The End of Karma Read online

  Mobs attacked galleries that displayed his work. They were not punished. Instead, there were long, live debates on television about nudity in Hindu iconography. A lawsuit, filed on behalf of Hindu nationalist groups, accused the artist of promoting religious “enmity.” It was eventually thrown out by the Supreme Court. Still, fear of attacks kept other galleries from displaying his work. Husain fled, living abroad for nearly nine years, in Dubai and London. He said he did not feel safe in his home country.

  Husain, inspired equally by European cubism and Bollywood, was an iconoclast, and he did not always make himself welcome among his fellow Muslims. One of his paintings portrayed a donkey at Mecca, prompting howls of protests. Husain called the animal a symbol of nonviolence, just as he described his choice of nudity as a metaphor for purity.

  I met Husain in 2008, in his home in Dubai. At ninety-three, he was still full of joy and flamboyance, still walking around barefooted as he had for much of his life. By this time, the Supreme Court had thrown out the case against him. But he feared that hard-liners would pounce on him if they could, and that the government, led at the time by Congress, would be unable to protect him. He chose to remain in Dubai, far from everyone and everything he cared about.

  To me, his exile came to represent the growing intolerance for cultural expression, just as it represented the state’s inability to protect its citizens—in this case, its most famous painter—from thugs.

  “The State fails to send a signal about protecting the boundaries of free speech,” Mehta told me. “If we want social stability we need a consensus on what our freedoms are.”

  Husain shrugged when I asked if he ever felt angry. He told me he bore no malice, not even at the government that, he said, was too weak to protect him. So I can’t go to Bombay. I can still paint, he said. His eyes lit up. Why don’t we take a ride in my Ferrari? he proposed. He sat in the passenger’s seat, shoeless, squealing like a child at his chauffeur, pleading that he drive a bit faster.

  Three years later, in June 2011, Husain died in London.7

  The demands of digital natives sharpen India’s dilemma over free expression. It is hard to suppress content on the Internet, unless you’re China. India is not China and cannot be perceived as being China.8

  India’s predicament is further complicated by the fact that the companies that run Internet platforms have their own rules about what they allow on their sites—their own jurisprudence, if you will, which complicates matters for governments that want to censor digital speech.

  Compared with rich countries, like the United States and much of Western Europe, a still-small share of Indians have access to the Internet—about one in ten, according to 2011 figures—but that number is growing exponentially, making India one of the fastest-expanding Internet markets in the world. Three out of four Internet users in India are under the age of thirty-five, like Rinu.9

  Like young people everywhere, young Indians have rushed online to read, listen, watch, troll, organize, fall in love, and express themselves. Most Indians access the Internet on their phones, which occasionally prompts village elders to call for restrictions against women’s cell phone use. Indians listen to music on their phones, check cricket scores, review astrological forecasts. Farmers look up crop prices. Voters listen to rousing political speeches at election time. Shubrangshu Choudhary, a friend of mine, has designed a platform for villagers in remote hamlets of central India to send text messages about news in their areas—much of it is about droughts, floods, road conditions, problems getting rations, and the like. And of course, Indians spend hours on Facebook. In conservative hamlets where teenagers are not allowed to meet members of the opposite sex face-to-face, they strike up what are known as Facebook romances.

  Neither Rinu nor Shaheen know quite where freedom on Facebook begins or ends.

  On that balmy Sunday in Palghar, Rinu’s friend Shaheen is also at home, on her computer, scrolling through Facebook. It is about seven o’clock. There is still a bit of light in the sky. A sea breeze comes in through an open window.

  Her Facebook newsfeed is peppered with mentions of the death of Thackeray, the political party boss, and of his followers thronging the streets of Mumbai for his funeral. They have called for a bandh, effectively shutting down the city.

  That Shaheen finds excessive. And she says so, on Facebook. “With all respect, every day, thousands of people die, but still the world moves on,” Shaheen writes. “Just due to one politician died a natural death, everyone just goes bonkers.”

  Shaheen is shy in person, but expansive online. So on Facebook, she goes on to suggest that it would be better for Indians to devote their energies to commemorating the achievements of those who fought for the country’s independence. She cites one popular antiimperialist hero, Bhagat Singh, “because of whom we r free living Indians.”

  Shaheen’s post floats up in Rinu’s newsfeed shortly after seven. “Wow!!!” Rinu writes.

  Shaheen and Rinu aren’t super close. Students at the same local college, they are what Rinu describes as “hi-bye friends.” Shaheen studies management science. Rinu majors in biology. They live a short distance from each other. And their circumstances are similar. Both their families settled in Palghar because Mumbai, which is a two-and-a-half-hour ride away, in a stinky, flesh-packed commuter train, has become way too expensive for middle-class families like theirs. Rinu’s father, who comes from Kerala, in the south, worked on merchant ships. Shaheen’s father, who moved here from the state of Chhattisgarh, in central India, sells bolts of cloth. Both Rinu’s and Shaheen’s mothers are homemakers. Neither Rinu nor Shaheen plan to be homemakers. Rinu imagines running her own recording studio; Shaheen plans to work at a bank. They spend hours on their computers at home. Facebook is a big part of how they pass the time.

