verb.

This examination of the plain text of the poster must also be seen in the context of what the intent behind it was. In the Shreya Singhal judgement, the Indian Supreme Court looked at the conditions under which the right to freedom of speech and expression can be restricted. It held that speech and expression that amounts to either discussion or advocacy, howsoever unpopular, cannot be restricted. The only valid ground is that of incitement. Can the language of the poster be categorised as incitement? Clearly not, judging by a measured understanding along the lines of the first two points above. Does it fall within the scope of discussion or advocacy? Yes.

Thus, the claims of hate mongering and hate speech against the poster are ill-founded. Their attempt to lower the bar for the freedom of speech and expression is as regressive for society as the patriarchy that they implicitly champion.

Frederick Douglass and Some Lessons for the Present

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Too often political speeches aim to temporarily rouse the passions of those who listen without making any attempt to be a record for posterity. To be prescient requires an understanding of human nature and the wisdom to foresee the future that is beyond the ability of many who engage in rhetoric. This cannot be said of Frederick Douglass, the American social reformer and abolitionist, and his speech What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, delivered all the way back in 1852 but which remains timely even now.

The speech is a great piece of oration. It deserves to be read for the strength of its purpose and the clarity of its vision. Here are the two things in it that stood out for me, aspects that resonate in today’s world.

One, when Douglass refuses to engage in argument and reason with those who support slavery. Instead, he says he will rebuke such people and lay bare their faults as individuals. These are his words:

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

This is a position that is reminiscent of many of the so-called liberal elites today (exemplified, in the US at least, by several late-night show hosts). The reasoning goes that the people you are in opposition to hold values that you disdain so much that it makes no sense to try and reason with them, to engage in a conversation with the aim of persuading them to your line of thinking. Is this the best method to adopt? I do not have an answer to this yet.

Two, and a more unambiguous lesson at that, is that Douglass is critical of his nation’s hypocrisy when it comes to liberty: extolling it as one of the foundations on which the nation is built and at the same time depriving millions of their liberty under the institution of slavery. He does not mince his words when talking about these national inconsistencies. If someone were to utter the sort of harsh words that Douglass uses today, they are likely to be branded unpatriotic. But as Douglass’ example shows, calling out the ills of your nation is an act of patriotism itself. For only when you know where you are going wrong as a nation can you correct your course.

Note: For more information about Douglass’ life, I would recommend this episode from BBC’s In Our Time.

Lessons from Julius Caesar – Part-II

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Note: This is the second of a two-part series on some thoughts I had after reading the play Julius Caesar. You can read the first part here. Slate’s Lend Me Your Ears podcast has an excellent episode that looks at the play from a modern context and that helped me gain some valuable perspective on this famous piece of literature. I would highly recommend listening to it if you have read the play.  

Julius Caesar is a tragedy. Characters exhibit flaws and make choices that lead to terrible consequences. It is easy to feel sorry for Caesar, who gets stabbed by his good friend, or Brutus, whose misplaced idealism comes back to haunt him (quite literally at that). But the individual I felt sorry for the most was one who had a bit part role, the poet Cinna.

In the aftermath of Mark Antony’s incendiary speech, the Romans go berserk, searching for the men who murdered Caesar. They come upon Cinna on the street and kill him because his namesake was one of the conspirators. The scene is short but shocking, but with a tinge of black humour when the crowd realises they have the wrong man but kill him regardless, justifying their action on the basis of his supposedly bad verses.

I have two thoughts on this little episode.

One, it best showcases Shakespeare’s cynicism about human reason that I touched upon in my previous post. If it was not clear already, this scene shows just how vacuous a crowd can be. The broader implications this has on a democracy and a republic cannot be ignored.

Two, it asks questions about Antony’s role in Cinna’s death. Yes, he could claim he had no intention and that Cinna’s death was an unfortunate case of collateral damage. But he was aware of the crowd’s nature and knew exactly what buttons to push to get them riled up. Shouldn’t he then bear some responsibility for his words? Or does the blame lie solely on the crowd even though their capacity to reason is stunted? These questions act as a precursor to a conversation about hate speech and how best one can prevent it while still preserving a right to free speech. That we are still having this conversation centuries after Shakespeare wrote the play shows just how vexing a problem it is.

