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China has extended a $1.3 billion syndicated loan and a $1.5 billion-yuan denominated swap, while negotiations are ongoing for more loans
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As many as 53 houses and shops built in ‘violation of the law’ have so far been demolished in Khargone
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Congress said that arresting the minister on murder and corruption charges was the only way to ensure justice
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Islamabad claims some terror groups ‘dismantled’
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The conference is a platform to discuss challenges being faced by the judiciary and it was last held on April 24, 2016
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A SpiceJet spokesperson confirmed that the DGCA has restricted 90 pilots of the airline from flying the Max planes
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According to sources, at least 29 houses built illegally by some of the accused in the incident were bulldozed on Tuesday
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The UGC will soon issue detailed guidelines in this regard and the option will be available to students from the 2022-23 academic session
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US is willing to be a partner of choice with India across virtually every realm — commerce, technology, education & security, Blinken said
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Parab was deported to India from Cairo in Egypt earlier in the day, as per the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officials
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Listen to a reading of this article:
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The United States is suddenly very concerned about human rights violations in India, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken telling the press on Monday that “we are monitoring some recent concerning developments in India including a rise in human rights abuses by some government, police and prison officials.”
While it is true that India’s right-wing government is guilty of human rights abuses and has been for years, it is also true that the US State Department does not actually care about human rights abuses.
A leaked State Department memo from the early days of the Trump administration showed neoconservative empire manager Brian Hook teaching a previously uninitiated Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that for the US government, “human rights” are only a weapon to be used for keeping other nations in line. In a remarkable insight into the cynical nature of imperial narrative management, Hook told Tillerson that it is US policy to overlook human rights abuses committed by nations aligned with US interests while exploiting and weaponizing them against nations who aren’t.
“In the case of US allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, the Administration is fully justified in emphasizing good relations for a variety of important reasons, including counter-terrorism, and in honestly facing up to the difficult tradeoffs with regard to human rights,” Hook explained in the memo.
“One useful guideline for a realistic and successful foreign policy is that allies should be treated differently — and better — than adversaries,” Hook wrote. “We do not look to bolster America’s adversaries overseas; we look to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver them. For this reason, we should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to US relations with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. And this is not only because of moral concern for practices inside those countries. It is also because pressing those regimes on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically.”
And it begins…
— Maitreya Bhakal (@MaitreyaBhakal) April 12, 2022
India was a "natural ally" as long as it did what the US wanted. But the minute the regime doesn't get what it wants, it is monitoring a "rise" in human rights abuses in India.
They're so transparent it's almost funny…😅 pic.twitter.com/1DUv6gK6jqNo, the US State Department does not care about human rights abuses. Blinken’s remarks are just the latest in a series of shots across the bow that the US empire has been firing at New Delhi to warn it against moving into alignment with Moscow.
In an article last week titled “India to Face Significant Cost If Aligned With Russia, U.S. Says,” Bloomberg reported the following:
President Joe Biden’s top economic adviser said the administration has warned India against aligning itself with Russia, and that U.S. officials have been “disappointed” with some of New Delhi’s reaction to the Ukraine invasion.
“There are certainly areas where we have been disappointed by both China and India’s decisions, in the context of the invasion,” the director of the White House National Economic Council, Brian Deese, told reporters at a breakfast Wednesday hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.
The U.S. has told India that the consequences of a “more explicit strategic alignment” with Moscow would be “significant and long-term,” he said.
https://twitter.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1511733819832819715
This new tone is a significant shift from the jovial relations between India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Trump administration, or even between Modi and the Biden administration as recently as last year. Just yesterday Biden made it clear in a call with Modi that it would be against India’s interests to increase its oil imports from Russia. Reuters reports that Biden “told Modi India’s position in the world would not be enhanced by relying on Russian energy sources,” according to US officials.
“The president conveyed very clearly that it is not in their interest to increase that,” White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said when asked about India’s imports of Russian oil.
We can expect to see more and more feigned concern about Indian human rights abuses from the US government if these increasingly unsubtle messages are disobeyed, with destructive acts of economic sabotage soon to follow.
