The State which has seemingly stopped curtailing creative freedom has outsourced such attacks to mobs, Malayalam littérateur N.S. Madhavan has said.
Delivering the 10th G. Rajesh Kumar commemorative lecture on the topic ‘State and mob: New challenges faced by creative expression’ here on Thursday, Mr. Madhavan said that while the Constitution guaranteed the citizens the right to freedom of speech and expression, there were many laws that stood to impede the same.
“Among these, the legal provision under Section 295 of the Indian Penal Code, which pertained to punishment for outraging religious sentiments, has been widely used in recent times against literary works. This was equivalent to the laws that existed in Pakistan against blasphemy,” he said.
Though the practice of legally banning creative work had more or less stopped in the country, the authorities were extending tacit support to fringe groups that tried to curtail the freedom. “If Aubrey Menen’s Rama Retold had been banned by the Jawaharlal Nehru-led government through an order issued by the Home Ministry, mobs were being permitted to dictate terms at present,” Mr. Madhavan said.
Citing the controversy surrounding the film Padmaavat , he pointed out that despite the Supreme Court order to facilitate the release of the movie, the governments of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh prohibited its screening. “This signified a nexus between the State and the mob in impeding creative freedom,” he said.
Self censorship
He said that the judiciary was the final refuge for creative freedom, even as many artistes themselves adopted a guarded stance and had begun to self-censor their works for the fear of coming under attack. As a result, many writers strived to become “politically correct”.
V.M. Ebrahim, Executive Editor, Madhyamam, spoke.
