Children as young as 9 locked up by Indian Police for speech violation
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Please also don't post articles that are primarily appeals to nationalistic indignation (for and against). HN exists for intellectual curiosity, and there's none of that in this thread. This was entirely predictable.
>“The government is telling Muslims to leave India and go away.” In reply, the other child says, “Amma, Modi is saying show documents of your father and grandfather otherwise he is telling us to leave the country.” At this point, another child is heard saying, “Hit them with slippers if anybody asks for documents.”
The last one is directed at survey workers who have been (mis)targeted recently.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/thiruvananthapuram/...
>Following instances of workers, engaged to conduct Poshan Abhiyan survey, facing hostile behaviour, the state government had issued an ad explaining that the survey had nothing to do with Census and NPR.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/jaipur/two-women-mi...
>In Kota, the woman attacked was a surveyor from the National Economic Census department collecting data for the National Economics Census 2019- 2020 in Brijdham area. Nazeeran Bano was let off only after she was able to convince the crowd that she, too, was a Muslim, like them. The police later arrested one person for the attack.
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/west-bengal-woman-s-ho...
>The house of a 20-year-old woman was set on fire by a mob in West Bengal's Birbhum district on Wednesday, following rumours that she was collecting data for the proposed nationwide NRC.
>Chumki Khatun and her family are now under police protection after the incident happened in Gourbazar village in Mallarpur police station area, officials said.
I don't support sedition charges, but there should be a penalty for (1) promoting (even petty) violence against government workers and (2) getting your children to express this promotion.
Union Minister in a public Rally. "Shoot the traitors(protesters)" https://scroll.in/video/951289/watch-anurag-thakur-minister-...
Chief Minister of UP at a public Rally. "If they(protesters) won't listen with words, they will surely listen to bullets" https://www.deccanherald.com/national/north-and-central/if-n...
I don't mean to engage in whataboutism, but the play had a line which said "hit them with slippers", it's not "sedition". It sure might be wrong, but not "Sedition".
Meanwhile lawmakers holding real power call out for using guns against protesters. And that has led to this https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-51308376
there have been 4 incidents of gun firing in last week alone.
By creating a war-like hysteria in the country, India gets away with doing absurd things: make people believe they are perpetually at war with someone (Pakistan, the muslims, the illegal immigrants, etc) and you can justify bizarre things like firing at civilians, cow terrorism, etc
i dont think so. News reports showed videos of stone pelters
As for the free speech issue: Disclaimer - I'm in favor of all speech, including hate speech. If it sounds like I'm defending the administration or police, I am not.
There are many "sacred" political figures. Michelle Obama, for example, is one of them. If there were a school play held in the deep south in which children were made to advocate for her to be physically beaten, as a response to some Obama government policy - I'm quite sure many folks in places like California would want the secret service or some offical government agency to formally investigate what's going on there. The police presence itself is not as unusual or "nationalist" as some seem to be suggesting here.
For a concrete example - the musician Ted Nugent said at an NRA event that if Barack Obama were to become President, he (Nugent) would be dead or in jail by November. The Secret Service paid him a visit following that statement and (correctly) did not arrest him.
Investigating threats of violence against the leader of a country is common. In this case, the fact that a teacher made kids say it, is not really very different in this context.
Unfortunately, India does not really have freedom of speech. The right to say things that are encouraging political violence is not covered by India's toothless right to free speech.
In this case, Modi is a similarly "sacred" figure to many, and he's also the Prime Minister. Some people made children put on a play in which they suggest physically beating the Prime Minister, and then a video of this gets shared on WhatsApp.
Had the play been put on and nothing happened thereafter, it would have been an entirely different matter. The fact that it started spreading on WhatsApp now gives the police grounds to suspect that this is part of a conspiracy to call for political violence.
The police in this case have gone ahead and actually arrested the teacher and parent who wrote the script. If (and only if) they conspired to spread the WhatsApp video, under the existing terrible laws, the police may have a case. I'm not a lawyer, but it seems that way as a layperson reading the statutes. I hope I'm wrong.
