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Colloquium Session 2: Safeguarding India's Democracy
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Vibha B Madhava
2:23
Hello and welcome to the second session of the Colloquium on 'The Constitution & Democracy'. The session is chaired by Sashi Kumar, Chairman, Asian College of Journalism (ACJ).
2:27
Theme 1: 'Freedom of expression and its discontent'. The speaker for this afternoon is Dr Anushka Singh (Assistant Professor, School of Law, Governance and Citizenship, Dr BR Ambedkar University Delhi).
2:29
The first theme for the afternoon focuses on one of the biggest challenges to freedom of expression in democracy - the question of 'line drawing', which determines the threshold of exercising the right to free speech.
2:35
The emcee for the day Gesu Bharadwaj welcomes the audience to the afternoon session of the Colloquium. Dr Anushka Singh, Kaleeswaram Raj, Geeta Ramasesan and Sashi Kumar move to the stage to commence the session.
2:40
Sashi Kumar introduces the discussants and the theme for the session. The discussion will revolve around the question: "How can 'line-drawing' be formulated in a way that it upholds the spirit of Constitutional democracy?"
2:41
Dr Anushka Singh begins her address. She is set to enter the theme of freedom of speech through the standpoint of philosophy and linguistics.
2:43
She poses three questions to the audience which is the framework of her alternative viewpoint on free speech.
2:47
The first question: "We have to assume that freedom of speech entails repercussions, and we try to evaluate the idea of the right to free speech through that. Then how do we arrive at the theory of free speech?”
2:48
"Can jurisprudence form the philosophy and linguistic theory in deriving the structure of the right to free speech in India?" Dr. Singh asks her second question. She follows it up with the last question: "Can the same legal standard be applied to evaluate all kinds of free speech?"
2:49
“A crisis helps us understand the routine better,” she highlights before delving deeper into the concept of free speech.
2:51
Talking about reasonable restrictions, she says: “ We can’t have free speech as an absolute right because we are faced with particular concerns. We need to limit the right and the limit to the right is in the form of reasonable restrictions.”
2:52
“Is your speech detrimental to public order, state and so on?” she questions while explaining the idea of harm in free speech.
2:55
Dr Singh highlights that what we have by way of free speech discourse in Indian law is the overwhelming understanding of public order perception.
She expresses her criticism of the law in terms of pre-conception of a targetted understanding of harm and says: “The language of the law doesn’t talk about protecting a particular community."
2:58
She further elaborates: “it helps to draw a pattern of where are we placed in terms of handling free speech” Emphasising the pattern, she says: "If we look at American jurisprudence in free speech, the pattern is fairly linear in nature."
3:00
Justice Holmes in the USA revised the understanding of restrictions in 1990. “His analogy was that the bad tendency test would penalise false cry of fire in an open space. As a democracy, we need to be mature enough to tolerate certain kinds of expression that may not be pleasant enough.”
3:03
Unlike America's linear pattern, India has a criss-cross pattern. She substantiates this statement with the mention of cases such as Ramji Lal Modi and the 1989 Ranga Rajan case.
3:05
In the Ramji Lal Modi case, the Supreme Court of India said that the Indian constitution works with the phrase, "in the interest of public order."
3:06
"What we have in India is a heckler's veto," says Dr Singh. A heckler's veto is based on the idea that if I hackle too much, the law will look at the response of the heckle but not look at the heckler himself.
3:07
Moving to the Ranga Rajan case, she highlights that the SC brought the phrase 'sparks in the powder keg' into play.
3:09
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