The last decade in India has been marred by the institutionalisation of arbitrary power.
Kunal Kamra is an unlikely hero. He stands slightly hunched over, mic loosely held in one hand, the other occasionally pressed into service to express disbelief but often stuffed into a trouser pocket. His most recent special, Naya Bharat, reprises the themes of his best work: ridiculing the Bharatiya Janata Party government and documenting the moral decline of Indian society.
This understandably attracts the wrong kind of attention. The thin skins of Indian politicians and their ready supply of combustible lackeys makes this inevitable. Hours after Naya Bharat went online on March 23, the performance venue in which it had been filmed was ransacked by members of the Shiv Sena faction owing allegiance to Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde.
Kamra’s shows in recent times have all reflected upon the uncertain status of comedy, and therefore speech, in India. What stands out in the new show is a marked shift in tone. At the end of the set Kamra pulls out a copy of the Constitution and stakes his right to speak upon it.
When the Shinde Sena ransacked the venue in which Kamra performed, the act of vandalism was a warning to others. Journalists and legal commentators use the phrase “chilling effect” as shorthand to describe this relationship between fear and speech.
The author Gautam Bhatia has defined it as “a practice of self-censorship that citizens engage in to avoid being penalised for illegal speech”. If we expand this notion to include the self-censorship people engage in to avoid extrajudicial mob violence, our picture of the suppressive effect of fear on speech is complete.
What does it mean for freedom, not just of speech, but freedom writ large that this chilling effect is now not the exception but the rule in India? Part of the problem lies in the selective application of state power. Minorities, Muslims in particular, are targeted. The average middle-class Hindu may assume that the most draconian laws are reserved for people more marginal than him. In his mind his freedom remains untouched.
This is an error. The error is a result of the conventional way of thinking about liberty. In his seminal essay, Two Concepts of Liberty, Isaiah Berlin called this “negative freedom”. Put simply, this is the notion that a person is said to be free “to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes” with their activity.
Liberty as non-interference explicitly allows, as Berlin admits, for a man to be free under dictatorship, so long as the dictator leaves him unmolested. In India, it leads people to believe that as long as their personal rights remain untouched, the existence of authoritarian legislation does not diminish their freedom.
If Berlin’s negative liberty produces this error, what other tradition of liberty might we draw upon as a corrective? In recent decades there has been a great deal of interest in what has been called the neo-Roman or republican theory of liberty. In a tradition that dates back to the English Civil War of the 17th century, this theory of liberty is associated with writers in the republican cause (hence republican liberty) including John Milton, Marchmont Nedham and James Harrington. They drew on ideas that find their earliest expression in the Justinian Digest of classical Roman law (alternatively neo-Roman liberty).
Freedom here is best thought of as a status: to be a free person is to enjoy the rights and guarantees of republican citizenship. The condition of freedom is contrasted with the condition of the slave. The slave is unfree not because his actions are interfered with; indeed, a slave may benefit from a great degree of non-interference given an absent or generous master. The slave is unfree because he is permanently dependent upon the will of another…..
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After the truth-shower 