The US empire is correct to be concerned about a potential future Indian pivot out of Washington’s sphere of influence. While it has succeeded thus far in weaponizing New Delhi in its grand chessboard maneuverings against China, the world’s two most populous nations uniting with the Russian nuclear superpower in the emerging bloc of nations who are rejecting absorption into the US-centralized power structure would be disastrous for the empire.
But the fact that the US sees it as its business who foreign nations choose to align with reveals its true dynamic on the world stage, and makes a mockery of the lip service this empire has been paying to the importance of respecting national sovereignty in its narrative management about Ukraine. The US is the single most tyrannical regime on earth, using whatever amount of violence, coercion and bullying are necessary in its efforts to bring the entire planet under its lasting control.
This empire truly believes it has a right to rule the world, and that no nation has a right to refuse it. The re-emergence of a true multipolar world is crashing headlong into an imperial doctrine that demands securing unipolar domination at all cost, and it’s getting very ugly very fast.
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The minister asked the officials to constantly review the availability of essential drugs required in the treatment of COVID-19 patients
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The rising prices have hit almost everyone, either it be a milkman from Madhya Pradesh or a fish vendor from Kerala
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Jaishankar said India has made a number of statements (on the Russia-Ukraine war) which outline its position in the UN and Indian Parliament
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JNU warns students, says no violence will be tolerated
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One person was also killed in Khambat town in Gujarat’s Anand district
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Situation in Ukraine worrying, says PM Modi
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We define censorship as the striking out of free expression from the public record for state security, removing hate speech and other objectionable content. It is also an act of convenience.
India exercises ‘prior restraint’ on films. The national Censor Board examines films’ suitability before exhibition. The Supreme Court of India once stated that film is a separate class of expression; it registers more emphatically with the audience than, say, a radio broadcast or newspaper editorial. Therefore, if it is likely to incite violence — risking ‘public order’ — it can be censored, following Article 19(2) of the Indian Constitution. Needless to say, censorship on these grounds has become problematically arbitrary.
There is a pattern of public-state interaction around allegedly disorder-inciting films: a) a group feels wronged by some films, and threatens/commits violence, b) the State palliates, often completely censoring films. This State behaviour is supposedly premised on maintaining public order. Consequently, it is severely flawed.
Capability to ban films on grounds of “public order”, a vague term, gives the State near-absolute, unaccountable freedom to censor media, often resulting in a violation of the freedom of expression, and provocatively also of other human rights. Importantly, it conveys that public discourse, including human-rights discourse, can be violently subverted with impunity. In this blogpost, I suggest that censorship due to fear of oppositional violence (called ‘hecklers’ veto’) is a violation of human rights on two counts: a) the violation of the human right to freedom of expression and b) the duty to facilitate the realization of human rights.
Violation of the right to free expression
In Freemuse Organization’s independent survey on media censorship, India ranked fourth among 89 countries, reportedly detaining 11 artists in 2019-2020. India’s mottled history with film censorship has seen several bans due to such actual or predicted risks to ‘public order’. Most cases feature groups finding certain films inadequate, ahistorical, or misleading. In the past, small public, yet vocal groups have advocated violence, destroyed sets, and vandalized cinemas. Examples include Jodhaa Akbar (2008), a film about the Mughal emperor (faced protests for allegedly distorting history), The Da Vinci Code (2006) and Vishwaroopam (2013) (banned due to opposition from religious organizations).
Recent examples include Final Solution (an enquiry into the 2002 Gujarat riots—severe intercommunal violence in the Indian state), War and Peace (an anti-war documentary that criticized the Indian nuclear program), and Udta Punjab (depicted drug-abuse problems in Punjab (India) and was censored for fear of heckling). That these films sought to present counterpoints on important public topics is obvious. Final Solution, for instance, explored the state government’s involvement in the violence at Gujarat which saw deaths on a massive scale. It levelled the charge that the State government had not done “enough” to prevent the violence. The film was banned on grounds that it could cause communal tension, but political undertones have been suggested.
