The Ali Khan Mahmudabad case is free speech under trial

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on May 22, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/05/22/the-ali-khan-mahmudabad-case-is-free-speech-under-trial

The arrest and subsequent release on interim bail of Ashoka University professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad, and the discussions in and out of court that have followed, ought to concern journalists, or rather those who believe that in a democracy, journalists should question the powerful. 

Prof Khan was arrested by the Haryana police in the early hours of May 18 based on two complaints relating to his posts on Facebook a week earlier.  Both complaints were registered in the same police station in Haryana, close to the private university where he heads the department of political science. One was by a member of the youth wing of the BJP, the other by the head of the Haryana Commission for Women.

After two days in police custody, and after the lower court sent him to judicial custody, the Supreme Court granted Khan interim bail on May 21.

In the immediate aftermath of the arrest, several national English language newspapers made strong editorial comments against the arrest and the serious nature of the charges brought against Prof Khan, including sedition.

As the speed with which events occurred around his arrest, readers might have overlooked these editorials (which in any case are read by a small number). But for the record, they are worth re-reading, given what followed in the subsequent days.

The Indian Express, in its editorial headlined, “Amid government’s calls for unity, Ali Khan Mahmudabad’s arrest sends a chilling message”, went on to state that fear cannot enforce unity in an open democracy. It argued that the Prime Minister’s call for unity and the strategy to send all-party delegations to present India’s case abroad after Operation Sindoor did not sit well with such actions. 

Deccan Herald was more direct. It wrote that Khan’s arrest “is the State’s strike against the expression of a citizen’s right and it exposes the police and the government which acted against him as partisan, and even communal. It is almost certain that Mahmudabad’s name was the problem here and that shows.” The Times of India suggested that “all thinking Indians must also ask why a professor who praised, logically and cohesively, GOI’s military response to Pahalgam found himself behind bars.”

And The Hindu suggested that the Supreme Court “must reiterate the importance of the freedom of expression and come down heavily on law enforcement agencies that misuse powers to slap serious charges related to sedition, on frivolous grounds.”

We know from the proceedings in the Supreme Court on May 21 in response to Ali Khan’s bail application that nothing even vaguely resembling this has happened. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

Given some of the remarks made by Justice Surya Kant, it appears that he has a different view of such rights. He was quoted as saying “everybody talks about rights…as if the country for the last 75 years was distributing rights.” Nor has the court ticked off the Haryana police for the alacrity with which it responded to the two FIRs.

In fact, just three years ago, in the case of the bail application by journalist Mohammed Zubair of the fact-checking platform AltNews, the Supreme Court had laid down that “Arrest is not meant to be and must not be used as a punitive tool because it results in one of the gravest possible consequences emanating from criminal law: the loss of personal liberty.” It also said, “Individuals must not be punished solely on the basis of allegations, and without a fair trial...when the power to arrest is exercised without application of mind and without due regard to the law, it amounts to an abuse of power.”  

Instead, in this case, instead of criticising the police for arresting a person “solely on the basis of allegations”, the court has directed the Haryana police to set up a Special Investigative Team “to holistically understand the complexity of the phraseology employed and for proper appreciation of some of the expressions used in these two online posts.”  This task has been given to police officers. How they are supposed to “understand the complexity” of posts that are written in reasonably simple English remains a puzzle. 

More alarming than leaving a team of the police to decide whether the charges against Khan hold is the last part of the order which states: “It is made clear that one of the objects of granting interim bail is to facilitate the ongoing investigation. If the SIT/Investigating Agency finds any other incriminating material against the petitioner, it shall be at liberty to place it on record and seek modification of the interim order.”

In other words, there is more to come in this unravelling drama.

Interestingly, in Zubair’s case, the UP government had argued that Zubair should be restrained from tweeting. The SC ruled against the request, stating, “The imposition of such a condition would be tantamount to a gag order... (which) have a chilling effect on the freedom of speech.”

In Khan’s case, exactly the opposite has happened. The court has restrained him from posting anything on the case, or “any opinion in relation to the terrorist attack on Indian soil or the counter response given by our armed forces.”

Khan’s case is one more nail in the coffin of the limits placed today on freedom of expression by this government.  

In his article in Frontline on the Khan case, Saurav Das writes about the “judicial choking of free thought”. Analysing the Supreme Court’s interim bail order in the case, Das doesn’t mince words in his critique. He writes:

“Mahmudabad’s case is a microcosm of sorts. It is a perfect example of how you make a nation of intellectually dead citizens, where critical inquiry is replaced by rote repetition and progressive voices are muzzled to make space for conformist, mediocre opinions. This is how a society dies, where the proliferation of free thought is choked, through a slow, judicially sanctioned suffocation of intellectual life.”

Perhaps free thought has already been choked, if you look at Indian mainstream media, especially TV news. There is precious little that is even mildly critical of recent government actions, even in our newspapers. Or questions, for instance, about how the all-party delegations, which have set out to foreign lands to explain the Indian government’s position on terror and Operation Sindoor, will explain the same government’s actions against minorities, especially Muslims, in India. According to to this piece in Article-14 by Kunal Purohit, there have been 113 incidents of “anti-Muslim hate crimes and hate speeches” since the April 22 terror attack in Pahalgam. 

Despite this, every now and then, even TV news can spring surprises. Such as this interview by Preeti Chowdhury on India Today TV with Renu Bhatia, the chairperson of the Haryana Commission for Women who filed one of the cases against Ali Khan.  Chowdhury did what journalists are supposed to do. She firmly and politely asked Bhatia what part of Khan’s post did she think insulted the women in uniform who appeared at the briefings during Operation Sindoor alongside the External Affairs Secretary. Do watch Bhatia’s effort at explaining what cannot be explained. 

