FROM speech that promotes hatred, hate speech has come to mean speech you hate. A nebulous term whose meaning varies from person to person, ‘hate speech’ is increasingly being used to vilify words and speech that we disagree with, and hence hate, expanding its meaning significantly from what it was meant to be – speech that encourages people to hate others.

Consider the recent controversy over Jack Dorsey, the chief executive officer of Twitter, the social media company. He held a poster made by the Dalit activist Thenmozhi Soundarajan showing a woman holding aloft a banner saying ‘Smash Brahminical Patriarchy’. The poster made the point that Brahminical patriarchy is deeply offensive. It has subjugated the large majority of Indians who belong to castes that are deemed lower than Brahmins, and uprooting such a structure is essential if India is to take meaningful steps towards creating a more equal society. That Dorsey was meeting women writers who use Twitter but have serious concerns about the way the medium is used to express vile views that are racist, misogynistic, and which urge followers to hate individuals or groups, made the response that followed particularly ironic.

After Dorsey posed for the photograph with the women and after Twitter officials encouraged the women to share the photograph on social media, the response from those who believed they were targeted was swift. Leading upper caste voices on Twitter – T. A. Mohandas Pai, a former Infosys executive who seems to be spending more time on Twitter and in investing in pro-government projects (such as the TV network Republic) and Chitra Subramaniam, who is an adviser to the network – criticized Twitter’s CEO for wading into territory he knows little about. Other self-styled groups claiming to represent Brahmins protested, and one such group said it would sue Dorsey for defamation, saying what the poster did was ‘hate speech’.

Notice the use of the term. Indian laws do not define hate speech, although there are specific sections of the Indian Penal Code, such as sections 295A and 153A, which respectively criminalize speech that outrages religious feelings or promotes communal enmity.

 

Those are sweeping terms, defined poorly and drafted with a view to curb critical comments, rather than uphold the right of free expression. What is intended to stop potential violence has instead ended up stifling free expression. Whether it is the artist Maqbool Fida Husain, or cartoonists making fun of politicians, or people sharing cartoons on Facebook, or even ‘liking’ a post on social media, many find themselves charged under these laws, and their actions are also described – erroneously – as hate speech.

Though it is entirely possible that these expressions have caused hurt to the people who were at the receiving end, they are not hate speech. To return to our Twitter example, a Brahmin who is sensitive may feel hurt that his or her identity is equated with a norm that has kept the majority of Indians stuck in a hierarchical patriarchy that is hereditary and from which there is no escape. But what the poster does not do is to attack the individual Brahmin. The solution it offers is the smashing down of the patriarchy – an abstract idea – and not of individuals or the group.

Indeed, the Indian Constitution intends to smash Brahminical patriarchy – its articles abolish untouchability and in particular Article 14 states openly that all Indians are equal and should be treated as equal. If reaching that goal requires smashing Brahminical patriarchy, so be it.

However, that’s not how Pai and Subramanian have read the poster. The politically motivated, self-styled ‘leader’ of Brahmins who said he would sue, has added yet another case for India’s overworked judges to consider.

The poster incident is symptomatic of the larger malaise in India – where people are all for freedom of expression for those they agree with, but have serious problems when those they disagree with exercise the same right. Yes, I am willing to let you speak as long as we agree; if not, and if you dare speak too loudly, that becomes tantamount to hate speech. Then I want the law to stop you from speaking. If each individual exercises such a right, and if competitive intolerance prevails, its logical end would be what the late humourist Behram Contractor, who used the pseudonym Busybee, envisaged: where the only topics we could write about safely were cricket and mangoes. Busybee was describing the chill during the Emergency of 1975-77.

 

This is not to say that hate speech doesn’t exist. It does – there have been several prominent lawsuits in India that deal with what may be described as hate speech. Religious leaders and politicians who use religion have often deployed terms that vilify entire communities. Courts have ruled in the cases too, but the rulings have not established any clear jurisprudence that can inform either politicians, litigants, or indeed lawyers, about the state of the Indian law in this regard.

Consider Ramesh Prabhoo vs Prabhakar Kunte and Manohar Joshi vs N. Patil, in the cases that came to be known as the Hindutva cases. On 5 December 1992, the Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray warned Muslims in India to ‘behave’ and draw lessons. He referred to them as the progeny of dogs and made jokes about circumcision. The court ruled in the case reducing his civil rights (he was prevented from voting or standing for elections; he of course had never stood for elections and wasn’t likely to protest over his right to vote being taken away).

 

In 2009, the BJP MP Varun Gandhi was charged with making a hateful speech during an election rally, where he reportedly said that Muslims should leave the meeting he was addressing, and people should vote for him to save Hinduism. Gandhi has claimed that the video of the speech was doctored and the speech was not authentic. While the case went to court, as many as 80 witnesses turned hostile, and the court dismissed the case, citing insufficient evidence.

