Civil Liberties in the Early Constitution: The Crossroads and Organiser Cases

Key Question Being Explored in This Insight:

How did the first two Supreme Court cases shape free speech in India's early constitutional history?

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Institution: Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

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How did the first two Supreme Court cases shape free speech in India’s early constitutional history?

Image courtesy of interviewee. December 3, 2024

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This video presents a discussion on the context of freedom of speech in India, particularly in the political climate following the rise of the BJP government in 2014. The speaker reflects on their experiences and observations from a decade prior, emphasizing the importance of freedom of speech in the ongoing discourse about Indian liberalism. They argue that Indian liberalism, which concerns itself with freedoms, including speech, should be rooted in the anti-colonial movement against the British rather than in contemporary nationalist ideas propagated by the Hindu right.

The speaker contrasts the American tradition of defending despicable speech for the sake of principle with what they perceive as a lack of similar traditions in India, where individuals tend to defend only speech that aligns with their beliefs. They highlight two significant early cases of freedom of speech in post-independence India — the Crossroads case and the case involving the organizer of the RSS - both of which were decided by the Supreme Court in favor of free expression regardless of the ideologies involved.

This video argues for a nonpartisan approach to civil liberties, where individuals across different ideological divides should defend each other's rights to speak, noting a historical tradition of such alliances in India. The speaker offers three key takeaways: 1) Distinguishing political sovereignty from individual freedoms, 2) Not resting Indian liberalism solely on nationalism, and 3) Advocating for the importance of nonpartisan civil liberties activism in contemporary society, stressing the need for vigilance against governmental overreach regardless of the ruling party's ideology.

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Here are five key points from the video:

1. **Convideo of Freedom of Speech in India**: The video discusses the historical convideo of freedom of speech in India, particularly around the time of the BJP government's rise to power in 2014, highlighting controversies and government suppression related to this fundamental right.

2. **Historical Ties to Anti-Colonial Movement**: There's exploration of the idea that Indian liberalism regarding freedom of speech is rooted in the anti-colonial nationalist movement against British rule, with a particular focus on how this shapes contemporary views on liberal values and civil liberties.

3. **Defense of Civil Liberties Across Ideologies**: The speaker emphasizes the importance of defending civil liberties for all, regardless of ideological differences. They reference the traditional civil liberties stance of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which supports the right to free speech even for those whose views are detestable.

4. **Case Studies of Freedom of Speech**: The video references two early cases concerning freedom of speech that arose shortly after India's Constitution came into force in 1950, involving opposing publications—one leftist and one affiliated with the RSS. Both were defended based on the right to free speech and ultimately received support from the Supreme Court.

5. **Non-Partisan Civil Liberties Advocacy**: The speaker argues for a tradition of non-partisan civil liberties activism in India, which includes leaders from both the left and right defending each other’s rights to speak, counter to contemporary sectarian perspectives which often limit defense of civil liberties to those within one's ideological group. They advocate for recognizing and promoting this nuanced tradition in present discourse.

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Here are the key quotes extracted from the video, focused on themes surrounding freedom of speech, civil liberties, and the historical convideo of these issues in India:

1. **On the convideo of freedom of speech**:
- "There was a lot of conversation around freedom of speech...lots of controversies around, freedom of speech, government suppression of speech."

2. **On Indian liberalism and its roots**:
- "Indian liberalism...should really be seen as an outcome of the nationalist movement, the anti-colonial movement against the British."
- "...going back to that, that sort of anti-colonial sensibility on the one hand...the BJP...the Hindu right is not a liberal party...and therefore, there's very little to be said or to be expected from the Hindu right as far as protection of freedom of speech are concerned."

3. **On the civil liberties tradition**:
- "I'll defend your right to say what you like, even though I hate what it is you say."
- "What’s interesting...is this kind of attempt to craft a nonpartisan civil liberties platform."

4. **On historical cases of freedom of speech**:
- "The first two cases of freedom of speech...come up really just a couple of months after the Constitution comes into force in January of 1950."
- "The Supreme Court says that those statutes are unconstitutional...the restriction on freedom of speech is, is not warranted."

5. **On the ideological spectrum**:
- "It’s a victory for all Indians. It’s a victory for our communist brothers in Bombay."
- "Defenses of civil liberties are seen in kind of sector terms...So, you know, if I have...a Hindu right-wing ideology, then I’m gonna defend sort of my people."