Lessons from Julius Caesar – Part-I

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Note: This is the first of a planned two-part series on some thoughts I had after reading the play Julius Caesar. Slate’s Lend Me Your Ears podcast has an excellent episode that looks at the play from a modern context and that helped me gain some valuable perspective on this famous piece of literature. I would highly recommend listening to it if you have read the play. 

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is an intriguing blend of high drama, sudden bursts of violence, and impressive speeches. It is also a realistic and sombre meditation on the fragility of a republic. This fragility stems from the play’s take on human nature, which it would not be a stretch to say is a touch cynical.

Brutus, the idealistic senator and Caesar’s friend, sets great store by reason to disastrous effect. He believes that his fellow conspirators are as idealistically motivated as he is. He believes that the citizens of Rome will understand his reasons for assassinating Caesar. He is mistaken on both counts. The self-interest that propels these groups is a trait that very few individuals, like Brutus, can disavow. Left to their own devices, they will wreak havoc on society, which they do in the play to varying degrees of success.

This points towards the quality that a republic must have in order to endure, namely, that of being more than the sum of its parts. It needs to rise above the individuals who form it. And the way it can achieve this is by having institutions that channel the best of such individuals while avoiding the unsavoury bits. A republic thus lives and dies on the strength of the institutions that undergird it. This is a lesson worth revisiting every time the functioning of a republic is questioned.

Women: The Unpaid Workers

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“With an increase of 22.3 million in the male workforce between 2004-05 and 2009-10 being virtually cancelled out by a fall of more than 21 million in the female workforce, the need to understand the gender dimensions of employment trends in India has acquired a new urgency.”

Let the statistic sink in. The paper on ‘Gender Dimensions: Employment Trends in India, 1993-94 to 2009-10’ by Indrani Mazumdar, Neetha N, drives home the magnitude of the problem in front of us. The authors highlight that “the most striking revelation of the National Sample Survey Office’s (NSSO) 66th round survey is a significant fall in the Female Labour Force Participation Rate (FWPR )between 2004-05 and 2009-10.” The paper expands on how the liberalisation, unlike the popular opinion, did not lead to an increase in the female labour force participation.

One of the key insights of the paper is the drastic increase in the number of unpaid women helpers. As per the NSSO, the employment activity categories have been segregated as self-employed, regular salaried and casual labour. Out of all the three segments, the highest proportion of female workforce is in the self-employed group. However within the self-employed group, the largest proportion of women are employed as unpaid women helpers. From 2004-2009, the total number of employed women rose from 61 to 72.5 per cent, while the regular salaried women only accounted for 9 per cent of the total number. These numbers clearly show that the increase in the FLFPR was mostly due to the increase in the unpaid job rather than the formal jobs.

The paper also shows how the characteristics of the unpaid jobs also varied between rural and urban regions. In rural regions, unpaid workers vary from peasant to supervisors. The jobs are also significantly dependent on the economic background of the household. For instances, the women are usually supervisors only if the land is owned by either their husbands or in-laws or fathers or parents. In urban spaces, the nature of the job is largely different as 43 per cent of the women are engaged in community and personal services which includes domestic workers, teachers, launderers, beauticians, and so on. The second biggest sector that hires unpaid women in urban region is the manufacturing sector (primarily home-based, piece-rated work). 

This disparity in the type of jobs and the variety of them is an indicator of how most of the women work at minimal wages and how vulnerable their jobs are. While in rural regions the family income defines their jobs, in the urban spaces they are mostly engaged in low wage and high risk jobs. With the large segment of women working in the informal spaces like domestic help and agriculture, one of the keys solutions to look at can be to formalise these sectors. A good example would be the increase in the number of online platforms like BookMyBai.

The Art of Letting Go

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It shouldn’t be a surprise that Air India, one of the most beloved public enterprises, is not finding any buyers. The government owned enterprise has been a cause for major concern for the union government with the size of its losses increasing over the past few years. Although, the proposal to sell the government owned airline has been put into action, it is evident that the appropriate desire has not followed.

The airline had opened up the offers for two months and did not see a single buyer concert. As per the reports,

“While the Rs 33,000-crore debt that was to be bundled with the airline was initially seen to be a major hurdle, industry analysts believe it was the government’s decision to retain 24% stake that ultimately proved to be the big deterrent.”

