Kunal Kamra is an unlikely hero. He stands slightly hunched over, mic loosely held in one hand, the other occasionally pressed into service to express disbelief but often stuffed into a trouser pocket. His most recent special, Naya Bharat, reprises the themes of his best work: ridiculing the Bharatiya Janata Party government and documenting the moral decline of Indian society.

This understandably attracts the wrong kind of attention. The thin skins of Indian politicians and their ready supply of combustible lackeys makes this inevitable. Hours after Naya Bharat went online on March 23, the performance venue in which it had been filmed was ransacked by members of the Shiv Sena faction owing allegiance to Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde.

Kamra’s shows in recent times have all reflected upon the uncertain status of comedy, and therefore speech, in India. What stands out in the new show is a marked shift in tone. At the end of the set Kamra pulls out a copy of the Constitution and stakes his right to speak upon it.

When the Shinde Sena ransacked the venue in which Kamra performed, the act of vandalism was a warning to others. Journalists and legal commentators use the phrase “chilling effect” as shorthand to describe this relationship between fear and speech.

The author Gautam Bhatia has defined it as “a practice of self-censorship that citizens engage in to avoid being penalised for illegal speech”. If we expand this notion to include the self-censorship people engage in to avoid extrajudicial mob violence, our picture of the suppressive effect of fear on speech is complete.

What does it mean for freedom, not just of speech, but freedom writ large that this chilling effect is now not the exception but the rule in India? Part of the problem lies in the selective application of state power. Minorities, Muslims in particular, are targeted. The average middle-class Hindu may assume that the most draconian laws are reserved for people more marginal than him. In his mind his freedom remains untouched.

This is an error. The error is a result of the conventional way of thinking about liberty. In his seminal essay, Two Concepts of Liberty, Isaiah Berlin called this “negative freedom”. Put simply, this is the notion that a person is said to be free “to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes” with their activity.

Liberty as non-interference explicitly allows, as Berlin admits, for a man to be free under dictatorship, so long as the dictator leaves him unmolested. In India, it leads people to believe that as long as their personal rights remain untouched, the existence of authoritarian legislation does not diminish their freedom.

If Berlin’s negative liberty produces this error, what other tradition of liberty might we draw upon as a corrective? In recent decades there has been a great deal of interest in what has been called the neo-Roman or republican theory of liberty. In a tradition that dates back to the English Civil War of the 17th century, this theory of liberty is associated with writers in the republican cause (hence republican liberty) including John Milton, Marchmont Nedham and James Harrington. They drew on ideas that find their earliest expression in the Justinian Digest of classical Roman law (alternatively neo-Roman liberty).

Freedom here is best thought of as a status: to be a free person is to enjoy the rights and guarantees of republican citizenship. The condition of freedom is contrasted with the condition of the slave. The slave is unfree not because his actions are interfered with; indeed, a slave may benefit from a great degree of non-interference given an absent or generous master. The slave is unfree because he is permanently dependent upon the will of another.

The core claim made in the neo-Roman tradition is that arbitrary power is antithetical to freedom. The very existence of arbitrary power necessarily implies exposure to a will that is not your own and that exposure is sufficient to render you unfree.

In his book, Liberty before Liberalism, Quentin Skinner, the historian most responsible for the recovery of this tradition, gives us a 17th century example of arbitrary power: the king’s veto on parliamentary legislation. Whether the king exercised this prerogative was irrelevant. Its existence meant that parliament was dependent upon his will.

Anti-colonial movements were actively engaged with the question of arbitrary power. The adoption of the Declaration of Purna Swaraj at the Lahore meeting of the Indian National Congress in 1930 was the decisive culmination of a debate centrally concerned with this question. An alternative to Purna Swaraj, or full independence, was dominion status within the British Empire; self-governance but not sovereignty.

The last decade in India has been marred by the institutionalisation of contemporary forms of arbitrary power. The enthusiastic deployment of laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act to stifle political dissent and the celebration of vigilante violence and lynch mobs have all degraded the freedom of Indian citizens. Fear has become a tool of this government.

Kamra’s Naya Bharat helps us understand his role in such a society. To think of him as just a comic is misleading. Kamra belongs to the same rank as activist Umar Khalid, YouTube commentator Ravish Kumar and factcheckers Mohammed Zubair and Pratik Sinha, who, among others, have put themselves at risk to tell the truth about this country. What unites these figures is that they bear witness to India’s moral and political degradation.

English’s mixed heritage gives it both “witness” (from the proto-Germanic wit) and “testify” (from the Latin testificārī). To bear witness is not just to see but also to testify. The everyday use of the word, in courts and crime dramas, has eroded part of its meaning. To bear witness implies a burden, a sense that the phrase “witness for the prosecution”, for example, does not convey.

English’s mongrel descent provides us with a clue to help us complete the picture. The word “martyr” comes from the ecclesiastical Greek root martys, which also means witness. To be a martyr today is to be oversensitive to your own pain. In its original sense, the martyr possessed so powerful a commitment to the truth that she was willing to die for it.

Martyrs were a special kind of witness, who, even on pain of death, would not change their testimony. (This semantic drift is curiously mirrored in Arabic, where the words for witness and martyr are shahid and shaheed.)

The size of his reach makes Kamra a target in a way that few English-speaking performers or writers ever are, and his genial, slightly shabby appearance masks an iron vein of courage. The list of names of those murdered – martyred – for the crime of speaking is too readily available to us: Gauri Lankesh, MM Kalburgi, Govind Pansare, Narendra Dabholkar. Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam and others languish in jail, endlessly awaiting trial, victims of a tyrannical law.

These are the consequences of speaking out against Hindu majoritarianism. To bear witness to our moral decline is to maintain a commitment to the truth in spite of this intimidation. In essence, it is a Gandhian commitment. Gandhi understood that in the face of tyrannical power the one freedom we have left is the freedom to reject fear. And what was satyagraha if not a grand commitment to truth at subcontinental scale?

In Naya Bharat, just before the credits roll, the video fades to white text over a black background. The line reads, “Life begins where fear ends.” Kamra understands the consequences of his work. For now, his life consists of dealing with those consequences. That will pass. But the heroism of this unlikely toreador making an idiot of these raging bulls will endure.

Raghu Kesavan writes about politics, sport and culture. His X handle is @raghukesavan1.