6. **On the importance of civil liberties**:
- "There is a kind of problem across the board, regardless of the views of the people or that political affiliations."
- "It is hard to make that argument on the left liberal spectrum...to think that there could have been people on the Hindu right acting in good faith and favor of civil liberties seems like anathema."

7. **Final takeaways about the relationship between sovereignty and individual freedom**:
- "You really should distinguish political sovereignty from individual freedom."
- "The anticolonial movement is primarily a movement for political sovereignty, not so much a movement for individual freedom."
- "There is a tradition of non-partisan civil liberties activism in this country...extremely important to argue for in the present."

These quotes reflect the speaker's exploration of the complex dynamics of freedom of speech, civil liberties, and the ideological divides in the convideo of Indian politics and history.

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A couple of different contexts for the work

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that I presented.

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Uh, this was about a decade ago, a little bit,

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before that, and I was, you know, I was in India.

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There was a lot of conversation around freedom of speech.

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Um, there was the, the BGP government led

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by the bodi we joined in 2014.

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And, in the first couple of years

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after that, lots of controversies around, freedom

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of speech, government suppression of speech,

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and, there were two, issues that,

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now in that political moment were very important.

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One was a lot of people had this idea that,

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Indian liberalism, liberalism, being concerned

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with issues of freedom, including freedom of speech,

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should really be seen as an outcome of the,

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the nationalist movement,

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the anti-colonial movement against the British.

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And that a kind of return to liberal values required.

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You know, going back, going back to that,

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that sort of anti-colonial sensibility on the one hand

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and amongst Indian liberals, as an addition,

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the thought that, the BJP, Hindu, right-wing party,

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the, the Hindu, right,

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is not a liberal party, didn't have its antecedents in the,

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anti-colonial movement.

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And therefore, there's very little to be said

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or to be expected from the Hindu, right?

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As far as, protection

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of freedoms speech are concerned.

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Um, and the third, thing, I, you know,

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spent many years in the US

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and,

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I've been interested in civil liberties for a long time.

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Um, and you have this very strong, sensibility you had,

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it's, it's, it's less common now.

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Um, and the idea of, I'll defend your right to say

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what you like, even though I hate the, you know,

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what it is you say, it's to aire.

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Um, the famous example in the US is the, the case

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of Skokie, Illinois.

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These neo Nazis are, you know, one march through a town,

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which has a number of Holocaust survivors

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and, you know, members

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of the American Civil Liberties Union thought, look,

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it's really important to defend these are,

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we think these are despicable people.

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We don't think that their views have any value,

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but we think as a matter of principle,

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the strongest kinds of defenses of freedom

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of speech are those of

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where the speech in question is in fact, despicable.

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There is this kind of tradition,

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and I was struck by the absence of that kind of tradition,

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in India and in the Indian case.

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Um, you know, you'd often have,

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people will, you know, will, will talk about freedom

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of speech in the context of speech that, you know,

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they believe is valuable and worth defending.

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Um, and, you know, you don't, you don't have

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what you might expect from this A CLU tradition of

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somebody saying, yes, this guy is a,

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somebody's a member of the Hindu, right?

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I hate his ideology, but I think it's important

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that he gets his right, to say

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what he does or vice versa.

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Um, that, so-and-so's a Communist time anti-communist,

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but I believe that they have a right to speak.

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So those are the, the elements of the,

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that I've been thinking about.

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Um, and one,

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one reason why I was already a little bit at odds with the,

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the liberal sensibility of the time is

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that I had done some work on, this Manji

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who is, a famous rightwing, leader

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and very much associated now with in the Rightwing.

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And, I'd seen him making some very impassioned speeches

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in favor of freedom speech in, in Indian Parliament in,

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in 19 50, 51.

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And so I had some sense of stories,

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a bit more complicated, but, yeah.

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So these are, these are the questions that were,

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that led to this work.

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The first two cases of freedom of Speech,

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they come up really just a couple of months

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after the Constitution,

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comes into force in January of 1950.

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And it's very interesting.

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So one case is called the Crossroads Case.

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Uh, crossroads is a communist magazine, run out

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of Bombay, and it's edited

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by somebody who becomes very famous.

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Um, afterwards, Ramesh Tapper, later became,

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the editor, a magazine called Seminar,

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which in fact has continued,

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until just a few months back was its last, issue.

