Regimes of free speech are, at their core, regimes of trust — trust between the State and its citizens, and trust among people themselves. Before protesting any attack on free speech, one must first ask: why has this trust broken down?
Reflecting on what free speech means in today’s challenging times, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one of India’s foremost public intellectuals, addressed a packed Calcutta audience on Monday evening. The talk, held at a Chowringhee bar called Conversation Room, marked the opening of a new series of lectures featuring some of the country’s most compelling thinkers unpacking topics ranging from free speech to the future of war.
Trust crisis
“Regimes of free speech require very high levels of trust — both interpersonal trust and trust between citizens and the State,” said Mehta, Honorary Senior Fellow at the Delhi-based think tank Centre for Policy Research (CPR), and Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University in the US.
“If we are to defend regimes of free speech, we have to ask why those regimes of trust have broken down.”
What emerged was a sweeping overview of the deeper causes eroding that trust and, in turn, triggering an assault on freedom of expression.
New realities
Mehta, former vice-chancellor of Ashoka University, noted that traditional defences of free speech were rooted in philosophy. “Often, when free speech is under attack these days, our instinct is to defend it with a philosophical argument. We think the answer must lie in law or some principle.”
But those arguments no longer suffice, because the game has changed, he said.
Free speech built on trust: Mehta opens talk series; conversations at city bar.
“On one level, those levels of trust were always very fragile. They were never perfect,” Mehta said. “If we are going to recover, we have to ask slightly different questions — not just about philosophy, but about why the conditions of trust, which made regimes of free speech possible, declined.”
The audience at the talk by Pratap Bhanu Mehta on Monday evening. Picture by Sanat Kr Sinha
Among the reasons for this erosion, Mehta said, are the changing nature of religious identities, the growing concentration of executive power, and the emergence of a new “information order”.
“The way information is disseminated today is actually designed to produce regimes of distrust,” he said.
“The more regimes of distrust you have, the more it paves the way for assaults on free speech,” said the prolific columnist whose areas of research include political theory, constitutional law, society and politics in India, governance and political economy, and international affairs.
Censorship paradox
Mehta also talked of the paradox of contemporary censorship.
In the past, a banned novel or film would be out of reach, but now, censorship often has the opposite effect. “A more curious phenomenon about contemporary censorship is that it curiously wants to draw more attention to the object being censored. These days, the joke goes: if you actually want to draw attention to what you are saying, the most important thing is to get censored. It seems like a joke, but it tells us something quite interesting about our times,” he said.
“The impulse to censor is not being driven by conventional worries. Even the censors know they are going to draw more attention to the object being censored,” Mehta said.
So why does censorship persist?
It has become like a performance, he said. “The demand to censor is part of an economy of attention. It is a way of drawing attention to your cause, your sense of power, or your sense of injustice. Sometimes, the demand for censors is to simply show: look, let me tell you who is in power; I am not interested in actually getting this censored; what I do want is to be able to use this occasion to tell you who is in charge.”