  Shaheen’s opinion resonates with Rinu. After an initial “wow,” she clicks “like” under Shaheen’s post, just as she clicks “like” a bunch of times every day on a bunch of things. That little blue thumbs-up.

  A boy named Akaash soon weighs in, furious. “Just mind your own busyness,” he writes, as a response to Rinu’s post.

  Rinu clatters out a rebuttal: “We agree that he has done a lot of good things, we respect him also, it doesn’t make any sense to shut down everything! Respect can be shown in many other ways! Even his soul might be like ‘Why so much?’ ”

  Around 7:15 P.M., Shaheen’s cell phone rings. A stranger, a man, barks at her: “Was it right to say that about the bandh?” She hangs up. She is rattled. So she clicks “delete” next to her post.

  It is too late. Her father gets a call too. He comes into the bedroom.

  “What is this about?” he asks her.

  His face turns ashen when she tells him what she wrote. Her face turns wet with tears. “He was a little bit shocked. He didn’t say anything,” Shaheen recalls. “I was crying and crying.”

  Ten minutes later comes a knock on their door. Police stand in the stairwell—maybe three or four, she doesn’t remember. They tell Shaheen there are some very angry people at the police station, and that she will need to come and apologize.

  Shaheen throws a dupatta over her shoulders, puts on her sandals. She is terrified of what awaits her. She has never been to a police station before. “Totally frozen,” she says.

  A bit later, across town, Rinu’s phone also rings. A friend calls to tell her that the cops have picked up Shaheen and that there’s a big crowd of Shiv Sena followers outside the police station.

  Rinu doesn’t believe it at first. Can’t be true, she thinks. But what if it is? She too deletes her “like” on Facebook—and then she deactivates her account. Gone. Vanished. Except not really. Her posts have already spread. They live elsewhere, on other people’s Facebook pages.

  Her friend calls again. He says the crowd at the police station demands an apology from both of them, that she should go and join Shaheen. “I was so much panicked and afraid,” Rinu says.

  She calls her father. “
Come fast” is all she needs to say on the phone. “I didn’t even explain. He figured out I was really panicked.”

  Her father, P. A. Srinivasan, a fifty-nine-year-old former naval officer, asks no questions. He immediately senses the panic in his daughter’s voice. He immediately gets that she needs him. So he hops on his scooter and races home. As soon he walks in the door, Rinu makes a most improbable demand. Take me to the police station, she says without explanation. Again, he asks nothing. All he knows is that he needs to stand by her.

  “I was really confused,” Srinivasan says. “I thought she had done something really wrong that she couldn’t be pardoned for. I didn’t even know it was a Facebook post.”

  The scene at the police headquarters in Palghar shocks father and daughter both. It is dark by then, close to eight o’clock. At the gates of the station is a loud angry mob. People are shouting, waving their fists. One woman, a complete stranger, walks up and slaps Rinu in the face. Dad blurts out: “Forgive her.” For what, he still has no idea. To make matters worse, the police say Rinu will have to go inside the station by herself, to be interrogated without her father.

  “It was all of a sudden,” Rinu says. “Fifteen minutes back, I’m at home relaxing. Then I was at the police station and people were very, very violent. They were shouting. Very aggressive.”

  Shaheen is already in a back room at the station by the time Rinu gets there. Together, they try to explain to a pair of policewomen what they wrote. They said they meant no harm. They were just expressing their opinion about something, just as they would about a movie they had seen.

  The policewomen have no idea what they are talking about. What is this Facebook? they want to know. What is a “status update”? they ask. Rinu says it would have been funny were it not so terrifying. Shaheen starts weeping. Her uncle’s medical clinic has been vandalized, apparently by a group of Shiv Sainiks, as party loyalists are called. It doesn’t help that Shaheen’s family is Muslim. The Shiv Sena is not known to be fond of Muslims.

  Finally, at midnight, comes an assistant superintendent of police who knows what Facebook is. He urges Rinu and Shaheen to compose an apology, which they do. “I’m sorry for offending Shiv Sainiks,” they each write by hand, like schoolgirls made to compose notes of contrition. They are scared out of their wits.

  Close to midnight, once the crowd outside has dispersed, the girls are allowed to go home. But their ordeal is not over. The next morning, Palghar police announce that they will file criminal charges against Shaheen and Rinu for “promoting enmity,” among communities, and for sending electronic communications that cause “annoyance or inconvenience.” The two young women walk into the police station once more. They are arrested under Section 66A of the Information Technology Act and punishable by up to three years in jail.

  Their images flash across television screens throughout the day. Rinu covers her face with a pale handkerchief. Shaheen uses her dupatta.

  The Internet had given them a way to express themselves and, in a flash, taught them how dangerous expressing themselves could be. “I was totally shattered,” Rinu recalls.

  The Indian state has been confounded by the power of the Internet.

  India has not erected a firewall, to keep out forbidden content, as China has. To do so would be to fly in the face of everything that a secular, democratic republic stands for. It wouldn’t work.

