With elections due in three months time in India, the world's biggest democracy (in quantity, not quality) goes once more to the polls to choose its leaders. Barring one year in which emergency law was declared, India is a shining example of a democracy established in a region

• which, to the left, has Afghanistan and Pakistan's Islamo/Military Terrorocracies and
• to the right, China , the biggest communist political state (and a very big capitalist economic state) in the seventh decade of shining rule of People's power .
• Meanwhile, Bangladesh has just suppressed a mutiny,
• Nepal has just ousted the King and
• Sri Lanka is on the verge of decimating the LTTE, a Tamil insurgency group. Tamils are minorities in Sri Lanka and the majority in southern states of India.

Like all democracies we have our problems and our warts. Some are removable by debate and discussion; some take an election to get rid of. But some of the more intractable problems persist because they are enshrined in the Indian Constitution-most notably the outdated law on speech and expression.

The Law on Speech and Expression in India states and I quote from the website of the constitutionÂ

19. Protection of certain rights regarding freedom of speech, etc.-

(1) All citizens shall have the right-

(a) to freedom of speech and expression;

(b) to assemble peaceably and without arms;

(c) to form associations or unions;

(d) to move freely throughout the territory of India;

(e) to reside and settle in any part of the territory of India; _13[and]

_14* * * * *

(g) to practice any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or business.

_15[(2) Nothing in sub-clause (a) of clause (1) shall affect the operation of any existing law, or prevent the State from making any law, in so far as such law imposes reasonable restrictions on the exercise of the right conferred by the said sub-clause in the interests of _16[the sovereignty and integrity of India,] 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.]

Note the fine print: The State is supreme to the citizen - and it can create laws to take away the Freedom of Speech on

• the grounds of security (Our politicians preceded George W Bush by 54 years in 1947),
• on the grounds of friendly relations with foreign States ( which may include Pakistan depending on which season we are in or how recent the latest bomb attack is (the Mumbai attack is now four months old and fading),
• public order (which presumably excludes the traffic in our cities which is organized disorder, and the strikes, riots etc. )
• decency or morality (which is related to what mostly heterosexual men decide)
• or in relation to contempt of court (The Guardians of Law are beyond reproach and no one guards the guardians )
• defamation (which can mean criticizing or pissing someone off with false facts)
• or incitement to an offence (which means, well, it is almost a Catch 22, that it is an offense to incite an offense).
  

This leads to the following situation:

A political party can sue a 18-year-old blogger and the supremest courts of the biggest democracy agree that that is okay--technically yes, it is okay.

Read the gory details here:Â

The blogger in this case criticized the Shiv Sena, a right wing party which has in the past criticized the right of non-Mumbai natives to get jobs, whose members have been indicted many times for causing riots and threatening minorities. Shiv Sena is led by an ex-cartoonist, Hitler-admiring politician Bal Thackeray who remains the biggest political influence in India's economic capital without ever standing for election himself.

What can I, as an Indian citizen, say to these domestic terrorists spawned by the neo-Hindu neo-Right? Members of another right wing group, RSS, were involved in killing of Mahatma Gandhi, yet thirty years later the then Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee ,proudly declared himself the most important RSS member. His fellow ex-RSS member and current Prime Ministerial candidate was indicted for instigating riots to cause demolition of the famous Babri Masjid mosqus and is currently running provocative ads on websites and blogs.

I cant say anything.

My freedom to speech , and to screech is subject to

• article 19
• clause 1
• sub clause a

A billion people of India can

• build spacecraft that reach the moon,
• build bits and bytes of software for almost all of the world companies
• write songs that win Oscars,
• win the Nobel Prize in Economics,
• vote in elections for 62 years without giving in to military rule (having the largest standing army in the world) or fundamentalism (having a population that is 80% Hindu).

We can do all that.

We just cant blog. Not with full freedom anyway.