When the protests against the Mohammed cartoons were raging last year, many European publishers had asserted that the freedom of expression precludes the right to insult. The arguments were clouded in a situation where not being seen as anti-Islamic was taken to be the politically correct stand to take. So, irrespective of what you believed was right or wrong, you had to tow the line of political correctness and denounce the Mohammed cartoons.
The point here is not about the cartoons, but that of the right to insult. If you don't delve into it, you can look at the flipside — the right to take offence. Today's Hindustan Times carries an article (Painting the art world red) where art critic and curator Ranjit Hoskote talks about this right, which you see being enforced day in and out these days.
The right to take offence is not a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution, but all the same, it is the most easily enforced of all rights. All you need is a local demagogue with a taste for publicity, a few rampaging goons, policemen who favour the violent over the reasonable, and a lower judiciary that is reluctant to defy the mob.
Hoskote takes his arguments to a higher level:
Periodic elections do not, by themselves guarantee a liberal democracy; they only guarantee periodic changes of government. A true democracy demands constant revitalisation of the spirit of openness, generosity and liberality of opinion. Democracy is not an achieved set of laws or a manual of instructions; it is a work in progress. It is a space that allows diverse imaginations to interact, it is a community of conversations. Given the direction in which we are heading, can we recover democracy as a community of conversations, rather than as a space segmented and partitioned by communitarian claims? Can we allow for the interplay of diverse imaginations, with none exerting a monopolistic claim on experience? Can we productively reconstitute the same objects in different discourses, without inviting assault on our civic and cultural freedoms? Can we preserve nuance, detail and polychromy in our accounts of ourselves – as complex selves in a complex society – without being coerced into subscription towards one group identity or another by colour-blind demagogues? Can we protect the right to artistic truth and the right to critique?
But then, it is unlikely that his contention will carry any conviciton with the hypersentive guardians of morality who would probably take offence even to his article.
