It is no longer novel or surprising for the Indian State to deal out the grave charge of sedition with alacrity. It was commonplace before the current government took power and it will probably be routine much after the story unfolding at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University ends. The real question that should be asked is: what do these incidents of suppressing dissent tell us about our State?
Amartya Sen said that acts of suppressing dissent at the first available opportunity are indicative of the conflict between a Penal Code that is past its expiry date and a Constitution that is far more evolved. Delivering the Rajendra Mathur Memorial Lecture on February 12, the Nobel Laureate said that while “penal codes legislated by the imperial rulers still govern important parts of our life”, the Indian Constitution doesn’t have impositions that allow for curtailing individual freedoms. He said:
“The Constitution’s insistence on ‘public order, decency or morality’ is a far cry from what the organised political activists try to impose by hard-hitting kick-boxing, allegedly guided by delicate sentiments. The Constitution does not have anything against anyone eating beef, or storing it in a refrigerator, even if some cow-venerators are offended by other people’s food habits.”
For the academic Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the JNU episode indicates the growing tentacles of majoritarianism, with this government acting as the enabler. He wrote:
“It [the arrest] represents an open declaration by government that it will not tolerate any dissent. It clearly put on display this government’s imperiously presumptuous claim that it has the monopoly on nationalism… They want to peddle a patriotism whose condition of possibility is the wiping out of all thought... nothing they [JNU students] said amounts to a definition of illegality that should befit a liberal democracy. As a society, we are also losing sight of a basic distinction: the threshold of justification required for using the coercive power of the state is not satisfied merely because someone disagrees.”
These reasons don’t capture the fundamental reason for the repeated use of disproportionate action against dissent. The cycle of dissent-protest-arrest that we witness so very often is indicative of a far bigger problem – the fact that far too often we have allowed the Indian Republic to be sacrificed on the altar of Democracy.
Constant conflict
Democracy literally means the “rule of the people”. In reality, it can be defined as the rule of the majority. What constitutes a majority can vary – two-thirds or three-fourths or sometimes even a shade above 50% – but at the bare minimum, a democracy means that whatever the majority agrees to will be carried out by the State. In a pure democracy, therefore, the majority rules in all cases, regardless of the consequences for individuals or for those not in majority. For example, the city-states in ancient Greece were democratic, and so, it was within the laws of the State for Socrates to be killed through a majority sanction. Centuries later, in the JNU case, if a majority of people support the arrest of a student because what he said is “seditious”, it would not violate the principles of democracy per se.
What, then, prevents a majority from using its coercive power against individuals or groups with lesser power all the time? It is the Indian Republic. The Indian Republic prohibits the majority from running roughshod on the basis of its numerical strength. In a Republic like India, the Constitution limits the power of governments and groups, in order to protect the individual’s rights. It is the Republic that grants fundamental rights to individuals to live, work and even protest.
Unfortunately, far too often, the idea of the Republic is disregarded for the idea of democracy. The JNU episode is no different. We think of our State as a democratic one instead of as a democratic republic.
The conflict between the democracy and the republic has a long legacy. There have been many times when individual freedoms have been abrogating in the name of upholding the greater good, of securing India and its citizens. The first strain between the two aims came up with the first amendment of the Indian Constitution, which introduced the concept of "reasonable" restrictions. The amendment made it easier for the State to regulate speech if they violated “sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence”. The introduction of the word “reasonable”, along with vaguely defined reasons for the restrictions, added ambiguity – it locked the media, the executive, the legislature and the judiciary in a four-cornered contest which continues to this date.
The arrest of the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Student Union is as much a failing of the government as it is a reflection of the conflict between the Democracy and the Republic. What is worrying that once again the definition of what constitutes a seditious idea or slogan is being expanded.
Pranay Kotasthane and Adhip Amin are researchers at The Takshashila Institution, an independent and non-partisan think tank and school of policy based in Bengaluru.