Ashoka University professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad today mercifully walks free. But I am able to draw only limited solace from his conditional and fragile freedom. He continues to be charged with dire crimes against the nation and social harmony. He was subjected to severe verbal censure by India’s highest court for “dog-whistling”, for his “choice of words” and for seeking “cheap publicity”.
Worse, the court thought it fit to appoint a team of three police officers to exhume the true meaning behind his social media tweets that overtly called for social equity and peace. He has been silenced by the court from commenting publicly on the hostilities between India and Pakistan that rose after the brutal terror attack on tourists in Kashmir.
His conspicuous targeting by the heavy arm of the establishment and investigation for any covert “dog-whistles” in his posts that called for peace raise many troubling questions. About the character of the Indian state, about the withering of its democracy, about the contested space of the university, about the narrowing freedoms of the liberal intellectual, about the perils of calling for peace and social equity during times of valorised military aggression, about the dilemmas of empowering the state to regulate free speech. Perhaps most somberly of all, whether Ali Khan was made an example because of his Muslim identity.
The facts are well-known. Professor Ali Khan stands charged with some of the severest crimes in India’s statute books. These include crimes that allege that he endangered the integrity, sovereignty and unity of the nation and sought to divide and estrange communities. The Supreme Court, while granting him interim bail, ordered that a special team of three policepersons investigate his two social media posts.
What are these two Facebook posts that lie at the centre of the crimes that Ali Khan is accused of? I have read many times the full text of these Facebook posts to try to unearth what in these posts could even remotely be considered seditious, anti-national or damaging to social harmony.
I failed.
There are three main thrusts to his contested posts. The first is his understanding of the rationale of the Indian government for its response to the latest act of terror killings. India, he says, has put “the onus on the Pakistani military to make sure that it cannot hide any longer behind terrorists and non-state actors”. It has “begun a new phase in terms of collapsing distinction between military and terrorist (non-state actors) in Pakistan”.
He observes that “the Pakistan military has used militarised non-state actors to destabilise the region for far too long while also claiming to be victims on the international stage”. Operation Sindoor “resets all received notions of Indo-Pak relationships as the response to terrorist attacks will be met with a military response and removes any semantic distinction between the two”.
The second is a brief call for ensuring equal citizenship for India’s Muslims. The “optics” of a Muslim woman army officer Colonel Sofiya Qureshi becoming the public face of the armed forces in official briefings, he says, would be reduced to hypocrisy if lynching and destruction of Muslim homes by bulldozers continue. In a secular democracy, this appeal for equal protections of minorities by the state would be considered salutary. In a de facto Hindu nation, the demand for equal rights of Muslims would be seen as disruptive, deserving censure and repression.
The third thrust of his posts is a brave and ringing call for peace. “The loss of civilian life is tragic on both sides and is the main reason why war should be avoided”, he declares (my italics). “There are those who are mindlessly advocating for a war but they have never seen one, let alone lived in or visited a conflict zone. Being part of a mock civil defence drill does not make you a solider and neither will you ever know the pain of someone who suffers losses because of conflict.
“War is brutal. The poor suffer disproportionately and the only people who benefit are politicians and defence companies. While war is inevitable because politics is primarily rooted in violence – at least human history teaches us this – we have to realise that political conflicts have never been solved militarily”.
He also cautions against hateful calls against the enemy. “So when you clamour for war or you call for a country to be wiped out, then what exactly are you asking?” he asks. “For the genocide of an entire people? I know Israel is getting away with doing this – and some Indians admire this – but do we really want to advocate the wholesale murder of children as potential future enemies?
“Just because you are far from the border or because you have internalised so much hate that you no longer think of human beings when you think of an entire country, people, religious community, ethnic group, or social group doesn’t mean you are safe… You cannot equate an entire people with their government. In any case war eventually hits everyone. It’s just a matter of time.
“Think about what it means when you say ‘wipe them out,’ ‘finish them,’ ‘destroy them’ etc?
“You are saying kill all the children, the elderly, minorities, those who are opposed to war on the other side and many other innocent people who want to do exactly what you want to do: be a father, a mother, a daughter, a son, a grandparent and a friend. You can only ask for such wholesale destruction if you have completely dehumanised them”.
He draws upon the teachings of both the Bhagwad Gita and the Prophet to support his appeal for harmony and amity. Denouncing the “blind bloodlust for war” displayed by some people on social media, he declares that warmongering “disrespects the seriousness of war and dishonours the lives of soldiers whose lives are actually on the line.”
It is nothing short of a tragedy that this luminous, heartfelt and morally salient call for peace has been distorted by the state establishment as an ignoble crime against the nation. His pacifist appeal for peace was an act of exceptional moral courage at a time when war-mongering is led from top on both sides of the border. The hawkish Pakistani general has been elevated to field marshal. Massive hoardings have risen across India of prime minister Modi in military fatigues.