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Uh, his brother's a he sister is

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a very famous torian in Ram.

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Um, so Crossroads is, gets into legal trouble.

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It's, you know, all over the country in Bombay

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and in Hyderabad, Madras, in the late forties.

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So in 40, 48 and 49.

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And, it's an extremely anti Congress,

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magazine.

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You have to remember now, it's the Congress party

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that's in power at the center

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and also in all these provinces.

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Um, and, yeah,

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and, there's a kind

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of constant conversation in the pages

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of Crossroads itself saying, look,

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we are under attack and we help.

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We need funds. We are gonna fight this case.

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And so they're fighting this case, like I said

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before, the Constitution comes into force and also

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after the Constitution, comes into force,

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and, you know, to take an ideological,

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you know, the polar opposite ideological position.

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The other magazine is the organizer, which is the,

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the house organ of the Austria, the RSS, which is

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of course now extremely powerful.

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And, in the news, a lot.

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But in the late forties, the RSS was,

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Um, on the back foot for a number of reasons.

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Um, most importantly

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because it was banned by, the government,

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after Mamma Gandhi's assassination.

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And there's been a continuing story about the extent

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to which, it was

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or was not involved with the, assassination.

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But, in the late forties, it was not exactly a magazine

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that had great, you know, political heft

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or, or background, though it was,

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obviously the RSS was an important organization,

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even then.

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And the RSS, the organizer,

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in 19 50, 51,

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spends a lot of time.

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It's very, well, it's very anti-Muslim, it's anti Congress,

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anti Nero,

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and there's a, a discussion of,

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the partition on the, on India's, Eastern Front

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and partition of Bengal

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and, a refugee crisis that rises out of it

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and persecution of Hindus in,

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what was then East Pakistan and, is now Bangladesh.

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Um, so this is a period, the late, the late forties,

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the early fifties, in general,

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violence, communist violence, Hindu,

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right-wing violence, is a problem all over the country.

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Uh, the state responds to the problem in all sorts of ways,

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and one of the ways in which tries to respond is

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by clamping down on freedom of speech.

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And in the case of the organizer

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and, east Pakistan, there is a, you know,

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they're called for going to war back with Pakistan to,

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reunify India.

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Uh, there's, a lot of suspicion of,

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Muslims in India,

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and the, yeah, the government of India has an,

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has an interest in,

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c clamping down on the violence

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by clamping down in the speech.

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Um, but yeah, so the, this case goes

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to the Supreme Court at the same time,

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and, the court essentially issues

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the same decision in both cases.

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They, they are different cases, but it decides,

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both cases in the same grounds.

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And, what it says is that,

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the restriction on freedom of speech is, is not warranted.

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It's unwarranted. Uh, and why is that?

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Well, there is the new constitution that has a,

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protects the right to freedom of speech

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and the statutes under which these

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magazines are being censored.

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The Supreme Court says that those statutes are

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Unconstitutional.

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Um, why the unconstitutional, where they kind of overbroad,

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they allow for restrictions of speech in situations where

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in fact, the, the Constitution doesn't allow them

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to restrict for those reasons for public, order.

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Um, and, what's fascinating is, yeah, that these,

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these, magazines at opposite ends

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of the ideological spectrum come up at the same time

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and defend each other.

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I mean, right. The, the, the organizer,

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when they say we've won, it says, this is great.

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This is not just a victory for us.

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It's a victory for all Indians.

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It's a victory for our communist brothers in Bombay.

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I think actually that it's quite common.

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Uh, we live in a world, continue to live in a world

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where defenses

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of civil liberties are seen in kind of sector terms.

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And so, you know, if I have,

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if I believe in a Hindu right-wing ideology,

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then I'm gonna defend sort of my people

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on civil liberties grounds.

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But I'm going to say that a communist today is

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not somebody whom I will defend.

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I don't think there should be a right to speech to

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quote unquote, you know, speak against the nation.

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Um, so what, what's interesting,

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and the, the claim I make

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that is maybe a controversial claim is that what's happening

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around freedom of speech and civil liberties more generally

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in this period, in the late forties

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and 1950s, is that there is a kind of, attempt to

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craft a nonpartisan civil liberties platform,

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and where it's possible for, again, a communist to say,

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I'm gonna defend the right of the RSS to speak,

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or for a member of the Hindu right, to say,

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I'm gonna defend the right of a communist to speak.