And so there have been numerous clear instances of violence against university students, professors and protestors on the street.
https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/opinion-the-jamia-v...
https://thewire.in/politics/delhi-polls-hate-speech-bjp-camp...
https://theprint.in/politics/shaheen-bagh-biryani-bullets-pa...
https://www.indiatoday.in/elections/delhi-assembly-polls-202...
Reputed universities / academics are caught in the cross hairs:
https://theprint.in/india/iit-professor-author-yale-postdoc-...
To all those who support this party in this forum must understand, as someone else said - nationalism in all its form is abhorrent.
A play that criticizes an act passed by the government and now you've got the government after you / questioning children.
That's scary stuff.
Sure sounds like they're being held against their will, which is one form of being "locked up". If I lock you inside my house and prevent you from leaving, I can be charged with false imprisonment, even though you're not in a prison.
This tactic of defending the government by trying to distract from this heinous set of events by arguing semantics is not new, but doesn’t deserve to be HN.
They have no liberty or agency, and putting them in a cell will not change their predicament in the slightest.
They are locked up
I think you mean psychological.
If I'm talking about a minority student instead... it'd be pretty fucked up that a piece of insured property has more protection under the law than a fellow human being.
Especially since if you were in a car accident and bleeding out, the EMTs are allowed to engage in destruction of property in order to save your life. They can damage the car, shred your clothing. They're trained to do this without even thinking (and wasting heartbeats).
Where it gets harder is what most people seem to want "hate speech" provisions to cover are much more diffuse forms of incitement, if you can even call it that. When you can't make a direct causal mapping between speech and crime, you start having problems. If you didn't personally direct drunk college students to flip cars, but instead had previously posted online somewhere that flipping cars while drunk is fun, it's a lot harder to say that absent your speech, the illegal act would not have occurred. Say a large number of commentators talked up how fun car-flipping is. Does each now possess 1/nth of the criminal liability for incitement? Do we know the actors read a given post? Even if we do, can we quantity the degree to which a given post influenced their actions?
Obviously IANAL, but in my lay experience it seems that the sort of incitement liability we have is limited to no-brainer cases where it's quite obvious that the speech was the primary motivating factor for the subsequent criminal action. Anything further quickly gets into an enormous can of worms of unknowables.
I think the term of art is the imminence of the incited lawless action. Without imminence, causality is difficult, and you open the door to all kinds of crazy contributory claims - are the authors of the Anarchist's Cookbook liable for every bombing to occur following its publication?
>I don't think it is that controversial in the US. There is a small, vocal minority that is against free speech but the overwhelming majority of Americans do not see things that way.
Looks like you're conflating free speech with hate speech? The parent mentioned "hate speech", but you're talking about "free speech".
I think Americans support Free speech, but Hate speech, especially when violence is involved, elicits a far different response.
Just ask any poor woman who has had her son arrested for mouthing off in some CounterStrike session about something he's gonna do at school. Just mouthing off trying to look big and all of a sudden police are at his door the next day.
Basically, in the US, you get free speech up to the point where they think your kid is going to shoot up a school full of kids or church full of little old ladies. At that point, there will be guys knocking at your door. I understand the motivation of law enforcement there, I get the point of "terroristic threat" laws. I just don't know if we've calibrated the application of the laws correctly.
But the point is, that this "overwhelming majority of Americans" you were speaking of would tell me to get lost, and tell the police "Good job! Better safe than sorry with these school shooters."
https://www.heraldmailmedia.com/news/nation/he-says-his-mass...
excerpt:
The case promises to have widespread implications beyond Puy’s felony prosecution. It’s become the first major test of a law strengthened partly in response to the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High.
At issue: Just what makes a written threat illegal? And are all young people and others who make fake threats about mass shootings — it happens on a fairly regular basis — in serious trouble?
