Slavery is freedom

While many people in India think that we have freedom of speech,
things are actually quite bad.

There are two well-respected global rankings in this field:

• Reporters Without Borders has a `Press Freedom Index'. For 2010,
  they
  show India at rank 122 out 178 countries. In their ranking,
  Nepal and Jordan and Qatar are more free than India.
  
  
• The other prominent ranking is by Freedom House. For
  2010, they
  place India at rank 72 out of 196. In their ranking, Hong Kong,
  Benin and Tonga are more free than India.
  
  

Why are things so bad? The Constitution does not establish freedom
of speech as a fundamental right. Laws of colonial vintage punish
free expression, and new laws (e.g. connected with the Internet)
have not shown a greater interest in free speech. Books are
regularly banned, journalists or bloggers are regularly imprisoned
or killed. It is a war zone out there.

See India
puts tight leash on Internet free speech by Vikas Bajaj
in the New York Times on 27 April.

I was hence quite surprised to
see reporting
by Sanjib Kumar Baruah in the Hindustan Times where he
quotes the minister for information and broadcasting, Ambika Soni,
as saying:

"Our media is probably the freest in the world"

It is bad enough to have a fundamentally flawed Constitution and
laws where free speech is not enshrined. The least we can do in this
unhappy situation is to recognise that we have a serious problem and
go solve it. We are better off without such Orwellian claims.

Similarly, Amartya
Sen, writing in the New York Review of Books notes that
there is more free speech in India than China. Yes, there is. But
should we get pleased when we are good when compared with one of
the more thuggish states of the world? India needs to set its
sights higher.

We like to think that while we're poor, we're one of the better
democracies out there. Okay, if so, shouldn't we be atleast in the
top quartile in international rankings of freedom of speech? That
would mean getting to a rank of 45 (instead of 122) in the ranking
by Reporters Without Borders, and a rank of 49 (instead of 72) in
the ranking by Freedom House. To get there, we will need to first
start by acknowledging that we have a problem, instead of engaging
in triumphalism.