This is not the first time the proposal to sell the government enterprise has been brought to notice. Twice before, in 1996 and again in 2000, much more feasible plans to sell the airline, then in much better health than now, were scuttled. The problem is much deeper than this non-viable auction. The problem lies at the core strategy towards divestment.

Government with all its units and resources is still a limited body that has various responsibilities to fulfil with scare resources. Keeping this in mind, it is important to consider the sectors or firms in which the government invests, in order to ensure that the resources are being put to the best use. On of the first litmus test for this would be to see if the good or service being provided can be provided more viably by a private body. If yes, there is no reason for the government to enter the sector as the player. If not, government can either regulate it to make it feasible or provide the good or service itself to ensure their provision. This simple test helps limiting the number resources being directed to ineffective causes.

If we put Air India into this consideration, it is evident that in the current set-up there are enough players in the sector to ensure competition and air travel is increasingly becoming viable. Hence, there is no role for a government enterprise to exist in this space. Knowing this, it would be best for the government to sell all its ownership claims towards the loss making government unit. Government needs to instead invest more in strategic sectors such as defence, healthcare and education.

Even though the argument for strategic divestment have been made in previous occasions, it is quite clear that the lack of focus has made it difficult for the union government to let go of the age old air line.

Icarus, and Doping in Sports

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Last night, my son and I were comparing notes on the Giro d’Italia, one of the Big 3 European cycling races, and speculating whether Chris Froome would be able to win the stage.

Waiting for race updates from the Guardian blog, I was bemused to see a photo of a spectator taunting Froome with a massive mock-up of an inhaler – Froome is fighting a legal battle for his rights to his last two racing titles over the salbutamol levels in his blood.

The next race update showed that Froome had raced down the last descent at an average of 53 km. an hour, with a peak speed of 80 km, and was now clear in the lead for his fourth grand tour in a row, a record unbeaten since Eddie Merckx, who retired in 1978.

Thinking about drugs in sports, I turned to ‘Icarus’ on Netflix, a riveting ‘accidental’ documentary. By a bizarre set of circumstances, a playwright and stand-up comic, Bryan Fogel, found himself in contact with Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, Director of the Russian anti-doping center, and filmed the drama that ensued. It’s tough to believe that Grigory is not a masterpiece of film-writing and casting, as he is an engrossing, complex character, who happily helps Bryan Fogel devise a personal doping program that will beat the anti-doping system.

Meanwhile, WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, is crawling over the Russian lab, suspecting that the Russian sports system is not as clean as it claims. Grigory bails out, flies to the US, and with Bryan’s help, turns whistle-blower. The New York Times carries a massive story, the WADA gets in on the act, and given the amount of data Dr. Rodchenkov is able to offer up, concludes, “I can confirm, for years, that spectators have been deceived. The desire to win medals superseded their collective moral and ethical compass, and Olympic values.”

The 2016 Rio Olympics were weeks away, and WADA recommended to its parent organisation, the International Olympic Committee, that Russia be banned from the Rio games. The IOC passed the responsibility for the decision on to individual sports federations; eventually, 111 Russian athletes were banned, and 278 took part.

Given the time frame, and the paucity of data from Russia, I would assume falseness in both sets of Russian athletes. Having seen the film, I suspect the number of athletes on doping programs who came to Rio was significantly more than those not on drugs who stayed away.

This is probably true of most professional sports – the doping docs stay one step ahead of the anti-doping docs, and in some cases, the two are the same. For a top-level athlete, its probably safe to assume that your competitor is doping. Looking for that tiny extra edge to get on top, it must be really tough to stay away from the magic mushrooms.

Is it even worth trying? Is the Olympic promise of a drug-free games achievable? Or would a laissez faire approach be more honest – find the training regimen, needles and pills included, that sails your boat…

Flower Power, at 50

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The first rock musical, HAIR, opened on Broadway in 1968.


It captured the spirit of Hippiedom with the exuberance of protest, inspired lyrics, and the shock value of a nude scene. It ran on Broadway for 4 years, in London for 5, and was adapted into a film by celebrated movie director Milos Forman. A generous cousin gifted me the double album set of the soundtrack, and its songs deeply informed my teenage years.

Ten days ago, I got to see a traveling production of Hair in Munich, and I had this strange sense of traveling into the past to look at the present.

