Platforms and publishing

Let us get one thing straight about the right to free expression: It has evolved as a mechanism to defend speech against the intrusions of state power. Governments have the ability to constrain what you or I say; we have a right, mandated under our Constitution and similarly liberal ones elsewhere, to ensure that this freedom is not taken away arbitrarily. Sadly, in India this right is not as absolute as one would desire, and thus various officials of the state do indeed act arbitrarily to constrain speech — from district magistrates shutting down the internet, to the wholesale silencing of Kashmiris online, to state control on books such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

As far as we know, state power had no role to play in the decision by a private company, Bloomsbury India, to withdraw one of its books from sale. This was driven by the company’s own decision-making. So, on the face of it, this does not seem to be a freedom-ofspeech issue.

That said, the state also has a role to play in protecting the freedom of expression. If a film is not screened, speakers are silenced, an art gallery is trashed, or a book is withdrawn from publication due to the threat of mob violence, then our constitutional rights are indeed infringed. In India, this is quite often how it happens — fear of mobs, particularly when it comes to religious issues, restricts our expression precisely because the organs of the state choose not to defend us against these threats. The threat of litigation, particularly criminal defamation, is also a very real one in India — and is another form of state power that in India has taken on an excessively restrictive form.

Is this what happened in the case of the Bloomsbury book? The book — which I have not read — purports to be about the riots that swept Delhi earlier this year. It is possible the book is a careful, fact-checked take on the riots. Many think that is unlikely, given that the book’s authors set up an online event for the book that also invited a politician accused of delivering the speech that incited some of the mobs in the first place.

Even so, unless the book itself is a similar direct incitement to violence, there is no reason why it should not be published. If a mob threatened the authors, the publishers and so on with violence then they need to be defended against it. As far as we know, no such threat of violence was launched. It is true that we do not know the exact circumstances causing Bloomsbury India to withdraw the book; the company itself has blamed the authors, saying that the latter organised a “pre-launch” seminar without informing Bloomsbury, and that the publishers wished to dissociate themselves with the speakers. Perhaps outrage in a section of social media scared off Bloomsbury; perhaps some of its other authors threatened to withdraw their labour from the publishers. This does not come up to the level of an infringement of our constitutional rights. Whether the publisher has violated its own contract with its authors is another matter — since one of them is a lawyer, I assume that, if there was such a violation, the publishers will have to defend their actions in court.

Nevertheless, it is clear that what happened with the riots book is a subset of a broader and global phenomenon. On the one hand, groups of individuals with a stake in platforms — publishers, newspapers, universities, and so on — seek to ensure that those platforms maintain what they see as a particular set of standards, which in practice means trying to shame them if they amplify voices that this group of individuals thinks inappropriate or dangerous. On the other hand, those who see themselves as being thus excluded from these institutions try to draw a link between such exclusions and their broader right to free expression.

These are not free-speech battles of the sort to which we are accustomed. In fact, these are basically exercises of various kinds of private power. Those with some power over the platforms are trying to keep them pure; those with other kinds of power are trying to use them. In this particular case the platform happens to owe more to the “side” of the dispute that does not have political power more broadly. This is rare in today’s India; most such spaces have bowed to the dominant political movement in the country, with which these particular authors are also associated. The specifics of who is on what side in this case should and does not, however, change the general principle.

In the end, publishers are corporations. As this column argued when Penguin India withdrew a book by Wendy Doniger, “They are a private sector company whose responsibility is to their shareholders and duty is to maximise profits. Which shareholder wants to see cash bleed into legally defending an asset that is depreciating fast, like a four-year-old hardback? … Penguin India is being true to itself by withdrawing.” A corporation that fears it might lose readership or authors or brand goodwill will take a commercial decision.

In the end, another publisher —one with no such concerns — picked up the book, which they say is already a bestseller. That makes it particularly hard to see how speech has been stifled in this case.