Another BJP stalwart, Subramanian Swamy, has been sued for hate speech. In 2011, when there were a series of bomb blasts in Mumbai killing 26 people, Swamy blamed Hindus for taking such violence lightly. Unlike in Ahmedabad in 2002 – where Hindus killed Muslims in what was explained away as a spontaneous outburst of violence in retaliation over the burning of the Sabarmati Express in Godhra; or Delhi in 1984, where Congress supporters killed Sikhs following the assassination of Indira Gandhi; in Mumbai despite the city having seen terrorist violence and bomb blasts in recent years, retaliatory violence has been relatively rare.

Swamy not only chided Hindus for taking the violence lightly, he also blamed Muslims for undermining India. He specifically called for denying voting rights for Muslims and said that the military should colonize Jammu and Kashmir. Cases were filed against him, and Harvard University, where he taught a summer course, removed him from faculty.

Finally, Akbaruddin Owaisi had said in 2012 that ‘in 15 minutes 250 million Muslims can exterminate a billion Hindus.’ Bombastic prose and questionable mathematics apart, the case was brought to the court, where it dragged on.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is no exception, although no charges have been filed against one of his speeches, which many may consider offensive. He referred to camps of Muslims displaced by the violence in his state in 2002 as ‘baby producing factories’. That is repugnant; it is probably filled with hate; but there is neither any political will, nor administrative zeal in curbing such speech from anyone who is powerful. And banning such speeches may only mean that their recordings would get wider currency on the Internet through social media. It is that politics that needs to be challenged.

 

Upholding free expression on one hand and protecting lives on the other should not be a mutually exclusive choice. The state has to do both; indeed, it has a legal obligation to do so. But the confusion around what constitutes hate speech can be reduced significantly if we learn to distinguish between hate speech and dangerous speech.

Dangerous speech may be defined as words that raise a significant risk that the audience will be encouraged and urged to condone or perpetuate violence on specific individuals or groups. Physical violence is a crime. Justice needs to be served. Working towards eliminating the source of such violence is a duty for the state. Identifying dangerous speech – speech that incites or promotes violence, in a context in which there is a clear and present danger of imminent violence – is important.

 

Such speech should face restrictions. Speech that’s ill-informed, bigoted, shocking, absurd and insulting to communities, religions, or individuals should be challenged, but not necessarily be restricted. Saying that all the people of a particular faith are ‘stupid’ or ‘lazy’ or ‘disingenuous’ or ‘murderous’ is terrible; nor does expressing such a view make it right. But such speech is different from someone saying that because people of a particular faith are lazy or stupid or disingenuous or murderous, they should be singled out, discriminated against, murdered, or expelled. It isn’t easy to define that line, and often that line shifts. It is the responsibility of the government to define those markers bearing in mind its obligation to protect human rights, including the right of free expression, and step in only when that line is crossed.

How can a government figure out the distinction? First is the context. In a peaceful society if a standup comic makes jokes about a particular community, that’s not hate speech. Such jokes may be in poor taste, and indeed, those offended by such jokes have the right to express themselves, urging others not to attend the stand-up comic’s show. But they should not have the right to stop the stand-up comic from making jokes, or to prevent others from watching the show. (They may choose to make their own jokes).

While the response from many Islamic governments to the Danish cartoons was vastly disproportionate, some Iranians had the sense of humour to host their own cartoon competition, which aimed to make fun of Christians and Jews and Europeans, in no particular order. It may be that both sets of the cartoons – the initial Danish cartoons and the responses – were neither funny nor inspiring. But such a response was far better than imposing trade sanctions on Denmark (as some had proposed), destroying property, or attacking civilians in other countries who had nothing to do with the cartoons. (Even the cartoonists should not have been attacked physically – they have the right to draw cartoons that others find silly or even offensive.)

 

Hate speech does not mean insult, rhetoric, polemic, satire, abuse, ridicule, allegation, or even gratuitous rudeness. If the all-encompassing definitions of hate speech now being embraced by many of the newly-offended prevails, virtually no social or religious reformer would be able to say anything to advance her agenda. The consequence of that would be continuation of existing hierarchy and power balance, which would still permit those who are privileged and entitled to continue to say what they wish, even if it is ‘hate speech’ for the others, while preventing the other from speaking back. The outrage over the poster Dorsey carried is only the latest such example.

