Ram Guha now thinks he is Mahatma Gandhi!

Ram Guha and some other such has-beens, sent an open letter to Prime Minister Modi to which some publicity-hound attorney in Bihar took exception. He has filed a petition with the local Magistrate's Court alleging sedition on the part of Guha & Co.

I too filed a case against Guha for harassing me for dowry. But Guha keeps mum about this just as his better half, Ranajit Guha, kept mum about the case I filed against him for outraging my modesty. Indeed, the entire male population of India- against whom my lawyer has filed similar charges on my behalf- is keeping mum about the terrible crimes they have committed against me. Anyway, that's what my lawyer tells me. Well, when I say 'lawyer' what I mean is an e-lawyer- probably an algorithm of some sort. Tick the wrong boxes and instead of getting a P.O.I card for your son, you end up suing vast numbers of people for quite unspeakable, and unlikely, offences against your person. Lucky I was using a maxed out credit card.

My point is, anybody can file any sort of case against anybody else. Only if the Government brings the prosecution can you complain of being persecuted by the Government.
However, Guha in a recent article is complaining precisely of that. Thus he compares himself with Mahatma Gandhi.

Last month, I joined a group of film-makers and scholars in sending a letter to the prime minister, alerting him to the high number of hate crimes committed in India in the name of caste and religion. “The lynching of Muslims, Dalits and other minorities must be stopped immediately,” we urged.

It seems Guha & Co have no objection to the lynching of members of the majority community.

Knowing the Central government’s extreme sensitivity to criticism, our letter reminded the prime minister that “criticising the ruling party does not imply criticising the nation. No ruling party is synonymous with the country where it is in power.

This is only true in a multi-party democracy like India.

It is only one of the political parties of that country.

It is perfectly proper to attack a political party even if some members of it form the Executive which governs the country. However, attacking the Government of a country may involve the crime of sedition. This is a matter for the Judiciary to decide. A member of the public is at liberty to make a complaint in this regard. The Judiciary may take up the complaint and institute proceedings against those complained of.

Hence anti-government stands cannot be equated with anti-national sentiments.

This is not true. An anti-government stand may be motivated by an anti-national sentiment- for example it may demand the violation of the territorial integrity of the nation. This is illegal in India. It may also call for the violent overthrow of the Government or have that effect. This too is illegal.

What Guha & Co should have said is that we are against your party and your administration but we affirm our loyalty to the nation, condemn any threat to its territorial integrity or any attempt to overthrow the Government, by law established, by force of arms or any other illegal means.

What they actually said was false and foolish.

An open environment where dissent is not crushed, only makes for a stronger nation.” 

This is why when Hitler or Stalin or Churchill or FDR wanted to make their respective countries stronger so as to prevail in the Second World War, they did not crush seditious dissent. Churchill did not lock up Moseley. FDR did not intern Japanese origin Americans. Hitler and Stalin released all political prisoners and encouraged them to dissent with whatever they wished.

Guha & Co are stupid or senile or both stupid and senile. They can't make anything stronger except support for Modi and contempt for senile sycophants of the dynasty.

The letter concluded with these words: “We hope our suggestions will be taken in the spirit that they are meant – as Indians genuinely concerned with, and anxious about, the fate of our nation.”

The spirit in which these suggestions were meant was one of virtue signalling self-publicity. They are silly suggestions and have been ignored by the Government. However, some younger artists- like Kangana Ranault- have been given an opportunity to beat up on these old has-beens.

The letter I had signed was met immediately with a counter-letter, calling our modest initiative a “conspiracy” to “defame the nation”.

The letter Ram signed went to Modi. Modi did not reply. Thus his letter was met with silence. Some unrelated person or persons wrote a letter condemning Ram & Co's letter.

 Guha's letter had specifically asked that action be taken against people chanting 'Jai Shri Ram', probably because Guha had learnt it wasn't he himself who was being invoked.  It is certainly possible that a Judge may take the view that Guha & Co had broken the law relating to hate speech likely to inflame communal animosity. This may also be viewed as anti-national.

The critics claimed our aim was “tarnishing India’s international standing and to negatively portray Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s untiring efforts to effectuate governance on the foundations of positive nationalism and humanism”.

A reasonable claim if one believed Guha & Co weren't virtue-signalling publicity hounds, but not otherwise.

We might have thought our letter an appeal for civic decency, a call to honour the ideals of the Indian Constitution, which mandates us not to discriminate on the basis of caste, gender, or religion.

