WHITHER JUSTICE?

WHITHER JUSTICE?

Free speech is increasingly becoming a Constitutional casualty. If actual criminals and their political backers go scot-free, and social media influencers are selectively apprehended to execute the letter of the law, then what remains of the rendering of the promised justice as enshrined in the Preamble to the Constitution? After all the Constitution is a book and cannot enforce itself its codes but has to depend upon the administrative machinery to do so. When such a machinery turns malefic and turns upon the lesser offenders with all its administrative might, citing violation of Constitutional clause, when its political bosses at the helm of such machinery themselves violate the norms of the Constitution far more with impunity, democratic civic existence is imperilled and citizens have to curb their spontaneous self-expression, much to the detriment of the very flowering of democracy whose fundamental and inviolable principle ought to be the protection of free speech, the right to criticise and go against established religious and social practices and principles. There are limits imposed on such a freedom but to impose blasphemy law by default when it comes to a particular religion or even religions is to go against the very spirit of free speech. If to offend is blasphemous on the probability of hurting mass religious sentiment, then the time for democracy in its true colour and essence has not yet come for such a polity. Such a one as yet lives in the dark of medieval mindset and must with due rational training be modernised. If somebody offends with the written word, then countering it with the written word ought to restore parity. 

The aggrieved community cannot in a democracy impose its blasphemy laws on those outside of its pale. But today increasingly all over the world the blasphemy law is being overtly and covertly being imposed on all. This isn't quite democratic. If a religion can openly preach, even blaring over the loudspeaker, that it alone possesses the absolute truth and that, by implication, all other faiths are partial truths or downright falsities, heresies in the eyes of their 'The God', then that also ought to be deemed highly offensive to adherents of those other faiths. What about the law on that? Must law be enforced only to facilitate in effect rogue elements who take to the streets and vandalise in the name of 'hurt feelings', and, so, must law be enforced to silence criticism of Abrahamic religious principles which are not in keeping with the spirit of inclusiveness that the Sanatan Dharma espouses? Must Sanatanis alone bear the cross of secularism, inclusiveness and all-acceptance while adherents of absolutist, exclusive, fanatical faiths and ideologies can with impunity keep calling our gods and goddesses names and defame our spiritual traditions?

Written by Sugata Bose