Another free speech assault

In a shameful incident, the editor of the Statesman was arrested for publishing this article by Johann Hari. The arrests were made pursuant to s. 295A of the IPC, which Tarunabh breaks down for us here. The article itself was unexceptional in every regard, and certainly can't be reasonably construed as an attack on Islam as a religion. Rather, it criticised the efforts of certain states to put forth an 'Islamic Declaration of Human Rights', intended as an alternative to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which permitted the exercise of civil liberties only within the limits set by sharia.

One could use this as a pretext for bemoaning the loss of respect for individual liberties in India, but I'd like to make a much more basic point here. If civil rights are only available at the behest of bureaucrats (as it is in the case of s. 295A), they risk being lost forever. The whole point of a pluralistic liberal state is to permit non-conformity, dissent, and criticism of others. By placing bureaucratic restraints on speech and expression, we stand to lose the vitality and energy which makes the right to free expression so valuable and important for culturally variegated societies like ours.