The 'ideals' of the Indian Constitution include cow protection. It is one of the Directive Principles. The answer to cow trafficking related lynching or other types of vigilantism is a police crackdown on the practice where mandated by State law.  The Constitution does not say the Government should criminalize the utterance of 'Jai Shri Ram'. What Guha & Co demanded would violate the Constitution.

Our critics, however, darkly alleged that we were “working to a certain agenda and are only playing into the hands of those forces that are out to Balkanise India and destabilise her”.

Guha, fool that he is, accepted an invitation to China- which does want to Balkanize India- for some bogus conference about minorities. Useful idiots like him have played into the hands of India's enemies in the past. However, Guha & Co are a bunch of has-beens. Thus they are now useless idiots.

A rejoinder
That there was a rejoinder so soon and so vehemently worded did not surprise me. That the likes of Aparna Sen and Shyam Benegal were called anti-national was entirely consistent with the zeitgeist, the poisonous spirit of what passes for public discourse in India today.

Kangana Ranault is hot. People have heard of her. Who remembers Aparna Sen or Benegal?

What was more dismaying, however, was that this counter-letter was followed by a brazen attempt at legal intimidation.

Legal intimidation involves the threat to uncover and punish actual wrongdoing. Neither Ranajit nor Ram Guha were intimidated at all by my threat to take them to court for dowry harassment and outraging my modesty. This is because they were not actually guilty of any such thing. However Guha gets dismayed by a brazen attempt to get him punished for breaking Indian law.

A criminal complaint was filed in a Bihar court, charging that our letter was in violation of specific sections of the Indian Penal Code: namely, Sections 124A (sedition), 153B (assertions prejudicial to national integration), 290 (public nuisance), 297 (trespass to wound religious feelings), 504 (intentional insults) of the IPC.

So, these silly has-beens are shitting themselves because they signed an illiterate letter. But, at their age, incontinence would be a problem in any case. There is no danger of them being actually convicted. Anyway, even if there is a case to answer, the case will drag on for so long they will all be dead long before any sentence is pronounced.

Had India anything like a transparent judicial system, had our country had the sort of freedom of expression that mature democracies have, then this sort of patently mala fide and malevolent complaint would never be entertained in a court of law.

The Indian judicial system is as 'transparent' as that of any other Anglo-Saxon jurisdiction. British law is tougher on libel than India. America's First Amendment is in the opposite direction to India's but it is likely that the Supreme Court will reverse Sullyvan vs New York Times.

The problem here is that Guha & Co would have no sort of celebrity in 'a mature Democracy'. Why? They were too stupid, provincial, and lacking in talent. No doubt they could play the 'native informant' or beaten down nigger- but, in India, these guys get to pretend they are of the elite, not the subaltern.

Unfortunately, we have a less than perfect justice system, since we are a flawed democracy.

Which democracy is flawless? Where is there a perfect justice system? Guha, meanly, won't tell us.

And so, according to news reports, this case was to come up for hearing on Saturday, August 3.

The case in Bihar is what in Hindi would be called a dhamki, a threat.

No it wouldn't. It would be called a tamasha- a spectacle. There is no 'chilling effect' here. It is pure theater.

The idea behind it is to deter criticism of the current government, to stop democratic debate in its tracks.

Democratic debate occurs between people who have received lots of votes. Stupid debate occurs between people whom nobody cares about. Guha & Co are not capable of critical thinking. They can't criticize anything. They can only tell stupid lies.

Notably, the signatories to the letter to the prime minister are being sought to be silenced under provisions drafted in the 19th century by an imperialist and racist regime.

The Indian Constitution upholds the legal doctrine of autochthony. It deliberately breaks the chain of legal continuity. This is a 'legal fiction'. However it has the force of law. Thus laws enacted under British Rule are, according to the Indian Constitution, wholly indigenous and derive their force from that Constitution itself.
Ram babbles a lot about 'Constitutional patriotism' but is ignorant of its actual provisions.

That these sections still exist on our statute books is a disgrace.

Laws against rape and murder and so forth too date back to the British period. But, thanks to the legal fiction of 'autochthony', the framers of the Indian Constitution specifically guarded against the sort of foolish argument Ram is making here.
From the legal point of view, all Indian laws are wholly the product of its own soil. None can be impugned by ascribing a foreign origin to them.

It is disgraceful that a Professor- no matter how shite his subject- is so ignorant and stupid as to say that a country should get rid of sensible laws imported from outside.

Back in 1922, a certain Mohandas K. Gandhi was imprisoned by the British raj under Section 124A, the notorious sedition clause of the IPC.