If voices calling on both governments to abjure from a war that would shatter the lives of innocent vulnerable citizens are silenced, even criminalised, this is a clear signal of a land that has dropped its moral compass.
The gravity of this societal crisis was reflected particularly in the distressing verbal trouncing to which Mahmudabad was subjected by judges of the Supreme Court. This is the highest forum to defend constitutional freedoms and secularism. The learned judges made mystifying allusions to “dog-whistling” in the professor’s social media tweets, criticising his “choice of words” and charging him with seeking “cheap publicity”.
The bench ordered the appointment of a Special Investigation Team to “holistically understand the complexity of the phraseology employed and for proper appreciation of some of the expressions used in the two posts.” It is beyond our comprehension how three police officers could be equipped to decipher hidden meanings that the learned judges could not themselves interpret from a post written in elegant and straightforward English.
The learned judges directed the professor to make no further statements about the India-Pakistan hostilities. At a time when the country is deluged with social media posts and speeches of hatemongering and warmongering, there is painful irony that calls for peace by a political scientist are silenced.
The contrast with how hateful speeches calling even for genocide by political and religious leaders are treated by the police and courts could not be more telling. During the 2024 general elections, the prime minister himself led his party’s hate campaign from the front, describing Indian Muslims repeatedly as infiltrators, engaged in a series of sinister conspiracies or jihads.
Concurrently with the criminal action against Mahmudabad, a minister from Madhya Pradesh, Kunwar Vijay Shah chose to describe Colonel Sofiya Qureshi as the “sister or terrorists”. The police initially took no action against him. It required the High Court to direct the police to register crimes against the minister, describing his statements “cancerous and dangerous”. Of course he has not been arrested.
India’s moral crisis was also on display in the conspicuous and disgraceful silence of the management of Ashoka University after the unjust criminal targeting of their faculty. This university presents itself as a premier liberal arts university. Its muteness in the face of this assault on the freedom of its faculty to call for peace and social justice displays how hollow are its claims.
The contrast, of Harvard University, that refused to penalise its students and faculty who protested Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, is uncomfortably telling. The university refused to bend even when in retribution the country’s president announced the slashing of a $2-billion grant to the university. We should also be mindful of the ways that the universities in Nazi Germany allowed themselves to become hotbeds of the Nazi genocidal ideology.
It is heartening, however, that many students and faculty members of Ashoka University came forward in heartening solidarity with Professor Ali Khan, despite the craven silence of the university leadership. Faculty members took turns to sit outside places where the professor was held in custody. I was particularly touched by a public statement released by Ali Khan’s students, who described him as compassionate and thoughtful, a teacher who loved his country and taught his students respect for the constitutional values of secular democracy.
But the Supreme Court even attacked public displays of solidarity with the professor, handing out a stern warning to academics and students who supported Professor Ali Khan with the words – “we know how to handle them also”.
The perils and consequences of suppressing free speech by unjust application of criminal law can be profoundly corrosive for a society. Journalist Sourav Das aptly describes the treatment of Ali Khan by the police and courts as “a perfect example of how you make a nation of intellectually dead citizens, where critical inquiry is replaced by rote repetition and progressive voices are muzzled to make space for conformist, mediocre opinions. This is how a society dies, where the proliferation of free thought is choked, through a slow, judicially sanctioned suffocation of intellectual life”.
Yet let me end with a central dilemma about the apparent imperative to control surging and sometimes genocidal hate speech by law. The dangers of hate speech that steadily poisons the social fabric and incites hate violence are manifest and frightening. But if we have stronger laws to punish hate speech, what we would be doing is to empower the executive and its arms of power and control – mainly the police – to decide what hate speech is and what it is not.
The fate of Mahmadubad is a painful reminder of how a majoritarian and repressive state can use these powers. It will treat an impassioned pacifist call for peace and the protection of civilian lives as criminal hate speech. It will leave unpunished hateful dangerous calls for genocide.
The message from the Indian state and courts through the persecution of Ali Khan is unmistakable. Calls for peace between and within the nation are unwelcome, as are calls for the rights to equal protection and rights of India’s Muslims. Yet the fact is that, for instance, I repeatedly have made similar calls against war and hate before and after the Pahalgam terror attack, in my writings and in online discussions and a video appeal.
Admittedly, the appeals made by Ali Khan are much more eloquent than mine. But if he is deemed to have committed crimes against the nation and social peace, then so have I. Then why has he been punished, jailed and severely upbraided by the country’s highest court and not I? There can only be one conclusion, and this is that he was punished because he is Muslim and I am not. Freedom of speech and conscience are under grave threat in Modi’s India for all citizens. But these freedoms are completely erased for the Indian Muslim.
Harsh Mander, justice and peace worker and writer, leads Karwan e Mohabbat, a people’s campaign to counter hate violence with love and solidarity. He teaches at FAU University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and Heidelberg University, Germany; Vrije University, Amsterdam; and IIM, Ahmedabad.
