India Between Nationalism and Free Speech

Through much of February and March 2016, India witnessed some of the largest student protests in its history. These protests raised important questions about how India – both state and society – conceives of various freedoms and balances these freedoms with the concepts of patriotism and nationalism.

On February 9, students at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi – a public university ranked among India’s top schools – held a protest to mark the third anniversary of the execution of Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri separatist hanged for his involvement in a 2001 terrorist attack on India’s parliament. There has been a lively debate in India for several years as to whether or not Guru was innocent or guilty. However, he was tried and found guilty by a generally competent and impartial court of law, and confessed that he arranged for money, arms, and housing for the actual attackers. Detractors allege that the charges and evidence against Guru were contrived by police looking to pin the blame on someone and that his eventual execution took place under uncharacteristic haste because the then-ruling Congress Party wanted to gain political points by appearing tough. While these are fair criticisms, they do not detract from the general consensus in India that Guru was guilty.

It remains an open question as to what exactly the protestors at JNU, a campus known for its left-wing activism, said on February 9. Activists from a right-wing student organization, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), filed a complaint with the police against the protest because, according to them, the protestors praised a terrorist, raised pro-Pakistan slogans, and favored the independence of Kashmir from India. On the other hand, the protesters themselves claimed they were merely questioning the unjust judicial processes and that only a handful of bad apples shouted secessionist slogans. While it is still unclear  who shouted what, posters advertising the protest leave no doubt that its organizers intended it to be controversial. Students were invited to attend an event “against the Brahmanical collective conscience against the judicial killing of Afzal Guru” that would be held “in solidarity with the Kashmiri people for their democratic right to self-determination.”

The next day, on February 10, Kanhaiya Kumar, the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Students’ Union, was arrested on charges of sedition. He was released on bail 23 days later. Shortly after Kumar’s arrest, another student, Umar Khalid, was arrested for organizing the February 9 rally and raising slogans demanding freedom for Kashmir. While Kumar denied chanting slogans in favor of Kashmiri independence and claimed to support India’s territorial integrity, he also strongly defended the right of JNU’s students to protest. Kumar and Khalid’s arrests led to student protests and demonstrations at college campuses across India, where groups gathered to call on the government to respect freedom of speech and expression. Moreover, these protests were supported by leftist intellectuals and international organizations such as Amnesty International. India’s sedition laws, a holdover of the colonial-era British Penal Code, came under particularly sharp criticism.

As with everything, there are always two sides to a story. While the student protests were met with approval by some subsections of Indian society, they also faced widespread social and governmental opposition.

Student groups pointed to Kumar’s arrest and subsequent judicial proceedings against him as evidence of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government’s war on free-speech and left-wing movements. Indeed, the BJP, while defending the principle of free speech, has used the incident to portray itself as the defender of Indian nationalism and did little to question the principle of arresting individuals for sedition. The government’s Home Minister, Rajnath Singh confirmed this, noting that: “If anyone raises anti-India slogans, tries to raise questions on the country’s unity and integrity, they will not be spared… stringent action will be taken against them.” Kumar and other student activists believe that the government’s actions against student groups were motivated by a desire to distract Indians from other, more important, issues facing the country. Moreover, Kumar portrayed the protests as breathing new life into a progressive movement that was fighting the “fascist tendencies” of the BJP government.

Some in India seemed to agree. India’s main opposition Congress Party, with the exception of its vice president, Rahul Gandhi, has also been cool on the protests, for fear of being tarred by association with “anti-national” elements. However, several regional party leaders praised Kumar when, after his release, he gave a fiery speech that urged his followers to continue chanting azadi (freedom), emphasizing freedom within India instead of freedom from India.

There is no legal case to be made for not arresting individuals for sedition, a crime that remains on the law books and has been used by Congress governments for decades. To defend against sedition laws, some opponents of the protests pointed out that such incidents would not be allowed in the United States. This is not true, but the comparison with the United States bears examination. India is not the United States, with the latter’s ironclad, almost absolute, freedom of speech provisions, enshrined in the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. Rather, like many European democracies, speech in India has numerous limits, constitutionally speaking, and these seem to be widely supported by the Indian population.

While the state did its part to criticize the protests, the independent media and large portions of the middle class were also against the college protests. In this sense, the opposition to the student protests looked more like the “silent majority” opposing counterculture protests in the United States in the 1960s, rather than Chinese-style state-sponsored repression. Indian social media, mostly populated by its educated middle-class, was generally unfavorable to the student protesters. Many social media users may be liberal, but they are liberal in a nationalistic sense, reminiscent of European liberals of the 19th century. A widely circulated answer about the JNU protests on Quora, a social media website popular among young Indians, argued that “[Freedom of speech] has reasonable restrictions. This freedom is not unfettered and it shall never be. The sovereignty and integrity of India, security of the state, public order, and incitement of an offense to name a few reasonable restrictions.”

Echoing the consensus among many Indians active on social media, another post said of the protests: “These brilliant students couldn't find a single other thing to celebrate in India, or make an issue of. Are they trying to say Afzal Guru was hanged wrongly? What's the proof? Are they saying they are against the death penalty? More importantly, Afzal Guru was hanged in 2013. Are they waking up to the news of his hanging now? What's their effing point? Nothing. Nada. Welcome to Communism in India.”

On his way to court, Kumar was assaulted by crowds several times; some in these crowds chanted that he and his fellow protesters were Pakistan ke dalle (Pakistan’s pimps). 

India’s independent media also was widely seen as being against the cause of the student protesters. Student groups at JNU complained several times that the media was not showing the protests and the sedition issue from their perspective and was instead stirring up the Indian masses against them. Arnab Goswami, a hugely popular reporter and talk show host, who is by no means a BJP apparatchik, took a stridently nationalist position that was widely criticized by students. Other media outlets were hardly more sympathetic to the students.

While the student protests have subsided somewhat following Kumar’s release, the issue of freedom of speech and sedition is unlikely to go away anytime soon, as Kumar’s trial could resume along with that of Umar Khalid and other individuals accused of sedition. What has India learned from all this? It has learned that the majority of its population and its private and public institutions do not see restrictions on freedom of speech to be a problem. While the reaction of the government and right-wing groups might have been over the top, it reinforced a norm that privileges nationalism over complete freedom of expression. For better or worse, this  is not seriously questioned outside of leftist circles India and likely won’t be questioned even if an opposition political party decides to do so for expediency.