The End of Karma

by Somini Sengupta

  He promised to improve the country’s dreadful sanitation system, which researchers increasingly said was a big factor behind childhood disease and malnutrition. But it wasn’t clear how his initiative to construct toilets would persuade Indians to actually use toilets, rather than relieve themselves in an open field.25

  He pledged to increase childhood immunization rates to 90 percent by 2020; however, in his first national budget, he did not allocate more money toward either health or education, which are central to young people realizing their ambitions.

  He got a thumbs-up from the business community for getting rid of expensive subsidies for diesel; raising limits on foreign investment in key sectors, such as defense; and announcing ambitious targets, like the construction of thirty kilometers of roads every day through 2017. But even his supporters said they were disappointed that he didn’t do more to push through unpopular reforms—for instance, to make it easier to acquire land, which is extremely contentious because it can step on the toes of politically powerful farmers.26

  Modi’s first year in office also brought rewards for the Hindu right. He gave Sangh loyalists important posts in his administration and in his party. His education minister said at one point that schools should remain open on Christmas day. His home minister proposed to ban the eating of beef, and the state government in Maharashtra, controlled by Modi’s party, made the trading and even possession of beef punishable by law, which, as critics pointed out, left many unemployed. The government-appointed head of the Indian Council of Historical Research said he regarded the Ramayana as a historical account—not mythology.27

  Meanwhile, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh mounted a campaign to convert Christians and Buddhists. The head of the Sangh, Mohan Bhagwat, railed against the late Mother Teresa.28

  Prime Minister Modi’s backers argued that he could not possibly maintain law and order in every corner of the country, which is the responsibility of state authorities anyway. Still, while Modi occasionally spoke out for religious harmony, he did not act to rein in the excesses of his hard-right supporters, including when they turned to violence.

  It not only sent chills through the country’s religious minority communities; it prompted warnings from unlikely quarters, including in late 2015 the governor of the Central Bank, Raghuram Rajan, who warned of the economic consequences of intolerance. “India’s tradition of debate and an open spirit of inquiry is critical for its economic progress,” he said in a widely covered speech in late October at the Indian Institute of Technology. He went on to say that it was important for India to protect “the right to behave differently so long as it does not hurt others seriously.”29

  By this time, three Indians had been murdered on suspicion of having eaten beef or having slaughtered or stolen cows; a fourth would be killed shortly thereafter.

  For Modi, the political costs began to pile up. By November 2015, his party had lost a crucial assembly election in the big, bellwether state of Bihar. The BJP had branded the opposition as being pro-Muslim and of insulting cows. This backfired badly. The party won fewer than half the seats of a new political coalition made up of Lalu Prasad Yadav—who ruled Bihar during Anupam’s childhood—and his former rival Nitish Kumar—who had tossed Yadav from power in 2005.

  The surprise machine of Indian politics had revived Yadav’s career once more, and in a coalition with the man who had accused him of running the state into the ground! In an email just days after the election news, Anupam called the victory “unprecedented.” But he worried that the “whims and fancies of Lalu Yadav,” whom he disliked, would prevail, and that this would prevent the new coalition from keeping its promises—roads, electricity, vocational training for youth.

  Modi’s biggest challenge confronted Shashi every morning as he left home to go to work. He lived in a gated community on the edge of Bangalore very much like the one that Surpriya called her “bubble” in Gurgaon. Shashi once described his complex as “America inside—India outside.” Every day, as he drove out of its gates, he saw the long line of young men, a generation younger than him, queuing up at the hiring line of a Coca-Cola bottling plant nearby. (Coca-Cola had returned to India in 1993, after the economy opened up.)

  They would be there all day, those young men who hoped to get a factory job. They were so close to the good life that they could almost lick it. And so very far away.

  Some nights, when he came home, Shashi heard of drivers being robbed just near his gates. Crime was not yet a potent political issue, but it could become one, he sensed. Anger would have to be dammed. It was not lost on him that one million Indians would turn eighteen every month from now until 2030. They could be turned into Modi’s army at election time, sure, but Shashi knew they could also pose the greatest challenge to his government.

  His own generation, he said, was different: They were willing to wait for democracy to deliver. “This generation wants it right now.”

  As Modi completed a year in power, Shashi counseled patience. He said Modi was focused on trying to create jobs. He rued that Indians were living in “an era of instant gratification.” He said social media was partly to blame.

  “Public Memory is woefully short these days with the News and Social Media outrage cycles shifting by the hour,” he wrote on the Niti Central website. Once devoted to the election campaign, it was now devoted to promoting pro-Modi messages.30

  FACEBOOK GIRLS

  Speaking Up,

  Testing Democracy’s Conscience

  On the third Sunday of November 2012, a dead man in sunglasses brings hustling, bustling, no-elbow-room Mumbai to a standstill. More than a million people line the streets for the funeral cavalcade of the city’s most influential and most controversial politician, a right-wing party boss by the name of Bal Thackeray, who even en route to cremation wears his trademark black shades.

