‘Hate speech’ does not refer to offensive, or foul-mouthed speech directed at a people.
The Uttarakhand police arrested Wasim Rizvi/Jitendra Tyagi for his hate speeches at the Haridwar event, causing his friend and co-accused Yati Narsinghanand to sit on a fast in protest, and also call for a ‘revenge assembly’ if Rizvi-Tyagi wasn’t immediately released from custody.
While Owaisi has been using abusive remarks against Hindus and the police, no action has been taken against him.
The most oft-used sections of the IPC frame ‘hate speech’ as a solitary act of deliberate outrage, or provocation, which might result in hurt sentiments, or cause feelings of distrust amongst communities, or disrupt public order and cause immediate violence.
But yet, similar sentiments appear in more serious circles as well, like this statement from some former ambassadors, which is why some clarity about the terms used is necessary.
In truth, the concept of ‘free speech’ stems from the idea of equality: from the democratic impulse; whereas the tendency towards hate mongering is mired in the oldest, most archaic ‘bullying for power’.
‘Hate speech’ does not refer to offensive, or foul-mouthed speech directed at a people, or even to vitriolic complaints directed at the government.
The Supreme Court of India in the case of Pravasi Bhalai Sangathan v.
For this reason, ‘hate speech’, which causes a ‘democratic deficit’ vis-à-vis the targeted community, by seeking to push it out of the polity, is always inflected with social, political or majoritarian power.
Sections of the IPC also apply equally to hateful speech where it causes enmity and distrust between communities, incites violence, or causes public disorder.
However, the application of the same IPC sections to all manner of angry speech or even hateful speech hides the element of actual discrimination that attaches to some speech, but not to others.
It’s almost inconceivable, but if someone were to book him for such a remark, justifying one set of religious leaders issuing proclamations of war against another religious community, he might also be booked under the same section 295A.
To take another example, there is an obnoxious and violent threat that was made by Akbar Owaisi, to the effect that if police were taken out of the equation, he would attack and finish off Hindus.
The Supreme Court in the case of Amish Devgan v.
The ambassadors’ letter also treats the many instances of ‘hate speech’ as exceptional.
On the other hand, people who actually experience ‘hate speech’ understand it as systemic.
All Muslims do not necessarily experience personal physical violence every day, but what they do experience much more are the winks and the smirks and the ‘tum log…’ refrain.
Others experience it in being denied rides, or deliveries or rentals.
When the ‘marginalizing discourse’, exhibits a range of opinions, and tenors, from the more sedate to the positively violent, it could be argued that not all speech constitutes an offence under Indian criminal laws.
This idea has already been articulated in the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes directed at a member of the scheduled castes or tribes, as an ‘atrocity’, precisely because it feeds into histories of marginalization.
The latter takes the form of beginning to consider an entire community as undesirable – in not allowing Muslim vendors into residential colonies; evicting Muslim tenants from rented accommodation, discouraging inter-religious marriages, and social interactions general – and, it would now seem, a gleeful discourse around sexual violence directed at Muslim women.
Any act of protest by a people who are at the receiving end of the ‘democratic deficit’ is viewed as further disruption of a project that seeks to make public spaces more exclusive.
On a sympathetic reading, the ambassadors’ letter implicitly references the problem of exclusion.
If there is indeed an effort to include through welfare schemes, I should think it imperative that these very schemes should have assessment mechanisms to constantly monitor ‘hate speech’, which works at cross-purposes to these schemes.
To sum up, we might start to think about ‘hate speech’ as a concerted politics of discrimination and respond to it as a constitutional tort.
Violent protests may incur certain sections of the IPC that relate to public nuisance, or disorder, but they still do not constitute ‘hate speech’, which is a system of marginalisation.
The use of the word “chakka jam” has earned Sharjeel Imam the charge of sedition and unlawful activities under the dreaded UAPA, while there are hoardings all over town, put up by the BJP announcing a ‘chakka jam’ in the national capital against the excise policies of the Delhi government.
It would seem that the police are more fearful of the potential for harm from Imam’s use of that phrase , than it is of a prominent political party’s, with considerably more heft and manpower.
It has been established in studies on “structural bias’ in the police force in the UK and the US for instance, that embedded racism in the force causes a subjective bias against certain communities.
On the other hand, identifying with the mainstream, or majoritarianism, allows for a certain ease with their ways, and an indulgence of their indiscretions.