I just tell the young people I work with to not even go there. If someone tries to goad you into something, just don't say it, it's too risky right now. I mean, a prosecution is some chance at getting the laws relaxed I suppose? But the judges and potentially even the jurors all have kids sitting in those classrooms too. So I just don't see it as a particularly fair way to assess the appropriateness of certain laws.
I really believe the various legislatures, in the end, will need to try to recalibrate some of this. (Though I realize that's not likely to happen either. I just think it's slightly more likely than relying on courts that have repeatedly held that yelling fire in a crowded theater, or talking about bombs at airports is not protected speech.)
That phrase was used in a court case to (successfully) justify censoring someone protesting the draft during WWI [1]. We should be skeptical of any limitations on free speech because they will be abused to stifle legitimate speech.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
Hate speech is not well defined, something that would be considered offensive in the Silicon Valley might be considered a compliment in New York.
The whole point of free speech laws is to protect controversial opinions.
Good or bad, because the bad of censorship is often much worse than the bad of free speech.
Taking away the right for someone to speak their mind is too much power for one individual or group, and is ripe for abuse, so it's better to not do it at all.
It is a risky business, but so are many others: food and drug regulation, road regulation, flight regulation etc. - the case must be made why freedom of speech is such a special right as opposed to any other action, such as selling food, driving cars, or building planes.
>Taking away the right for someone to speak their mind is too much power for one individual or group
We already do this globally, with copyright law, or less controversially, laws against threats, assault and child pornography. This at least shows that there is some scope, and unless that scope is a dogma, it should be open for questioning - either in broadening or narrowing.
If I describe to you exactly how you might go about murdering someone, and they get murdered, I'm likely to be a suspect, and if you're charged, I'll be charged as an accessory. If I rouse a group of people into flipping over cars, breaking windows, and hurling rocks at the police, I'll be charged with incitement. If I yell fire in a crowded theater... I can't recall what the charge is but it's not good (endangerment?). If I con the police into arresting you for something you didn't do, I can be charged for that as well (and you probably ought to also sue me for civil penalties).
If all of that is criminal, then it's not much of a stretch to include escalation to hate crimes as a prosecutable offense. Grooming people toward these activities might be a grey area, but it's a grey area, not an unassailable one.
False, see Anarchist's cookbook and similar cases such as MIT's lockpicking guide
> If I rouse a group of people into flipping over cars, breaking windows, and hurling rocks at the police, I'll be charged with incitement
Incitement is a crime. It requires specific, actionable intent. "Screw the police" is not incitement, "go hang group X" is.
> If I yell fire in a crowded theater
Not a crime
> If I con the police into arresting you for something you didn't do
That's making a false statement to police
> If all of that is criminal, then it's not much of a stretch to include escalation to hate crimes as a prosecutable offense
Thank goodness it's not
IANAL, but this doesn't sound quite right. I think they need to be able to show mens rea on your part, that is, that you actually believed the person might commit murder and deliberately helped them.
if you agree with my nitpick, then all of your examples show a clear intention to incite others to do specific material harm.
on the other hand, if someone says "X group doesn't deserve to live", it's hard to say whether they are deliberately inciting violence. if X is saints fans, you might reasonably assume the person is joking. if X is a marginalized group, it's still hard to say whether it's an incitement of violence or a gross opinion that lacks actual intent to incite violence. if it were easy to show that it was a deliberate incitement of violence, then it would already be illegal under current laws.
Three lines from the play were highlighted.
>“The government is telling Muslims to leave India and go away.” In reply, the other child says, “Amma, Modi is saying show documents of your father and grandfather otherwise he is telling us to leave the country.” At this point, another child is heard saying, “Hit them with slippers if anybody asks for documents.”
The last one is directed at survey workers who have been (mis)targeted recently.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/thiruvananthapuram/....
>Following instances of workers, engaged to conduct Poshan Abhiyan survey, facing hostile behaviour, the state government had issued an ad explaining that the survey had nothing to do with Census and NPR.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/jaipur/two-women-mi....
