[Reader-list] Censorship from an (Un)usual Quarter

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Sir, point taken,

Name calling is not in order.

However, I would still insist that there is a world of a difference between 
the speech act that is anti free speech, and the act that is more than a 
speech act. 

If, for instance, the PWG were to conduct a militant public campaign against 
the NGO running a radio programme, by staging public meetings, displaying 
posters, printing pamphlets, or even setting up their own radio station - 
that would be an interesting instance of the contestation of two kinds of 
speech. One for a particular radio programme, and the other against, with 
arguments and counter arguments. I would then totally agree that it is the 
merit of the arguments on either side that would demand attention. 

Then, I wouldn't have reason to call the PWGs action 'Thuggery', I might have 
been satisfied with talking about plain and simple bloody mindedness. 
However, their (the PWGs in this case) modus operandi has a very different 
kind of concreteness. It is not an argument, rather it is a violent act that 
forecloses the possibility of the development of an  argument. When you 
kidnap people and destory their equipment and threaten to do violence to 
them, you step outside the line of an argument about the nature of what 
constitutes free speech. You lay claim to being the 'legitimate' instrument 
of violence, of having recourse to your own sense of 'constitutional 
propriety' in what you claim is your 'Liberated Zone'. Its just that the 
terms and conditions of this kind of propriety have a somewhat different 
emphasis. 

Now 'Thuggery' has a kind of lineage, it involves the organized actions of 
secret societies through much of central and eastern india, who used a 
combination of deciet, violence and subterfuge to achieve clear ends of 
informally exercised domination. In their own times, Thugs may have had as 
much reason to waylay travellers as the PWG does today, in the name of some 
higher cause. Perhaps, on the other hand it is too far fetched a comparison, 
too weak a metaphor.

Maybe 'Thuggery' is too broad, too imprecise, what about - 'Extortion', 
'Arson', 'Intimidation' and 'Abduction'.

I am not name calling here, merely searching for words that are precise 
enough to be able to describe the methods that the PWG, or other state and 
non state or para state agencies use to achieve their very specific purposes 
when their anxieties go riding into the forest, looking for audio video 
equipment, generators and micro transmitters.

After all, the PWG could simply have 'Appropriated' the equipment and done 
something with it for their own ends. That might have been an interesting 
situation, pointing towards a conflict about 'who will speak freely'., and a 
struggle to acquire the 'means of free speech'. Instead what we witness is a 
fear of 'free speech' as such, a deep suspicion of the discursive. That it 
chose not to do so, but to destroy the equipment instead, points I think to 
deeper and more fundamental anxiety.