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And not just speech.

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We don't, speech is one civil liberty,

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but you might think of others like, the right

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to a fair trial, let's say.

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Um, I wanna share one, one image,

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which is quite striking.

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This is an image from a booklet on civil liberties

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that was published in, towards the end, 1949.

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And what you'll see is, these two columns,

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communists and RS arrests in Madrass province.

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Madrass was a, the site of a, a lot

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of anti-communist organization at this point.

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I mean, communist, the Communist Party was banned

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for a large period of this, of this time.

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It would be very odd to see this kind

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of two columns in a civil liberties document today,

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because one would typically assume that if you have,

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you know, if you're more left oriented, you don't, you know,

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you want the people, the members of the Hindu right

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to be in jail, and vice versa,

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you think that's where they belong.

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So this idea that there's a general problem

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of state oppress, you know, state oppression of giving

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discretionary power to government officers to arrest people

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or to decide to censor them, then there's a kind

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of problem across the board, regardless of the, of the views

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of the people or that,

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or the political affiliations

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of the people at the receiving end that you just don't see

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in the, in the Indian context.

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And what I was arguing in my paper is that the organizing

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around the civil, the, the crossroads in the organizer

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case represents this kind of moment.

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So this pamphlet, is from a,

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a group called the All India Civil Liberties Council,

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that's gets, set up, I think in late 1949,

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good news for a number of years.

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It's sort of, the history just vanished from the history

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of Indian liberalism.

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Nobody talks about it, but it has,

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you know, prominent right-wing leaders.

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So NC Strategy and Shama Prasad Muji on,

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on the Hindu, right?

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And it has, figures like,

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and Joshi who's a labor leader, from the left.

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I still don't, I know in a way,

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I don't even know enough about what this organization is

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and what it's doing, but, I see the, so,

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so I see that, this is, this is a group that's seems

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to be making a kind of non-sectarian kind of claim.

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The communists, the RSS is not saying we have right freedom

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to speak, but the communists shouldn't though, by the way,

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they believe that they're extremely anti-communist.

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They don't want the communists to be around,

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but at least they articulate this in this in

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a nonpartisan way.

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Stop sharing the screen here.

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It's hard to make that argument

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because people don't want to, if you're, if you're,

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on the left liberal spectrum in day to day to, to think

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that there could have been people on the Hindu, right?

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Acting in good faith and favor

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of civil liberties seems like a, you know, an athema.

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Um, and frankly, one of the things I had hoped,

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to do with that paper, and the couple things I wrote

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around then was to say to the, to the Hindu, right?

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That, look, you, you have this kind of tradition of,

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of civil liberties, lawyering

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and engagement, which is really fantastic.

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Something that you should,

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take pride in.

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And,

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and you know, there's been a growing conversation

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for a very long time now about how, you know,

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you wanna be sort of suspicious of Western liberalism.

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It's alien, it's an import.

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It's, comes from a colonial, you know,

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the legacy of colonial conquest.

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And so, at least the contemporary Hindu, right, is

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very invested in decolonizing these languages

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of liberalism saying, no, we need some, we need to go back

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to our past and deco, you know?

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Um, and one of the things that's interesting is if you,

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if you read what people like Shama Muji

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and, NC Chat are saying

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and writing, they're not making their freedom

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of speech claims on the basis of some ancient Hindu past.

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They're making it on the basis of really British liberalism.

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You know, John Stewart Mill, NC Chat has this great,

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speech where he is referring to these very famous

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American Supreme Court, Supreme, you know,

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justice Brandeis, justice Holmes, these,

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these are the people he's holding up to.

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So there's also a, a plea to kind of make the, enrich,

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enrich the history of the Hindu, right?

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And see that it's a, a more complicated one than one.

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One thing, I think there, maybe three takeaways.

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One is that the discourse in India is so, centered

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around the movement for Indian independence

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that it takes, again, if you're a liberal, it takes that

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to be the fountain head of, of everything else.

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And one of the important points I wanted to make is

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that you really should distinguish political sovereignty

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from individual freedom.

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And the anticolonial movement is a movement primarily

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for political sovereignty, not

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so much a movement for individual freedom.