>In Kota, the woman attacked was a surveyor from the National Economic Census department collecting data for the National Economics Census 2019- 2020 in Brijdham area. Nazeeran Bano was let off only after she was able to convince the crowd that she, too, was a Muslim, like them. The police later arrested one person for the attack.
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/west-bengal-woman-s-ho....
>The house of a 20-year-old woman was set on fire by a mob in West Bengal's Birbhum district on Wednesday, following rumours that she was collecting data for the proposed nationwide NRC.
>Chumki Khatun and her family are now under police protection after the incident happened in Gourbazar village in Mallarpur police station area, officials said.
I don't support sedition charges, but there should be a penalty for (1) promoting (even petty) violence against government workers and (2) getting your children to express this promotion.
More like "I should not be fired, refused service, and kicked out of teams/events due to my speech/opinions".
Do you agree with this or not?
What I do think is that being fired should not be a death sentence; that there should be a mechanism, possibly the Government in our current society, by which one can continue living with food and a roof over one’s head even if people refuse to associate with that person. Generally speaking, I don’t think there should be an entity which can prevent you from feeding and housing yourself in the first place, though.
In that case, do you believe that it should be legal to fire/refuse service/kick out of teams and events someone due to their gender, religion, or sexual orientation?
So what should we do, given that enforcing association by law doesn’t work?
My solution is in anarchism; stop preventing me from living my own life (through a capitalist society enforced by the state, police and prisons) and I’ll stop forcing myself on yours.
People make and break friendships, or make any number of other associations, based on any factors they want, such as common interests and opinions, aligned goals and values, or just a common idea of fun and enjoyment. People have a right to decide who is welcome and who isn't, by any number of factors (modulo the interaction of protected classes with services offered to the public).
"Obnoxious" is not a protected class, nor should it be. You have a right to not be arrested for your words or opinions or expression. You are not entitled to (for instance) other people's business, patronage, custom, service, friendship, or any other kind of association. You do not have the right to control other people's reactions to you.
It doesn't matter if we're talking about a hobby group, a sports team, a software project, a company, or a social network. "I don't enjoy being around this person" is more than reason enough to stop associating with someone, let alone more critical reasons such as "I don't want to be around someone who wants to deprive me of my rights as a person" or "this person is driving other people away".
See also the Geek Social Fallacies: http://plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html
And to turn that around, you're free to associate with people who feel differently, and others are free to judge you based on those associations too.
> I don't enjoy being around this person" is more than reason enough to stop associating with someone
So I should be able refuse to sell bread to someone with green hair, right? Or if they have a specific skin deformation.
Now, what if all shops in an area refuse to sell food to people with these characteristics?
> let alone more critical reasons such as "I don't want to be around someone who wants to deprive me of my rights as a person"
In that case I will be able to pretty much ban anyone I want as the vast majority of people think that certain victimless crimes should be illegal (and thus they deprive me of my rights as a person), right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
If you are looking to argue against that, feel free to do it with someone else.
Karnataka’s sedition case against parent and teacher for a school play is absurd – and illegal
They had the same liberties and agency they would have had if they were behind bars. Zero, to be precise.
Not sure if you are a pedant who cares to an inappropriate degree about the proper use of words, or more likely, trying to distract from this heinous set of events by arguing semantics.
After a video of parts of the play did the rounds on social media, the accusation was that a child spoke a line in the play that Narendra Modi should be beaten with slippers. However, several media reports have debunked this claim. The child seems to have made a generic statement that anyone who demands documents to prove one’s citizenship should be beaten with chappals.
It's absolutely wrong to detain the kid for this. Only the one who wrote the lines for "beating" someone deserves to be questioned and that too in accordance with the law.
Or is it rather that implied negative speech against the government is not protected by the law?
Certainly, strong arming Muslim children by law enforcement is largely protected by the law and what seems like the majority of the public.
Laws exist on paper. Law enforcement agencies however have been historically known to act on behalf of leaders, a behaviour which also seen in many other countries.