  His supporters weep, chant, and wave party flags, which are orange and bear the image of a roaring lion. Most everyone else stays indoors.

  About two hours up the coast, in Palghar, one of Mumbai’s far-flung commuter towns, a twenty-year-old college student named Rinu stays indoors too. That evening, while her parents go to temple, Rinu goes on the Internet. On her laptop, she bounces between three open tabs. On one, she chats with a friend in the United States; on another, she fiddles with a music-recording program; on the third, she scrolls through her Facebook page, clicking “like” as indiscriminately as only a twenty-year-old can.

  She has heard about Thackeray’s demise. Who hasn’t? At eighty-six, Thackeray was among the most feared political bosses in contemporary India—a chauvinist, according to his critics, who over the years encouraged his followers to beat up migrants from other parts of India, then Communists, then Muslims, as well as to destroy gift shops that carried Valentine cards, because he considered Valentine’s Day to be a corrupting Western export. The writer Suketu Mehta once described Thackeray as “the one man most directly responsible for ruining the city I grew up in.”1

  Rinu has zero interest in politics, and therefore spends next to no time pondering Thackeray’s death. Her passion is music—specifically, pop songs, and not those arduous Hindustani classical scales her mother forces her to learn. Rinu is into Bruno Mars at the moment. She listens to his hits again and again. She plays his videos on YouTube repeatedly too, until she gets the words, the feel, the drawl exactly right. She records herself singing his songs—his “It Will Rain” is one of the songs she is presently working on—and if she is pleased with her own rendition, she posts it on Facebook. She posts a lot of stuff on Facebook, including pictures of her gorgeous curls, pictures of dogs, and a whole lot of minutiae about her daily life:

  “Made capcicum bhaji. Delicious!”

  “6 billion people and I’m still single.”

  “Off to sleep! *Feels like a ninja!* :D.”

  That Sunday night, Rinu thrusts herself into something bigger and scarier than she could ever have imagined. With a couple of off-the-cuff clicks and comme
nts, she finds herself inside a police station and charged with a crime—for the first time in her life. Without meaning to, she also prompts a high-stakes national debate over the right to free expression for Indians in the networked age.

  Rinu is arrested that evening under one section of a federal law, the Information Technology Act of 2008, designed to prevent posts online from sparking lawlessness offline. Her college friend, Shaheen, is arrested too, making them among the first to be charged under the provisions of the new measure—and certainly the most famous. News of their ordeal spreads instantly on social media, incenses their peers, and unleashes so much public outrage that within days, government officials promise to review the rules restricting online speech.

  The right to free expression becomes one of democratic India’s increasingly delicate pillars, but it is one that Rinu’s generation takes as a given. By 2012, the year of the girls’ arrest, India is home to one of the largest concentrations of Facebook users in the world, and nearly half of them are estimated to be between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four.2

  So, quite by accident, Rinu and Shaheen come to symbolize the demands of their generation. No matter how forcefully the state tries to tie their tongues, they holler back. They spur an intense legal and political battle, between a state machinery nervous about the nonsense that flows through the pipes of the Internet and a generation of digital natives for whom it is like air. In turn, they reveal an important fault line in the world’s most populous democracy. On a global index of free expression, compiled in 2014 by an American group called Freedom House, India ranks only as “partly free,” alongside Myanmar and Belarus.3

  India has wrestled with freedom of expression since independence.

  The preamble to the Constitution, which came into effect on January 26, 1950, enshrines “LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship.” Among the “fundamental rights” of Indian citizens, article 19 of the Constitution is unequivocal in its support for this idea: “All citizens shall have the right to freedom of speech and expression.” 4

  Free expression is a celebrated legacy. From India’s creative ferment has come an extraordinarily rich mix of music, dance, theater, and literature—not to mention the world’s most prolific film industry.

  India has never had the gulags of Solzhenitsyn’s Soviet Union. It has never forced its citizens into reeducation camps as China did under Mao. Even Mrs. Gandhi’s emergency era was mild by the standards of modern totalitarianism.

  And yet, since independence, India has been ambivalent about any speech that can inflame emotions and disturb the public order—all the more so because the state has had to pay attention to the sentiments of so many castes and creeds. India has had to weigh the cultural and religious sensitivities of all its people against the values of a secular, plural republic. That has been a delicate balance to strike, and the scales have often tipped in favor of order; Indian authorities have very often opted to squelch expression, giving the nation an improbably rich record of banned books and movies.

  Nothing exemplified independent India’s anxieties about civil liberties more plainly than two cases that reached its Supreme Court shortly after the passage of the Constitution.

  The first case was brought by a leftist magazine called Cross Roads after a state government banned it, on the grounds that it threatened public order. Its publisher, Romesh Thapar, argued that his constitutional right to free speech had been violated.

  The second case was brought by a magazine published by Rashtriya Swamsevak Sangh, the same Hindu organization where India’s future prime minister Narendra Modi received his political education. The Sangh went to court after it was ordered to have its publication prescreened by government authorities. The group was already a grievous thorn in the side of Prime Minister Nehru’s government. In court, the state’s attorneys contended that the Sangh magazine could endanger public order.