Gandhi pleaded guilty though he had a defense in law. Will Guha & Co do likewise? Gandhi said “I plead guilty to all the charges. I observe that the King’s name has been omitted from the charge, and it has been properly omitted." In other words, Gandhi was saying he was loyal to the King-Emperor. His quarrel was with the Viceroy's administration. However, since he needed to spend a little time in jail till his own allies' anger at him had died down, he did not present the defense that his actions merely expressed 'disapprobation of the measures of the Government with a view to obtain their alteration by lawful means, without exciting or attempting to excite hatred, contempt or disaffection.'

Who charged Gandhi with sedition? Was it the petition of some Bihari advocate? No. It was the Government of India.

Have Guha & Co been charged with sedition by the Government of India? If not, why is this cretin comparing himself to Gandhi? How inflated is his ego?

Like Aparna Sen and Shyam Benegal today, Gandhi had not fired a gun or thrown a bomb, since (like them) he was incapable of either. Like Sen and Benegal and their co-signatories, all he had were his words, which he used, in the pages of his newspaper, Young India, to offer some cogent and well-merited criticisms of the policies of the government of the day. For this he was charged with sedition.

Do Guha & Co own a newspaper? Did they use it to call for the overthrow of the Government established by law? No. They signed an open letter and someone else published it. Is the Government prosecuting Guha & Co? No. Some advocate in Bihar has made a complaint which a Magistrate will look at.

‘Affection cannot be manufactured’
Gandhi’s words to the court in 1922 are worth recalling: “Section 124A under which I am happily charged is perhaps the prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen. Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by the law. If one has no affection for a person or system, one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote or incite to violence.”

 Gandhi was expressing the law as it stood at that time. He was not contradicting it in any way. Had he not been a barrister, the Magistrate could have set aside his guilty plea and appointed an advocate for him. Alternatively, the Government could have dropped the prosecution. But Gandhi needed to be in Jail and it was convenient for the Brits to play along because he was a better interlocutor for them than any possible successor to him.

Guha probably knows this. Yet he has written silly books about Gandhi so as to make a little money. He is now comparing himself to Gandhi because that's what happens when you tell stupid lies. You become a stupid liar and start believing you are a Mahatma 'experimenting with Truth'.

After he came out of jail, Gandhi called for a countrywide agitation demanding the repeal of Section 124A. The section, said Gandhi, constituted “a rape of the word ‘law’”; it was “established by the naked sword, kept ready to descend upon us at the will of the arbitrary rulers in whose appointment the people have no say”.

What happened next? Was there a 'countrywide agitation'? No. Why not? Because the thing wasn't a 'rape' of anything at all. Nor was it a naked sword. It didn't even sleep naked with its grand-nieces. It was a reasonable law and thus kept on, though diluted in application after 1962, purely because it was utile.

In fact, the colonial State had suppressed Gandhi’s right to free speech while he was still in South Africa. In 1910, his book, Hind Swaraj, was impounded by Customs in Bombay, and banned from being distributed in India.

Gandhi was a subject, not a citizen. He had no right to anything at all. This changed after India became independent. But the laws by which the Government could ban the import of a book remained untouched. It is a different matter, that there is now a right to judicial review.

Appealing against the ban, Gandhi wrote: “In my humble opinion, every man has a right to hold any opinion he chooses, and to give effect to it also, so long as, in doing so, he does not use physical violence against anybody.”

Gandhi's opinion was foolish. It may be my humble opinion that Guha & Co routinely sodomize little boys whom they then proceed to kill and eat. However, it is against the law for me to give effect to my opinion by publishing articles affirming such incidents or making movies depicting Guha & Co engaged in such activities. The fact that I'm not using physical violence against anybody is irrelevant.

Gandhi and other nationalists had hoped that the coming of swaraj would mean the casting into the dust-bin of repressive laws that had no place in a free and independent India.

Nonsense! They wanted to use those laws themselves to repress their rivals and render India governable.

Tragically, these laws were not repealed or replaced; they still hang over the heads of us citizens, to threaten and intimidate us into submission and silence.

How is this a tragedy? India would be ungovernable if nutters could run around telling any sort of lie. Submission is a good thing. We want people to submit to the law. Silence is an even better thing. Everybody talking bollocks is an intolerable nuisance.

It was under these obnoxious sections of the IPC that many different cases were brought in lower courts against the great artist, MF Husain, forcing him to flee his homeland into exile.

Who gives a damn about MF Husain? What great deprivation did Indians feel as a result of his relocating to Doha?

It is these sections that have been used by party ideologues and state governments to have books and films banned and suppressed.

But this is a matter for the Courts. They have a countervailing power- indeed, they have the last word.

It is these sections that are now being used to criminally harass the writers of a courteously worded and utterly non-violent letter to the prime minister. 