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And that goes both ways. So, you know, there are defenses

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of individual freedom, including the,

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the civil libertarians who come up

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with this civil liberties council, who are not,

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you know, I mean, they're interested.

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They, they, they believe in Indian sovereignty,

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but that's not their main question.

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Their main question is what's the, you know,

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they weren't about a misuse of executive power, misuse

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of state power, who that power is a secondary question.

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The primary question is, don't be, you know,

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don't give people laboratory power,

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even if it's the good guides.

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Um, so the first

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takeaway is distinguished political civility from individual

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freedom, and

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therefore, don't rest Indian liberalism

339
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on nationalism.

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That's the second takeaway.

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Um, and the third is this idea that,

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there is a tradition, there is a tradition

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of non-partisan civil liberties activism in this country.

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Um, I, I think it's an extremely important tradition to

345
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remember, but it's also extremely important to, argue

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for in the present,

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because I think we live in a, a country where there's,

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there's is not much appreciation for,

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and people are very relaxed about, you know,

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locking people up in jail for they think

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that they've done something bad.

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The idea that, well, there's a general problem.

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It doesn't matter if, you know,

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if your chaps are in power, they might get outta power,

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in which case somebody else will start locking them in.

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Um, so yeah, so the idea of nonpartisan, civil, libertarian,

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interests, as something to be defended.

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That's the third, the third thing that I would take away.

Quick Answers

Freedom of Speech and Indian Liberalism: A Historical Perspective

00:00:00 - A couple of different contexts for the work that I presented. this was about a decade ago, a little bit, before that, and I was, you know, I was in India. There was a lot of conversation around freedom of speech. there was the, the BGP government led by the bodi we joined in 2014. And, in the first couple of years after that, lots of controversies around, freedom of speech, government suppression of speech, and, there were two, issues that,

00:00:34 - One was a lot of people had this idea that, Indian liberalism, liberalism, being concerned with issues of freedom, including freedom of speech, should really be seen as an outcome of the, the nationalist movement, the anti-colonial movement against the British. And that a kind of return to liberal values required. You know, going back, going back to that, that sort of anti-colonial sensibility on the one hand

00:01:07 - the thought that, the BJP, Hindu, right-wing party, the, the Hindu, right, is not a liberal party, didn't have its antecedents in the, anti-colonial movement. And therefore, there's very little to be said or to be expected from the Hindu, right? As far as, protection of freedoms speech are concerned. and the third, thing, I, you know,

Defending Despicable Speech: The Challenge of Civil Liberties

00:01:37 - and, I've been interested in civil liberties for a long time. and you have this very strong, sensibility you had, it's, it's, it's less common now. and the idea of, I'll defend your right to say what you like, even though I hate the, you know, what it is you say, it's to aire. the famous example in the US is the, the case of Skokie, Illinois. These neo Nazis are, you know, one march through a town,

00:02:10 - and, you know, members of the American Civil Liberties Union thought, look, it's really important to defend these are, we think these are despicable people. We don't think that their views have any value, but we think as a matter of principle, the strongest kinds of defenses of freedom of speech are those of where the speech in question is in fact, despicable. There is this kind of tradition, and I was struck by the absence of that kind of tradition,

00:02:41 - you know, you'd often have, people will, you know, will, will talk about freedom of speech in the context of speech that, you know, they believe is valuable and worth defending. and, you know, you don't, you don't have what you might expect from this A CLU tradition of somebody saying, yes, this guy is a, somebody's a member of the Hindu, right? I hate his ideology, but I think it's important that he gets his right, to say

Exploring Complexities of Freedom of Speech in India

00:03:11 - that, so-and-so's a Communist time anti-communist, but I believe that they have a right to speak. So those are the, the elements of the, that I've been thinking about. and one, one reason why I was already a little bit at odds with the, the liberal sensibility of the time is that I had done some work on, this Manji who is, a famous rightwing, leader

00:03:44 - And, I'd seen him making some very impassioned speeches in favor of freedom speech in, in Indian Parliament in, in 19 50, 51. And so I had some sense of stories, a bit more complicated, but, yeah. So these are, these are the questions that were, that led to this work. The first two cases of freedom of Speech, they come up really just a couple of months after the Constitution, comes into force in January of 1950. And it's very interesting.

