Some two decades ago, when I oversaw the features sections of a newspaper, four representatives of a Chennai restaurant sought an appointment with me. The delegation — owners, manager and the chef — were agitated about the extremely negative review by our food critic, a quick-witted young woman with a preternatural gift for words.
As I heard them out, it became apparent that their problem was not so much that she didn’t like the food, but the manner in which she expressed it. One of the offending lines, if I recall correctly, related to her description of their steak, which apparently tasted like an old hawai chappal that was left out for too long in the sun.
My attempts to gently explain that simile and hyperbole were legitimate tools in some journalistic contexts failed to assuage their hurt. I remember one of them, a woman, telling me: “It would have been fine if she thought our steak was overcooked and rubbery, but was it necessary for her to compare it to a worn-out chappal?”
The memory of this interaction came flooding back during the CJP-led youth protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. I couldn’t help thinking that the mimicry, the satire and the humorous memes about Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah must have hurt, even traumatised, the BJP leadership much more than the political broadsides, the blunt onslaughts, and even the most profane gaalis. While Modi forgave the ‘misguided’ students who frontally abused him and his mother, one couldn’t help thinking that the mockery cut too deep to be simply laughed away.
Also read: How student protesters rewrote the language of political dissent—with humour
Freedom to mock doesn’t exist in India
We Indians, to understate the point, are extremely sensitive to the power of ridicule. It is a power that is derived from stripping away the very things we want for ourselves and those we admire or hero-worship – respect, dignity, gravitas. Here, more than elsewhere, a certain seriousness is the social currency for power and authority. We are better loathed or lambasted than lampooned. Better feared than made a flake of.
This is why so many stand-up comedians have been the victims of police complaints, court cases and general public outrage, real and simulated. Since the backlash and the multiple FIRs against the group AIB for its celebrity charity roasts over a decade ago, so many comics have found themselves caught in legal proceedings and forced to apologise.
The idea that freedom of speech includes the freedom to mock, satirise – at the risk of causing offence – is strongly protected in the West.
It is a foundational notion that goes back at least as far as John Stuart Mill, who argued famously that our freedom of action and speech should not be circumscribed unless these acts or expressions caused or risked causing direct harm. At the cost of some over-simplification, his narrow definition of harm was confined to the physical kind. It is arguable that he only codified a commonsense belief that people had at that time. The childhood version of Mill’s Harm Principle is echoed in the well-known rhyme: ‘Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but words can never harm me’.
Of course, there has been a revision of this classical liberal position in recent years. The growing acceptance and spread of hate speech regulations, predicated on the idea that psychological harms need legal protection, is the foremost example of this. Still, hate speech is notoriously hard to define, which is one of the reasons that the commitment to robust satire has not been fully abandoned. Sometimes, this has come at great cost, as did in France after the publication of satirical cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad.
Also read: BJP’s selective outrage over insults reveals a new culture in Indian politics
Politicians should learn to laugh a little
As Salman Rushdie said, people don’t have a right not to be offended. But in India, we not only officially acknowledge offence but punish those who may cause it. Our so-called insult laws, Sections 153A and 295A of the IPC (now Sections 196 and 299 of the BNS), have been misused, invoked to clamp down on satirical stand-up comics on the grounds that something said has provoked enmity between groups or outraged religious feelings.
We will continue to remain a republic of hurt sentiments, but it is worth asking if what we saw at Jantar Mantar, more freewheeling carnival than everyday protest, will see satire and mockery move from the fringe internet spaces to the mainstream of political life. My conjecture is that we are going to see much more of this in the days ahead.
It is possible that Rahul Gandhi was taking a leaf from the CJP playbook by parodying Modi’s foreign policy by hugging a fellow Congressman. The Congress leader is probably more aware than most about the power of ridicule. There is no way of measuring this, but the ‘pappu’ moniker, coined just before the 2014 general election, has probably done him more political damage than the entire collection of op-ed articles that criticised his alleged lack of political savvy and seriousness.
Indian politics could do with a little bit of lightening up and its politicians would do well to learn to laugh a little more about themselves and those who they claim to venerate. Humour will serve us well if it shows up pretensions, exposes humbuggery and makes people understand an ironic truth — the joke is never the real cause for blame.
Mukund Padmanabhan is a Professor of Philosophy at Krea University. He was the former editor of The Hindu and the author of The Great Flap of 1942. He tweets @muk22. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant Dixit)