  Like many other nations, both autocratic and democratic, India keeps a close eye on what its citizens do online, generally with the help of surveillance technologies available on the open market.10

  It is unusually aggressive in monitoring who says what on popular web platforms. India was number two on the list of governments asking Google to disclose information on its users in 2014, second only to requests from the United States. Its requests ranged from the names of Gmail users and their Internet Protocol addresses to who posted which YouTube videos. In a majority of cases, Google provided what the government asked for.11

  Likewise, from Facebook: India sought information on more than 7000 users in the second half of 2014, second only to the United States.12

  As for gagging expression, India has had mixed success.

  In the spring of 2011, the Congress-led coalition government put into place a set of regulations to restrict web content based on a vague set of criteria. Known as the Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011, they required Internet companies that run platforms like YouTube and Facebook to take down within thirty-six hours any material that, among other things, the government considered “harassing,” “disparaging,” or “hateful.”13

  By this time, it was impossible for Silicon Valley tech companies to ignore the Indian market: a billion people, so many of them young, and 90 percent of them yet to be connected to the Internet. At the same time, it was becoming extremely hard to do business in a country that had such a muddled policy on what users could and could not post on their platforms.

  To operate in India, of course, means that the web companies must abide by India’s own laws. And so they must take down content when government authorities order them to. On this score, Indian authorities have been unusually aggressive too.

  In 2014, Facebook removed 5832 pieces of content at the request of the Indian government, more than in any other country in the world.14 Facebook, for instance, said that content was restricted specifically inside India because it violated Indian law “including anti-religious content and hate speech that could cause unrest and disharmony.”

  In the summer of 2012 came a new crisis. A localized Hindu–Muslim clash in northeastern Assam spread swiftly across the country. As attacks against ethnic northeastern migrants intensified, turning fatal in many places, the government blamed the Internet. It ordered a host of Internet companies, including service providers, to block more than three hundred websites. Twitter was blamed for flaming communal tensions. The government told the company to shut down more than a dozen accounts.

  In a compromise, Twitter agreed to suspend about a half-dozen accounts that, it concluded, had violated the company’s terms of service (a bit like its own constitution) by impersonating Indian government officials. Twitter bucked the government’s request to take down several obvious parody accounts, including one that mocked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with the Twitter handle @YumYumSingh.

  Government authorities seemed to grow ever more incensed by posts, pictures, and cartoons circulating online. In April 2012, police in Calcutta arrested a middle-aged chemistry professor for emailing a cartoon that mocked the chief minister of the state. That October, a businessman in the southern city of Pondicherry was arrested for a tweet that criticized another businessman, who happened to be the son of India’s finance minister.

  Then, in November, Shaheen and Rinu were hauled into the Palghar police station for speaking up. Nothing enraged India’s Internet generation quite like it. They revolted.

  All these arrests were made under Section 66A of the Information Technology Act. That section, vague and heavy-handed, imposed up to three years in jail on anyone found to “transmit a) any information that is grossly offensive or has menacing character; or b) any information which he knows to be false, but for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred, or ill will, persistently by making use of such computer resource or a communication device.” The legal bar was mind-bogglingly low: you could be jailed for “annoyance.”

  The cover of India Today, a newsweekly, summed up the zeitgeist this way: “The Paranoid State,” read the headline, illustrated by a handcuffed fist pointing its thumb downward, the opposite of a Facebook “like.” It was a pie in the face of the government, which had vastly underestimated how unpopular its new rules would be in a country so young.

  Kapil Sibal, the government’s technology minister at the time, made sure to tell the press he was “deeply saddened” by the arrests. “It is just their point of view, and enforcem
ent of these laws are not to ban people from expressing their views,” he said in a television interview.

  Within weeks, police dropped the charges against the two young women.

  The government also swiftly agreed to tweak the controversial section of the law. A beat cop was no longer allowed to make a decision to arrest someone based on that law. A senior police officer—holding the rank of at least a deputy commissioner—would have to sign off before a case could be filed under that statute.

  However, young Indians were not content with such a cosmetic fix. Before the end of 2012, just weeks after watching television images of Rinu and Shaheen being paraded to the police station, a young Delhi woman named Shreya Singhal went to court to challenge the law. She told reporters later that she had been outraged by it, and that her mom, a lawyer, suggested that if she cared so much about free speech she should file a petition with the Supreme Court. Singhal was twenty-two years old. She called the law “a gag on the Internet.”

  In March 2015, the Supreme Court agreed with her. It struck down several provisions of the Information Technology Act, including Section 66A. The judges concluded that it was vague and unconstitutional. The court also cited the case brought before the Supreme Court in 1950 by the publisher of Cross Roads magazine, one of the two lawsuits that led to India’s First Amendment.

  The judges wrote: “The Preamble of the Constitution of India inter alia speaks of liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship. It also says that India is a sovereign democratic republic. It cannot be over-emphasized that when it comes to democracy, liberty of thought and expression is a cardinal value that is of paramount significance under our constitutional scheme.”15

  The judges went on to say that under the law “no distinction is made between mere discussion or advocacy of a particular point of view which may be annoying or inconvenient or grossly offensive to some and incitement by which such words lead to an imminent causal connection with public disorder.” The italics are mine.