  In both cases—one from the government’s leftist critics, the other from the right—the Supreme Court was skeptical of the state’s argument. The judges said that a threat to public order alone was not enough to override the constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech, unless the state could prove that the published material specifically threatened the security of the state or sought its overthrow. The court ruled against the state.

  These twin rulings unsettled Nehru. He assembled his cabinet and proposed that the Constitution be amended. His ministers vigorously debated. They weighed the perils of squelching dissent versus allowing radicals, whether right or left, to threaten the stability of the new nation.

  The language they finally came up with seems now extraordinarily broad. They agreed on a constitutional amendment to limit the right to free speech if it was “in the interests of the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency, or morality or in relation to contempt of court, defamation, or incitement to an offence.”

  The amendment empowered the government to impose “reasonable restrictions” on speech; Bhimrao Ambedkar, law minister at the time, had insisted on the insertion of that “reasonable.”

  Nehru made his case to the nation’s parliament. He said that like other democracies, India could not afford to protect speech that allowed someone to advocate “crimes of violence.”

  India’s First Amendment passed on June 18, 1951—“the first major crisis of the nation state,” a law scholar named Lawrence Liang called it.

  “It exposed the inherent tensions between balancing freedom of speech and expression and the promotion of national security and sovereignty,” he continued.

  “It also posed the question as to who the guardians of the Constitution were. Finally it set in motion a debate which would haunt Indian democracy for the next fifty years, viz. the exercise of a democratic right as a threat to the larger, abstract ideal of a democratic state.”5

  When it was born, at midnight, on August 15, 1947, India was a most unlikely nation. It contained a multiplicity of faiths, languages, and races. There was no obvious glue to bind its people, only an idea that was radical for its time: that a poor, populous, incredibly diverse people could live together as a modern, secular republic. Its closest cousin among nations was the United States.

  By and large, in the first two decades of independence, what the state banned revealed the prickliness of a new nation. Racist tracts were not welcome. Prohibited too were writings that preached secession for Kashmir—the Himalayan territory that both India and Pakistan claimed.

  There were other sensitivities. In 1956, the state banned Rama Retold, a cheeky retelling of the Ramayana written by the Indian-English satirist Aubrey Menen. In 1960, it banned Arthur Koestler’s collection of essays The Lotus and the Robot, which was skeptical about India’s ability to nurture democracy.

  In the coming decades, India outlawed films that state authorities thought might engender violence. The 1984 Hollywood film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom could not be screened in India because it suggested that Indians ate chilled monkey brain for dessert. (We did not, not chilled anyway, as I assured my sixteenth-birthday party guests in California that year.)

  The most notorious ban came four years later, when Rajiv Gandhi’s administration banned the importation of The Satanic Verses, published in the United States. This was even before Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran put a price on Salman Rushdie’s head.

  Mahesh Bhatt’s 1998 film about Hindu-Muslim strife, Zakhm (the Hindi word for “wound”), could be screened only after it erased references to a Hindu extremist group. (Its members could not be shown waving orange flags, which is the color of Thackeray’s Shiv Sena party. Bhatt agreed to turn them into gray.)

  No one party or ideology has held a monopoly on squelching free expression. The Congress Party called for a ban of Katherine Frank’s 2001 biography of Indira Gandhi, which suggested that Mrs. Gandhi had had an active sex life. In 2003 the Communists who ruled my home state of West Bengal banned an autobiographical novel by Taslima Nas
reen, a Bangladeshi feminist who had angered some Muslim clerics. (Perhaps only in India can Communists be so concerned about offending clerics that they order police to confiscate all copies of a book.)

  Sometimes, it’s the fear of hooligans that squelches free expression. Parzania, a film based on the true story of a family that lost a son during the 2002 violence against Muslims in Gujarat, could not be shown in that state. Gujarat’s movie theater owners refused to screen it; they said they feared vandals, and the state authorities said nothing to reassure them.6

  I find it a bit strange that India’s leaders are still so anxious about free expression. The nation is no more as fragile as it may have been in 1951, when the First Amendment was passed. Yet, the anxiety about civil liberties has held on. It has arguably become more intense. Indian authorities are quick to squelch any utterance that might offend.

  To my mind, it is a measure of the state’s inability to guarantee law and order. That is to say, if you can’t protect your citizens from troublemakers on the street, you might as well squash anything that can upset the troublemakers—an offensive Facebook post, say, that might offend one community or another.

  India has done this repeatedly. One aggrieved group after another says it is offended by something someone has written, painted, uttered, clicked. The authorities respond by quashing the potentially offending utterance itself. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a political analyst, once described it to me as “offense mongering.”

  The most egregious example of offense mongering came over a handful of modernist works by Maqbool Fida Husain, India’s most famous painter. He attracted the ire of Hindu radicals with two nude, abstract figures of the Hindu deities Durga and Saraswati, as well as a painting that showed the figure of a female nude superimposed on the map of India.