Casting Brahmins as the ‘Jews of India’ is another such. On a recent visit to Ahmedabad I was surprised to see the city’s walls plastered with slogans calling on Brahmins to unite to stop the violation of their rights. Brahmins already have rights; they feel they are entitled to privileges. Those privileges are getting reduced, and rightly so – hence the demand to preserve the social order by borrowing the language of civil activism and human rights. The extension of quotas for jobs to economically disadvantaged people from upper castes is another step by those who wield power to maintain the status quo. In Anand Patwardhan’s film, Jai Bhim Comrade there is a telling scene in which Marathi Brahmins, some dressed in traditional finery, are arguing for their rights, blissfully ignorant of the privileged position they’ve enjoyed for millennia, and without offering any evidence of their rights (not privileges or perceived entitlements) actually being violated.

 

Susan Benesch, a former journalist and now an academic at the American University in Washington, has developed a framework that helps us understand dangerous speech. According to the framework, dangerous speech has the following characteristics: First, there is an influential speaker. This may be a religious preacher, a politician, a charismatic orator, a public personality, but not the alcoholic in a village pub, nor someone who has climbed on a soapbox and is shouting loudly.

Second, there has to be a susceptible audience. This would mean people who are likely to get swayed by the hate-filled message, but not a well-informed citizenry which has access to other information, including viewpoints that are contrary to the hate-filled message.

Third, the message of the speech dehumanizes the other. Examples abound – think of Radio Mille Colliens, in Rwanda, which called the Tutsis ‘cockroaches’, and urged Hutus to deal with them, during a long period where it was the most prominent radio station in the area, and no other stations operated, and the population had no other access to information. Or, more recently, the British columnist Katie Hopkins calling all migrants ‘vermin’. Closer home, BJP President Amit Shah calling Bangladeshi migrants ‘termites’. Think of words like ‘modoadoa’ (stain) and ‘kwekwe’ (weeds) in Kenya, or how blacks were called ‘noxious insects’ during the Civil War period in the United States, and more recently, the kind of language used by Burmese Buddhist monks towards Rohingyas. These are all examples of dehumanization.

Fourth, the speech should play on a sense of grievance a community already has. Former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic excelled at that, when he made a famous speech to Serb nationalists, reminding them of their wounded pride by repeating stories of battles lost to foreigners centuries ago, urging them to regain pride. In 1989, in Gazimestan, to commemorate the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, Milosevic built on a 1987 speech he had made when he told the Serbs, ‘no one will beat you’. At Gazimestan he spoke of reclaiming past glories. The fall of Yugoslavia, as author Misha Glenny describes what followed, was inevitable.

Fifth, it should speak in terms of purity – where the outsider is the one who contaminates and dilutes the essence of a civilization. In his famous essay on ur-fascism, published in The New York Review of Books in 1995, the Italian writer Umberto Eco, who had witnessed the rise of fascism in Italy, had also said that speaking of purity is one of the early signs of fascism. The speaker who makes what Benesch would describe as dangerous speech, would speak of ‘way of life’ being changed by outsiders, or how our women or girls will be made impure. Think of the BJP rhetoric in Assam.

Sixth, the speeches use coded language which may seem innocuous to the outsider, but are intended as dog-whistles for those who understand a different, more specific meaning.

 

Context, a sense of social and historical wrong, the idea of ethnic, religious or national purity, are all the building blocks of a situation where dangerous speech is made possible, when the audience is susceptible and the speaker is powerful and has charisma. Add to that with the dominance of the medium, where a specific means of communication is limited to a sole entity or a primary one, and the problem becomes more acute.

Hate speech is broad, it can confuse. It may be morally condemnable, but it need not be criminal. It can offend, it can cause hurt and pain, but it may not mean a call for violence, unless such a call is explicit, at which point it is likely to be dangerous, provided there are no alternative means of communication, and if the audience is in thrall and the speaker has sway over the crowds. Dangerous speech specifically instills fears and provokes violence.

 

It is not possible to eradicate or eliminate hate speech. Indeed, banning it or prosecuting the one who makes hate speech may in fact glorify that individual, making him a martyr in the eyes of those who follow him or his politics. But we should be able to inoculate it and delegitimize it, says Benesch.

One way of doing it, she argues, is through counter-speech. Counter hatred with facts, with reason, and sometimes, as some groups have tried in Myanmar, with love. There, people moderating intense discussions on Facebook groups attempt to lower the temperature by deploying a civil tone in an attempt to reduce tensions. Censoring hate speech will only send it underground, and in the echo chambers in the netherworld, it will get louder. Countering it is hard work, but essential. And the laws meant to prevent violence and maintain peace should be used against those who indulge in dangerous speech which incites violence. The fact that people who make such speeches are parliamentarians, sometimes ministers or leaders of political parties, and who are able to strut and fret upon the stage without restraint, shows that the real problem is not the content of the speech, but the power equations that govern us.