[Reader-list] Freedom of Speech for Alien traitor muslims & hindus?

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

On 14-Feb-08, at 1:54 PM, ARNAB CHATTERJEE wrote:

>  While I temporarily disagree with his no
> freedom of speech for aliens etc.,

Did i say that? not really.

I was just saying the "protection of speech" by the state is  
available to the citizens. A non-citizen does not have that  
protection. State and it's everyday million invocations has  
circumscribed the space fundamentally.

Now what will be the basis of  "protection of speech" will rage on  
for many many years. Whether it will be on normative grounds or other  
grounds cannot be resolved. Protected speech will have it's own  
"reasonable restrictions". So the ground conditions of this debate  
will go on for a long time, and will be more venomous in the coming  
times.

But the questions around condition of speech, socially acceptable and  
unacceptable speech, freedom negotiated within each act of speech,  
significant speech or heretical speech cannot be understood if all  
our arguments are about how we will petition the state or how best to  
think like the state. The present debate remains at the level of how  
to speak to the state or convince the state or condemn the state.

How do we understand the limits of "unacceptable" speech that we can  
live with or bear with is an area that gets left behind, within this.  
The tendency to mobilize sentimental or paranoid fictions of  
communities to argue reaches a dead end quickly.

Then how do we think about speech - without the state as the  
guarantor and without fiction of communities as the crutch?
-------------------

Formally asylum came up as an address to the condition of stateless  
people in the first part of the 20th century. But the culture of  
giving shelter to the prosecuted, the traveller who is not acceptable  
in some places or the one who is on the run is deep in all cultures  
and has been part of stories for ages. Maybe time has come re- 
invigorate these domains of practices and thinking from various  
cultures and see what has been the ways of practicing  
"ashraya" (refuge) in cultures and civilizations.

warmly
jeebesh