Criminally harass? If Guha & Co have been 'criminally harassed' why have they not lodged a complaint? The answer is that they have not been criminally harassed at all. Guha is lying. No crime has occurred. Some guy in Bihar has presented a petition to a Magistrate. That is his right. Some other guys have signed a letter calling Guha & Co a bunch of anti-national shitheads. That is is their right. Guha may believe that he is the victim of a crime. But then he also believes he is comparable to Mahatma Gandhi. This sad fuck is the huccha venkat of Indglish letters.

Right-wing regimes and right-wing ideologues have, of course, been very quick to misuse these colonial-era laws to suppress free expression.

But weren't a patch on left-wing regimes and ideologues, at least in India.

For all their exaltation of the nation and their loudly professed nationalism, they are happy to use imperialist means to serve their purposes.

Says a guy who writes in English coz...urm... English is actually a dialect of Tamil, right?

However, other parties and leaders have competitively kept pace with them in this regard. Mamata Banerjee, in West Bengal, has been as eager as any Bharatiya Janata Party chief minister to use repressive laws to suppress democratic dissent. And the United Progressive Alliance government, with Manmohan Singh as prime minister and P Chidambaram as home minister, shamelessly invoked the sedition clause to put peaceful protesters in prison, most notoriously in the case of the peaceful protesters against the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu.

 This was the fruit of Rajiv Gandhi's deal with Gorbachev. It was supported by the Left.

That Indian politicians, across party lines, have used colonial-era laws to suppress freedom of expression should not surprise anybody.

Nor should we be surprised that colonial era laws relating to rape and murder continue to be used. What should surprise us is why this huccha venkat is writing in English, not Kannada.

What is more disappointing is that the judicial system has not done more to prevent this shrinking of democratic space. Motivated petitions aimed at pre-emptively shutting up democratic and independent voices assuredly have no place in a court of law. It is time the Supreme Court issued clear directions to lower courts so that this pernicious practice of intimidation stops.

Why is it only now, when Guha & Co are shitting their pants, that the time has come for the Supreme Court to take action? Why not previously? What will Guha's next demand be? Suppose he is arrested for solicitation, will he then say 'the time has come for the Supreme Court to issue clear directions to lower courts to stop this pernicious practice of arresting elderly Tambram prostitutes like myself? Prior to arrival of evil Britishers, it was perfectly legal for me to waggle my bottom at all and sundry and offer to service them for the price of a bidi. Mahatma Gandhi too was threatened with sodomy by a Chinese prisoner in a South African Jail. I have written plenty of books about Gandhi. Thus I too should get sodomized for the price of a bidi because a nation can only get stronger if dissent is encouraged. Clearly the sight of me plying a nefarious trade will stimulate dissent against the Government. Thus, it is not anti-national at all for me to make this demand.'

Where politicians are increasingly governed by sentiments of revenge and retribution, citizens look to the judiciary to more actively play its Constitutional role as guarantors of liberty and free expression.

So, Guha, who is shitting his pants coz of some petition in a Bihari Magistrate's Court, thinks the Supreme Court must come and wipe his bum and hold his hand and say it will guarantee his liberty and freedom of expression.

In this regard, the judges could refer to the maxim that Mahatma Gandhi offered in 1910, amended for our times as follows: “Every man [or woman] has a right to hold any opinion he chooses, and to give effect to it also, so long as, in doing so, he [or she] does not use [or advocate] physical violence against anybody.”

This is not a maxim, it is stupidity. One may hold any opinion one pleases. One may not give expression to it in a manner contrary to law even if this does not involve physical violence. I may hold the opinion that it is right and proper for me to counterfeit the currency of the land. If I give effect to it by actually counterfeiting money I should be arrested even if no physical violence has occurred.

For giving effect to his views, non-violently, Gandhi was imprisoned by the British raj in 1922 under Section 124A of the IPC.

Gandhi was imprisoned because he pleaded guilty and asked for the maximum sentence. It is by no means a foregone conclusion that he would have been convicted if he'd hired a good lawyer.

Now, for giving effect to their views, also non-violently, the signatories to a letter to the prime minister of independent India in 2019 are sought to be arraigned under the same colonialist clause.

Sought by whom? Why won't Guha tell us? The suggestio falsi here is that it is the Government or some minion of the Government. The truth is nobody gives a flying fart for Guha & his senile chums. On the other hand, Kangana Ranault is hot.

And to think we boast of being the “largest democracy” in the world.

No. We boast of having the largest dicks in the world. Only Guha and his senile chums have to settle for bragging about the size of their democracy. What a sad bunch of losers!