War and Peace broke away from the glorification of nuclear armoury. It elicited strong disapproval for a quoted reference to the nuclear stocks as Hindu bombs, for India, and Muslim bombs, for Pakistan — hinting at nuclear nationalism, and Pakistan’s and the BJP’s apparently religious-nationalist tendencies, which was the ruling party then and was again voted to power in 2014 and 2019. The Board suggested deleting the allegedly incendiary speech, as it might compel the audience to breach public order. Observations in the court judgment, which reversed the deletion, are universally applicable to films: the Indian Constitution recognizes the importance of contrarian views for the furtherance of society, and, the audience is expected to have autonomy over their reactions to film, and the State shall not infantilize them.
When violence is directed at films, the State should protect films and not ban them. This is the oft-noted positive obligation of the State, and its active responsibility to protect free speech and expression. The court explicitly mentioned heckler’s veto while chastising the State’s easy submission to opposition, in the form of imminent religious violence in the Da Vinci Code (2006) episode. This obligation has been emphasized in political censorship cases, too. Adherence to the positive obligation protects expression, and maintains public order, by preventing assault on filmmakers and the destruction of sets. It is in consonance with the Constitution as well as the ICCPR. Hence, the State is wrong in resorting to censorship as a stopgap measure to protect public order.
Pummeling human-rights discourse
A State banning films solely for ‘maintaining public order’, is in violation of this positive obligation. This feeds the creation of certain norms, which Robert C Post defines as the State choosing which public narrative, and for our purpose, which human-rights narrative, is deemed acceptable.
For example, banning a film depicting “female desire” sets a precedent laced with misogyny; banning War and Peace tacitly censors critical views on crucial topics like nuclear warfare. Thus, censorship based on a fear of opposition to ‘contrarian’ messages risks another human rights violation: the intercommunity duty to promote human rights by contributing to a democratic, “free and full development” of a person (Article 29 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)). Here, it is important to borrow an observation from the Rangarajan judgment: by “continual exposure to films of a similar character” the attitude of a large community could be altered. By censoring contrary voices on topics of human rights, the State tacitly delegitimizes the counterviews, effectively discouraging rights discourse as the State continues to support, irrespective of intention, a particular notion on crucial subjects through active censorship, however harmful or regressive these notions may be. This is visible in the case of films depicting LGBTQ+ interests; many have been banned due to heckling. It is against the EHRC advisory of “talking about human rights positively”. Article 7, Declaration on Human Right Defenders, mentions the right to develop ideas on new human rights, including providing “a conducive environment for defenders’ work”, which is at serious risk in the present climate of convenience-based censorship.
Films do play a crucial role in creating this human rights-positive environment and perceiving human-rights crises, as did Schindler’s List (1993) or Bombay (1995) — which depicted the 1992 communal riots in Bombay, and served a reminder that communal strife, rife during India’s partition, was still occurring. It was censored because of the possibility of communal disharmony and violence. It is a case of catch-22 when a film cautioning about flaring religious tension is banned for fear of flaring religious tension. The way out is pursuing the positive obligation, which would protect human-rights messages and conserve public order.
Other conjectures have been made, such as a State-heckler political nexus with possibilities of enforcing certain norms. Ban on films dealing with religion, such as Bombay (1995) or Vishwaroopam (2013), have received patronage from sundry Indian states, with implications for state-level vote-bank politics.
These examples essentialize the ailing discourse around human rights, beset by political and ideological motivations under the garb of maintaining order. The Supreme Court of India’s aforementioned observation regarding films’ more impactful nature can very easily be turned on its head (as was done in the War and Peace case): if a strong depiction of violence is likely to lead viewers to violence, a similarly potent depiction of human rights perspectives can have an equal and opposite effect. In the larger rights-based discourse, this is a crucial link between its theory and practice. If the State fulfils its positive obligation to secure freedom of expression, for which this blog vehemently argues, it would strengthen this link and help the conversation, and consequently policymaking, take a beneficial turn.