Hair was a protest against the Vietnam war, and the draft; a plea for love, peace, and clean air.
 
It was a paean to the solidarity of youth, to the joys of sex – of all kinds, and free love.

It was a celebration of drugs.

 
And, yes, to the freedom to wear your hair long.
 
In the context of the late 60s, the demands that Hair made of society were truly fringe. And yet, its appeal, which was quite unprecedented, could be seen as a pointer to how widely change was sought.
 
5 decades later, so much of that change has been wrought, particularly in the US.
 
Though wars may still rage across the world, annual deaths have trended vastly down since the late 60s, and Max Roser has an amazing set of graphs (https://goo.gl/images/ZtP9wY) to show the changes. And draft, a central theme in Hair, was removed in 1973.
 
‘Free’ Love, meaning sex outside of marriage, barely merits mention today; same-sex intercourse, and marriage, have wide-spread acceptance, and increasingly, legal sanction. In June 2016, President Obama dedicated the Stonewall Monument in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, to honor the LGBT rights movement. In November of that year, Kate Brown became the United States’ first openly LGBT person elected Governor.

During World War II, smog in Los Angeles was so bad that people suspected a Japanese chemical attack. But the US Congress enacted the Clean Air Act in 1970, and progress has been rapid. California is still vulnerable to forest fires and thermal inversion, but air pollution in the US is not a major public health hazard. Meanwhile, 14 of the world’s most polluted cities are in India.

And drugs? 64 % of American citizens support the legalisation of marijuana. In 29 states, you can smoke it for ‘medical use’. And legal annual marijuana sales crossed 10 billion dollars in 2017.

Long hair? Man-buns is now a thing.

I don’t want to make too much of a point of this, but I was really struck by how the performing arts can anticipate change, and, perhaps, just perhaps, influence it.

Elaborately Learned Superstition

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Check out this excellent paragraph from that Jane Jacobs masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Talking about the urban planners of her time, she writes:

And to put it bluntly, they are all in the same stage of elaborately learned superstition as medical science was early in the last century, when physicians put their faith in bloodletting, to draw out the evil humors which were believed to cause disease. With bloodletting, it took years of learning to know precisely which veins, by what rituals, were to be opened for what symptoms. A superstructure of technical complication was erected in such deadpan detail that the literature still sounds almost plausible. However, because people, even when they are thoroughly enmeshed in descriptions of reality which are at variance with reality, are still seldom devoid of the powers of observation and independent thought, the science of bloodletting, over most of its long sway, appears usually to have been tempered with a certain amount of common sense. Or it was tempered until it reached its highest peaks of technique in, of all places, the young United States. Bloodletting went wild here. It had an enormously influential proponent in Dr. Benjamin Rush, still revered as the greatest statesman-physician of our revolutionary and federal periods, and a genius of medical administration. Dr. Rush Got Things Done. Among the things he got done, some of them good and useful, were to develop, practice, teach and spread the custom of bloodletting in cases where prudence or mercy had heretofore restrained its use. He and his students drained the blood of very young children, of consumptives, of the greatly aged, of almost anyone unfortunate enough to be sick in his realms of influence. His extreme practices aroused the alarm and horror of European bloodletting physicians. And yet as late as 1851, a committee appointed by the State Legislature of New York solemnly defended the thoroughgoing use of bloodletting. It scathingly ridiculed and censured a physician, William Turner, who had the temerity to write a pamphlet criticizing Dr. Rush’s doctrines and calling ”the practice of taking blood in diseases contrary to common sense, to general experience, to enlightened reason and to the manifest laws of the divine Providence.” Sick people needed fortifying, not draining, said Dr. Turner, and he was squelched.

It is my case that bloodletting in the 19th century was like government regulation in the 20th and 21st. There exists a “superstructure of technical complication” that makes wonks and boffins believe in their omnipotence, but they are as wrong as Dr Rush.

We will look back on this with wonder 100 years from now. Dang, I feel like I’m trapped in the wrong century. That said, better this one than any that came before.

Not Waving But Drowning

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This is one of my favourite poems, and at first glance it seems that it deals with the personal and doesn’t belong on Pragati Express. But hey, wait a minute: do you think the metaphor in the poem could be extended to decades-long victims of bad public policy?

NOT WAVING BUT DROWING
by Stevie Smith

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.