Sunday, December 09, 2018

Kamaal R Khan is a victim

You may call Kamaal R Khan all kinds of names for posting a video where he is supposed to have made derogatory comments targeting the LGBT community - I might join you in the name-calling if and when I do watch the video. But frankly, it matters little to me what he says. On any subject. What I do care about is that at least some of you join me in calling him a victim. A victim of our statism - a level of intolerance that asks for the State to intervene and shut down free speech.
A lot of you would say that Khan and others like him are not exercising their freedom of expression (#FoE) but abusing it through hate speech. Most of you would have dismissed the news with thoughts like: 'Serves him right' or 'he is just an attention seeker' or maybe even 'This Ujjawal Krishnam is an attention seeker'. The action against Khan is yet another in a long list of governments acting against individuals for mere speech but it is probably the first instance where an individual is sought to be punished by law for comments against the LGBT community. Yes, there are consequences to slander. As there should sometimes be. However, there could be broader, lasting consequences for LGBT individuals and their allies as well as for those on 'the other side of the fence'. So, here's a blog post after a long gap mainly to say that hate speech is also free speech. There is no freedom of expression if we do not allow what we may consider 'hate speech', allow expression of what some or even the majority might find offensive. We must at least not seek to punish someone through legal means for what we may consider to be offensive.
Without FoE, the church would still have us think that the earth is the centre of the universe. Without FoE, freedom fighters wouldn't have been able to advocate for India's independence (although some were still charged with 'sedition'). Sans FoE, whistle-blowers and the media would not be able to expose corruption, cronyism, nepotism in government and its policies. No FoE would probably mean one-party rule because there could be no opposition. If there were zero FoE, even #LGBT activists would not have been able to advocate for re-legalisation of same-sex love and reading down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Heck, without #FoE, I would not be able to blog this post. This much might be easy to agree if you are an LGBT rights activists or just a 'liberal' in popular understanding. Now comes the hard part. 
Who decides what is 'hate speech'? If you wish the government to discriminate between what you define as 'free speech' and 'hate speech', you are well down the path to death of #FoE (the bad news is that we have been on that path for sometime now). No one, absolutely no one is qualified to decide what is 'hate speech' and what is not, least of all a politician or a bureaucrat. Not even a lawyer or a judge qualifies, even though we have been stupid to allow elected representatives who have made laws for us that do exactly that.
There will always be differences in what one person sees as hate speech and the other as free speech. What makes one person more qualified than the other? Any law that tries to circumscribe #FoE (and we have multiple of those, enabled by the Constitution of India), gives scope for the subjectivity of a judge and the subjectivity of a cop to come into play. Although such public servants are paid to protect people while upholding the rule of law, by now you should know that people have opinions and egos, they get offended and they do let that influence their actions. The result is always: Might is Right. The innocent get crushed.
There's enough real crime to go around. The State should not be distracted from its job of handling crimes where there are victims. They must not be allowed to confuse their priorities. Khan's is a victim-less crime. Same-sex love was a victimless crime too until 5 September 2018. I'd like Krishnam to at the very least show how he is tangibly affected by Khan's video forget how one man's comments affect a population of millions?    
Condemn hateful comments. You must. That would be an exercise of FoE obviously. Counter abuse with valid criticism, and even abuse if you wish to fall to that level. But you have no right to muzzle someone. You are using the government as a proxy to do that literally, not figuratively. Restraining  someone, not just for speaking what they feel but also wrongfully confining them. Abuse ought to have no space in a civilised world. But let's face it, we are still evolving. We allowed that poster boy of liberal values, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Barack Obama, who is responsible for the killing of many, to evolve his position on LGBT equality. Can we not allow the same courtesy to people who are only spewing hateful words?
They will show their hand. They might not evolve - we have seen evolution failures such as an otherwise intelligent Harvard professor (Subramaniam Swamy) - thus proving to be exception to the rule. However, they should be allowed to expose their own failures. FoE is a barometer of what a society is like. As a side note, it can help activists strategise their communication and advocacy. Who is equality-friendly; on whom not to waste your resources; which message works in which situation.
Both wings might be offended by this post. The Left and the Right. Even some self-proclaimed libertarians. The right choices would be to either ignore or criticise. The wrong choices would be to tell Blogger to take down this blog/this post or to file a police complaint. Do you really want to control what others are able to read , hear or watch? Do you want to decide what others should think and what they shouldn't? Sadly, for most people on either side, the answer is 'yes' even if they consider themselves to be free speech advocates. This may be especially true of LGBT activists. This is even more unfortunate because restricting speech can hurt the cause of LGBT equality disproportionately. Someone who takes offence to it even more than a Khan or a Swamy can put legal obstacles in advocacy efforts. You might think it impossible in the euphoric aftermath of the Supreme Court verdicts on Section 377 but that is a fallacy. Five people overruled what two of their peers thought about the validity of a law. Tomorrow nine people could overrule those five. Difficult but not impossible. Especially in a country like ours going through a churn, where the resulting poison is in the air that we breathe. There are already enough tools against FoE speech in the hands of the powerful. As an LGBT rights advocate, can you say with certainty that it will not be used against any one of us? By using such laws against the likes of Khan, we are validating them and strengthening the hands of the State. We are allowing it to define what it considers pornographic, obscene or a threat to public health and 'morality', Instead, we should be demanding more freedom from our rulers. Count me out, I do not wish to be part of that section of the amorphous LGBT community that feels offended enough by Khan to demand that the police be called in on him.