00:04:15 - crossroads is a communist magazine, run out of Bombay, and it's edited by somebody who becomes very famous. afterwards, Ramesh Tapper, later became, the editor, a magazine called Seminar, which in fact has continued, until just a few months back was its last, issue. his brother's a he sister is a very famous torian in Ram. so Crossroads is, gets into legal trouble.

Media Dynamics and Political Tensions in Late 1940s India

00:04:50 - and in Hyderabad, Madras, in the late forties. So in 40, 48 and 49. And, it's an extremely anti Congress, magazine. You have to remember now, it's the Congress party that's in power at the center and also in all these provinces. and, yeah, and, there's a kind of constant conversation in the pages

00:05:18 - we are under attack and we help. We need funds. We are gonna fight this case. And so they're fighting this case, like I said before, the Constitution comes into force and also after the Constitution, comes into force, and, you know, to take an ideological, you know, the polar opposite ideological position. The other magazine is the organizer, which is the, the house organ of the Austria, the RSS, which is

00:05:50 - And, in the news, a lot. But in the late forties, the RSS was, on the back foot for a number of reasons. most importantly because it was banned by, the government, after Mamma Gandhi's assassination. And there's been a continuing story about the extent to which, it was or was not involved with the, assassination. But, in the late forties, it was not exactly a magazine

Political Tensions and Freedom of Speech in Post-Colonial India

00:06:25 - or, or background, though it was, obviously the RSS was an important organization, even then. And the RSS, the organizer, in 19 50, 51, spends a lot of time. It's very, well, it's very anti-Muslim, it's anti Congress, anti Nero,

00:06:55 - the partition on the, on India's, Eastern Front and partition of Bengal and, a refugee crisis that rises out of it and persecution of Hindus in, what was then East Pakistan and, is now Bangladesh. so this is a period, the late, the late forties, the early fifties, in general,

00:07:27 - right-wing violence, is a problem all over the country. the state responds to the problem in all sorts of ways, and one of the ways in which tries to respond is by clamping down on freedom of speech. And in the case of the organizer and, east Pakistan, there is a, you know, they're called for going to war back with Pakistan to, reunify India.

Supreme Court's Ruling on Free Speech in India

00:08:00 - Muslims in India, and the, yeah, the government of India has an, has an interest in, c clamping down on the violence by clamping down in the speech. but yeah, so the, this case goes to the Supreme Court at the same time, and, the court essentially issues

00:08:26 - They, they are different cases, but it decides, both cases in the same grounds. And, what it says is that, the restriction on freedom of speech is, is not warranted. It's unwarranted. and why is that? Well, there is the new constitution that has a, protects the right to freedom of speech and the statutes under which these magazines are being censored. The Supreme Court says that those statutes are Unconstitutional.

00:09:00 - they allow for restrictions of speech in situations where in fact, the, the Constitution doesn't allow them to restrict for those reasons for public, order. and, what's fascinating is, yeah, that these, these, magazines at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum come up at the same time and defend each other. I mean, right. The, the, the organizer,

Nonpartisan Advocacy for Civil Liberties

00:09:30 - This is not just a victory for us. It's a victory for all Indians. It's a victory for our communist brothers in Bombay. I think actually that it's quite common. we live in a world, continue to live in a world where defenses of civil liberties are seen in kind of sector terms. And so, you know, if I have, if I believe in a Hindu right-wing ideology, then I'm gonna defend sort of my people

00:09:59 - But I'm going to say that a communist today is not somebody whom I will defend. I don't think there should be a right to speech to quote unquote, you know, speak against the nation. so what, what's interesting, and the, the claim I make that is maybe a controversial claim is that what's happening around freedom of speech and civil liberties more generally in this period, in the late forties and 1950s, is that there is a kind of, attempt to craft a nonpartisan civil liberties platform,

00:10:34 - I'm gonna defend the right of the RSS to speak, or for a member of the Hindu right, to say, I'm gonna defend the right of a communist to speak. And not just speech. We don't, speech is one civil liberty, but you might think of others like, the right to a fair trial, let's say. I wanna share one, one image, which is quite striking. This is an image from a booklet on civil liberties that was published in, towards the end, 1949.

