prasad1
Active member
[h=2]A democracy without a dissenter in it is impossible. Free men, in the exercise of free thought, will give vent in free speech. No matter how abhorrent the thought, or its manner of expression, a mature democracy will tolerate it, and even encourage its publication.[/h]
Nearly a century ago, in 1919, the United States had just finished with World War I, a war to end all wars. There had been race riots in the summer and labour strikes in the autumn. A bomb had exploded on the attorney general’s doorstep. In that year the U.S. Supreme Court was called to decide the case of Abrams v. United States. The case challenged the convictions of five Russian-born men who were prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917, as it had been amended by the Sedition Act of 1918, for “provoking and encouraging” resistance to the government’s war efforts (and its hostile manoeuvres toward Russia) through a series of pamphlets. The court sustained the conviction but one judge, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., dissented.
Holmes wrote: “But when men have realised that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”
These very words were cited in India last year by Justice Rohinton Nariman of the Supreme Court, when the court struck down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act in the Shreya Singhal case. It freed online speech in India from the threat of arrests and prosecution.
“India, that is Bharat, shall be a union of states,” decrees Article 1 of its Constitution. In reality though, Bharatvarsha-India has in its nearly 70 years of independence been a disunity of strongly held political opinions, all of which dissent from each other.
There is an opinion that India has come into its natural inheritance only after the election of a majority government in May 2014. It is argued that the past 60-odd years of the Indian Republic were a mere epilogue to an empire and a Western era that had not fully died in 1947. The Nehruvian consensus, it is urged, was a hypocritical cloak of minority appeasement within India, and a subservient bowing to Western domination abroad.
A democracy without a dissenter in it is impossible. Free men, in the exercise of free thought, will give vent in free speech. No matter how abhorrent the thought, or its manner of expression, a mature democracy will tolerate it, and even encourage its publication. It is better for an imperfect thought to be voiced and rejected in the marketplace of ideas, than for it to fester within the warehouses of inexpressible thought. After all there is no greater idea of democracy than free men, freely and voluntarily, committing to the requirements of citizenship of a free country. Only totalitarian regimes suppress dissent and dissidents. Only a country not yet rid of its colonial hangover of a government that commands and controls, labels dissent as seditious. A truly free nation will confidently view even its advocated destruction as a bad idea that will fail in the marketplace of ideas. This is my idea of India, secure in its place among the great nations of the world, confident in its destiny. Dear reader, is it your idea, as well?
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/no-freedom-without-dissent/article8310191.ece?homepage=true
Nearly a century ago, in 1919, the United States had just finished with World War I, a war to end all wars. There had been race riots in the summer and labour strikes in the autumn. A bomb had exploded on the attorney general’s doorstep. In that year the U.S. Supreme Court was called to decide the case of Abrams v. United States. The case challenged the convictions of five Russian-born men who were prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917, as it had been amended by the Sedition Act of 1918, for “provoking and encouraging” resistance to the government’s war efforts (and its hostile manoeuvres toward Russia) through a series of pamphlets. The court sustained the conviction but one judge, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., dissented.
Holmes wrote: “But when men have realised that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”
These very words were cited in India last year by Justice Rohinton Nariman of the Supreme Court, when the court struck down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act in the Shreya Singhal case. It freed online speech in India from the threat of arrests and prosecution.
“India, that is Bharat, shall be a union of states,” decrees Article 1 of its Constitution. In reality though, Bharatvarsha-India has in its nearly 70 years of independence been a disunity of strongly held political opinions, all of which dissent from each other.
There is an opinion that India has come into its natural inheritance only after the election of a majority government in May 2014. It is argued that the past 60-odd years of the Indian Republic were a mere epilogue to an empire and a Western era that had not fully died in 1947. The Nehruvian consensus, it is urged, was a hypocritical cloak of minority appeasement within India, and a subservient bowing to Western domination abroad.
A democracy without a dissenter in it is impossible. Free men, in the exercise of free thought, will give vent in free speech. No matter how abhorrent the thought, or its manner of expression, a mature democracy will tolerate it, and even encourage its publication. It is better for an imperfect thought to be voiced and rejected in the marketplace of ideas, than for it to fester within the warehouses of inexpressible thought. After all there is no greater idea of democracy than free men, freely and voluntarily, committing to the requirements of citizenship of a free country. Only totalitarian regimes suppress dissent and dissidents. Only a country not yet rid of its colonial hangover of a government that commands and controls, labels dissent as seditious. A truly free nation will confidently view even its advocated destruction as a bad idea that will fail in the marketplace of ideas. This is my idea of India, secure in its place among the great nations of the world, confident in its destiny. Dear reader, is it your idea, as well?
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/no-freedom-without-dissent/article8310191.ece?homepage=true
