Shashidhar Nanjundaiah | Threats to free speech rise as global conflicts intensify

To say that our world has become much more polarised than before after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine would be to state the obvious. With the Israel-Hamas conflict, the wedge is further in. What lies beneath these political binaries, how our new generations think and act, should be of interest, in particular to those of us who like to watch the interplay between change and constancy.

In the United States, three university presidents have been under fire this month after they faced a congressional hearing as the Republican-controlled House Representatives probed and questioned them to understand where the universities stand on anti-Semitism. That is truly ironic: It is the right-wingers who decry the so-called “cancel culture” and hail free speech. Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Sally Kornbluth of MIT suffered through these hearings, stating “it depends” on the context. Contextualisation is precisely the destabilising factor in the discourse. If these presidents encourage academic freedom, they must make it about the context. Contextualisation often brings forth issue-based and informed views rather than culturally or otherwise affiliated opinions. To that extent, the uncertain-sounding replies by the presidents make sense.

This is not to condone any sort of anti-Semitic speech. But the fact that the university presidents hold campuses accountable for conduct and not speech highlights both the fracture and the confusion between free and fair speech. In the United States, speech is not protected only if the talk about genocide poses a threat of harm to identifiable individuals. I asked Saint Louis-based media law professor and long-time US Supreme Court reporter William Freivogel what all this means. In his opinion, the presidents were right as a matter of law in saying that it depends on the context, but a legalistic answer wasn’t going to pass muster at a congressional hearing. Free speech law stops at the gates of private spaces, although most private universities promise to follow the First Amendment to provide a safe learning environment.

Of course, these developments may not go down in history as great flag-bearers of free speech or fair speech. A student leader tried hard in an interview to a television news channel to balance the views and both defend the university’s stand on free speech and critique her actions. Harvard student Jacob Miller, who spoke on CNN, struggled to walk that tightrope by stating, in effect, that while academic freedom should be a supreme feature of universities as safe spaces for speech, his university president’s refusal to condemn should also be critiqued.

Typically, we use “free and fair” in tandem and it makes sense. But in terms of legal permission to express versus social acceptability, the wedge between the two is growing. Extreme examples that spotlight this wedge are people who stand for the problematic “absolute free speech” and those on the other extreme of that continuum, some of whom stood out during the MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, for “cancel culture”. The consequences of both are often painful: One brings out the ugliest sides of our societies -- such as trolls and hatemongers -- while the other side can be easily appropriated by vested interests. But more importantly, they operate in tandem and in opposition.

This poses a problem of security for one side of the voices. Politics seems to make it all acceptable and turn us into holders of binaries. The turn of events in American universities is not some situation that is locked in that geography. Nations have been quick to take sides. The police tried to quell the anti-Israel protests in the US -- they have been arresting pro-Palestine protesters or those seeking a cease-fire -- as they have in other prominent countries, including France and India.

It gets particularly tricky when we consider that many of the donors at these universities are Jewish, and resigning might seem to be a hypocritical act of succumbing to commercial demands. The donor pressure shows the controversy in a particularly poor light when we consider it in ethical, not purely monetary, terms. In the face of all this political polarisation on campuses, it is heartening to see groups protesting together even though they represent opposite sides of the political divide. The faculty and students at Harvard have mixed and matched themselves to stand up for their president. Public spaces seem more vulnerable in this regard: In October, Jewish protesters voicing their anger against Israel were arrested in Washington DC. When Jewish and Muslim students speak in one voice, they send out the message of sanity while announcing to the world that the “who” does not matter as much as the “what” -- Unfair justice, whoever perpetrates it, should not be tolerated.

In India, we have been making cautious adjustments to our understanding of free speech by watching the goings-on all around us. The arrival of troll-dependent politics, constantly baying for the blood of inconvenient voices, is both an extreme form of free speech and cancel culture. The chilling effect, or the spiral of silence, is palpable, and those who are bold enough to voice their opinion in as unfettered a manner as before do so at great peril. We are constantly reminded by political and even public rhetoric that the restrictions to free speech are far more important than speech itself.

We should be heartened to see cultural groups on both sides of the divide protesting together in the face of the political instigation, risking discrediting, hatred and even ostracism. A limitation of free speech in the US is a specific call-to-action, but often this limitation is inadequate in instilling violence and fear. Desensitised behaviour is a result of a normalisation run contra to the invariable claim by societies to practise and promote harmonious living.

The forced polarisation in the Israel-Hamas conflict in countries other than Israel and Palestine by political expediency followed by dominant majoritarian-cultural voices is a symbolic representation of a shrinking space for speech in general. Unless judicial and legislative systems take firm steps to curb hate speech, the intangible damage that we can all feel from such appropriation may only worsen, and yet in the current environment of democratic backsliding, that is unlikely to happen anytime soon.