Civil Liberties and Political Polarization in India

00:11:06 - communists and RS arrests in Madrass province. Madrass was a, the site of a, a lot of anti-communist organization at this point. I mean, communist, the Communist Party was banned for a large period of this, of this time. It would be very odd to see this kind of two columns in a civil liberties document today, because one would typically assume that if you have, you know, if you're more left oriented, you don't, you know, you want the people, the members of the Hindu right to be in jail, and vice versa,

00:11:35 - So this idea that there's a general problem of state oppress, you know, state oppression of giving discretionary power to government officers to arrest people or to decide to censor them, then there's a kind of problem across the board, regardless of the, of the views of the people or that, or the political affiliations of the people at the receiving end that you just don't see in the, in the Indian context. And what I was arguing in my paper is that the organizing around the civil, the, the crossroads in the organizer

00:12:06 - So this pamphlet, is from a, a group called the All India Civil Liberties Council, that's gets, set up, I think in late 1949, good news for a number of years. It's sort of, the history just vanished from the history of Indian liberalism. Nobody talks about it, but it has, you know, prominent right-wing leaders. So NC Strategy and Shama Prasad Muji on, on the Hindu, right? And it has, figures like, and Joshi who's a labor leader, from the left.

Non-Sectarian Claims and Civil Liberties

00:12:40 - I don't even know enough about what this organization is and what it's doing, but, I see the, so, so I see that, this is, this is a group that's seems to be making a kind of non-sectarian kind of claim. The communists, the RSS is not saying we have right freedom to speak, but the communists shouldn't though, by the way, they believe that they're extremely anti-communist. They don't want the communists to be around, but at least they articulate this in this in a nonpartisan way. Stop sharing the screen here. It's hard to make that argument

00:13:14 - on the left liberal spectrum in day to day to, to think that there could have been people on the Hindu, right? Acting in good faith and favor of civil liberties seems like a, you know, an athema. and frankly, one of the things I had hoped, to do with that paper, and the couple things I wrote around then was to say to the, to the Hindu, right? That, look, you, you have this kind of tradition of, of civil liberties, lawyering and engagement, which is really fantastic.

00:13:45 - take pride in. And, and you know, there's been a growing conversation for a very long time now about how, you know, you wanna be sort of suspicious of Western liberalism. It's alien, it's an import. It's, comes from a colonial, you know, the legacy of colonial conquest. And so, at least the contemporary Hindu, right, is

Revisiting Indian Liberalism: From Anti-Colonial Roots to Individual Freedom

00:14:14 - of liberalism saying, no, we need some, we need to go back to our past and deco, you know? and one of the things that's interesting is if you, if you read what people like Shama Muji and, NC Chat are saying and writing, they're not making their freedom of speech claims on the basis of some ancient Hindu past. They're making it on the basis of really British liberalism. You know, John Stewart Mill, NC Chat has this great,

00:14:49 - American Supreme Court, Supreme, you know, justice Brandeis, justice Holmes, these, these are the people he's holding up to. So there's also a, a plea to kind of make the, enrich, enrich the history of the Hindu, right? And see that it's a, a more complicated one than one. One thing, I think there, maybe three takeaways. One is that the discourse in India is so, centered around the movement for Indian independence

00:15:22 - to be the fountain head of, of everything else. And one of the important points I wanted to make is that you really should distinguish political sovereignty from individual freedom. And the anticolonial movement is a movement primarily for political sovereignty, not so much a movement for individual freedom. And that goes both ways. So, you know, there are defenses of individual freedom, including the, the civil libertarians who come up with this civil liberties council, who are not,

Distinguishing Political Sovereignty and Individual Freedom

00:15:54 - They, they, they believe in Indian sovereignty, but that's not their main question. Their main question is what's the, you know, they weren't about a misuse of executive power, misuse of state power, who that power is a secondary question. The primary question is, don't be, you know, don't give people laboratory power, even if it's the good guides. so the first takeaway is distinguished political civility from individual freedom, and therefore, don't rest Indian liberalism

00:16:29 - That's the second takeaway. and the third is this idea that, there is a tradition, there is a tradition of non-partisan civil liberties activism in this country. I, I think it's an extremely important tradition to remember, but it's also extremely important to, argue for in the present, because I think we live in a, a country where there's, there's is not much appreciation for,

00:17:24 - locking people up in jail for they think that they've done something bad. The idea that, well, there's a general problem. It doesn't matter if, you know, if your chaps are in power, they might get outta power, in which case somebody else will start locking them in. so yeah, so the idea of nonpartisan, civil, libertarian, interests, as something to be defended. That's the third, the third thing that I would take away.

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