Bibliography:
Gautam Bhatia, Film censorship and the courts, Live Mint, May 7, 2016, https://www.livemint.com/Sundayapp/6ZZM8m9pHkZ2ECPvOee1jN/Film-censorship-and-the-courts.html
KA Abbas vs The Union of India & Anr., 1971 AIR 481, 1971 SCR (2) 446
RS Chauhan, Clamping down on creativity, The Hindu, Mar. 30, 2017, https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/clamping-down-on-creativity/article62113427.ece
Freedom of expression gagged, The Hindu Business Line, Feb. 13, 2013, https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/freedom-of-expression-gagged/article22996184.ece
Patrick Schmidt, Heckler’s Veto, The First Amendment Encyclopedia, https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/968/heckler-s-veto
Freemuse, The State of Artistic Freedom Report, 2021, https://freemuse.org/media/ck5fvaze/the-state-of-artistic-freedom-2021.pdf
Uday Bhatia, 100 years of film censorship in India, The Mint, Jul. 14, 2018, https://lifestyle.livemint.com/how-to-lounge/movies-tv/100-years-of-film-censorship-in-india-111644473960098.html
Tamil Nadu bans screening of Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam after protests from Muslim organisations, India Today, Jan. 24, 2013, https://www.indiatoday.in/movies/story/kamal-haasan-vishwaroopam-banned-by-tamil-nadu-152383-2013-01-24
Kerala: Right-wing groups vandalise film set of church, CM says ‘communal forces cannot thrive’, Scroll, May 25, 2020, https://scroll.in/latest/962871/kerala-right-wing-groups-vandalise-church-film-set-cm-says-communal-forces-cannot-thrive
Zia Mian, Nuclear Nationalism, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, May 5, 1999, https://www.wagingpeace.org/nuclear-nationalism/
Shri Anand Patwardhan vs The Central Board Of Film, 2003 (5) BomCR 58, 2004 (1) MhLj 856
- Rangarajan Etc vs P. Jagjivan Ram, 1989 SCR (2) 204, 1989 SCC (2) 574
Robert C Post, Community and the First Amendment, (inaugural Willard Pedrick Lecture) 29 Arizona State Law Journal 473 1997, https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/1236/Community_and_the_First_Amendment.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y
Abhijnan Rej & Rahul Sagar, The BJP and Indian Grand Strategy, Apr. 4, 2019, https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/04/04/bjp-and-indian-grand-strategy-pub-78686
Sonia Tascon, Considering Human Rights Films, Representation, and Ethics: Whose Face?, Human Rights Quarterly (2012), https://www.corteidh.or.cr/tablas/r29358.pdf
Julian Garritzmann, Why does public opinion (only) sometimes affect policy-making? The example of education policy, The LSE Social Policy Blog, Apr. 12, 2021, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/socialpolicy/2021/04/12/why-does-public-opinion-only-sometimes-affect-policy-making-the-example-of-education-policy/
This post was originally published on LSE Human Rights.
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Indo Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) and National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) teams are also present at the spot
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The six victims were working near a reactor, which suddenly blew off during solvent distillation process
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Asom Sahitya Sabha, an influential literary body, asked the Union government to concentrate on conserving and promoting indigenous languages
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Mr Khan’s successor will be elected at a special session of the National Assembly that has been called at 2 pm on Monday
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Defence minister Rajnath Singh and external affairs minister Dr S. Jaishankar have left for the US for the meeting
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Inspector General of Police Kashmir, Vijay Kumar said the slain ultra was involved in the attack on the CRPF in Maisuma area on April 4
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The number of active cases of the infection has further declined to 11,132, according to the ministry’s data updated at 8 am
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Assembly elections in the state are scheduled by the year end
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Covishield has been cut down from Rs 600 to Rs 225 per dose for private hospitals and Covaxin has been reduced from Rs 1,200 to Rs 225
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Infected person tested COVID positive last month, but report on XE sub-variant received only yesterday
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All those aged 18 or above and have completed nine months after the administration of the second dose, will be eligible for the booster dose
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The high court had earlier ordered a CBI investigation into the killings of the nine people at Bogtui village
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