Modi’s misstep: By banning BBC documentary, far more people have now watched it

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on January 27, 2023

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2023/01/27/modis-misstep-by-banning-bbc-documentary-far-more-people-have-now-watched-it

The Modi government has scored a self-goal.

By using emergency provisions in the Information Technology Act to order YouTube and Twitter to take down links to episode one of the BBC’s two-part series India: The Modi Question, the government has ensured that thousands of people have now watched the programme.

The programme was telecast on January 17 on BBC Two, which is only available to viewers in the UK. Yet, given the nature of the internet, it was widely available on social media in no time for anyone anywhere to watch it.

Two days after the first episode was telecast in the UK, India’s external affairs ministry spokesperson Arindan Bagchi said the documentary was a “propaganda” exercise that reflected a “colonial mindset”, and that the government had taken the step to get all links to the episode taken down.

Under the emergency provisions of the IT Act, the government can ask for content to be removed if it affects the “unity, integrity, defence, security or sovereignty of India”. It has been used several times since these provisions were introduced and Twitter has acceded several times to the government’s requests based on this provision. In this instance, barring Bagchi’s statement, the government has not issued any explanation about how this programme falls under any of these categories.

The first episode focused on the communal killings of 2002 in Gujarat when Narendra Modi was chief minister. Its news peg, so to speak, was a confidential report prepared at the time by the British high commission in India on the events that unfolded in the state. According to the report, which has been published on the Caravan’s website, the team that went to Gujarat concluded that Modi was “directly responsible”. 

For those familiar with what happened in 2002, there is little that is startlingly new in the programme, barring the British high commission’s report. We see distressing footage of those days and weeks in Gujarat that are familiar to many who watched the events unfold on live television, as India had private TV channels by then that covered the killings. There have also been films like The Final Solution by Rakesh Sharma that recorded the events of 2002.

The producers of the documentary have ensured that both critics and supporters of Modi have a say, giving the former plenty of airtime to put forward their views. There is also a mention of the Supreme Court clearing Modi of all charges of conspiracy.

Then why object to the programme? It’s evident that any reminders of what happened in Gujarat in 2002 are not welcome, even if they are by a foreign channel with a limited audience, now that Modi is the prime minister. If the government thought the documentary would sully Modi’s image internationally, especially when India is chair of the G20, the decision to take it down has misfired. Leading international outlets – including the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Guardian and others – have questioned the Modi government’s commitment to freedom of expression. Hardly appropriate at a time when the government has claimed that India is the “mother of democracy”.

Apart from individuals viewing the banned episode, there have been attempts at public screenings. But by overreacting to such screenings at Jawaharlal Nehru University, where the power went off just as the screening was to begin, or detaining students who were organising screenings at Jamia Millia Islamia, the government is only adding more fuel to the fire it has lit. 

There are likely to be even more acts of defiance, and the debate over the documentary is likely to continue for some time. In some ways, the government has done us a favour. It has drawn the attention of the public to these emergency provisions that have a direct impact on freedom of expression.

Incidentally, so far, the government has raised no objection to the second episode of the series. This looks at what has happened since 2014, when the BJP came to power at the centre and Modi became prime minister. Its specific focus is the status of Muslims in India today and, over the course of one hour, it records the lynching of Muslim men, the impact of the National Register of Citizens on Muslims in Assam, the opposition to the Citizenship Amendment Act, the Delhi riots of 2020, and the reading down of article 370 in Kashmir. Together, this makes a powerful indictment of the policies of the current government. 

One of the most chilling sections in episode one is the interview by BBC correspondent Jill McGivering with Modi in 2002. It concludes with this exchange. McGivering asks, “Do you think you should have done anything differently?” Modi responds: “Yes. One area where I was very, very weak. That was how to handle the media.”

The Modi who is now the prime minister of India has figured out how to handle the media. 

The provisions of the IT Act that the government used to order the taking down of links to the BBC programme are only one of several steps that this government has taken in the last eight years. They are incremental, like a slow burn. Hence, the response to them has been muted, limited to statements by media organisations and some editorials.  But the cumulative impact of these measures has been to try and stifle freedom of expression.

The government’s latest move to control the media is a draft proposal amending the IT Rules that will give the Press and Information Bureau the power to determine what is “fake” or “false” news and demand that it be taken down. The draft has not yet been accepted and several media organisations, such as the Editors Guild, have issued strong statements against it. As a result, the deadline set for objections has been extended. Whether these objections will be taken on board remains to be seen.

 However, the very fact that this government can contemplate such an amendment, essentially allowing a government department to decide what is “fake”, with little recourse to a hearing before the action is taken, indicates a larger plan to control free expression.  As the Indian Express points out: “...to remove content merely because the government decrees it ‘false’ would restrict free expression without any constitutional justification, violating citizens’ rights to receive all information on public issues, whether true or false.”

Incidentally, for those of us who were journalists during the Emergency of 1975-77, and had a direct experience of press censorship, it was the same PIB that operated as censor under orders from its political bosses.  Although today we are not living under an Emergency, to institute a system that gives such powers to a body whose principal job is to put out information about government programmes is ominous, to say the least, and totally unacceptable under any criteria of press freedom.

Unfortunately, as I have mentioned earlier, such incremental steps are like a slow burn. The public does not realise how gradually these curbs are being put in place. It is a perfect strategy to lull people into believing that we live in a free country, with guarantees of free expression, even as this right is being stifled slowly and surely.