India's Parliament has a 900-page booklet that lists words that generations of Speakers and Chairpersons of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha and legislatures have deemed unfit for the tender and sensitive ears of elected members. The long list of new additions provoked an unsurprising Twitter storm from the opposition, with Trinamool Congress MPs Derek O'Brien and Mahua Moitra leading the charge that it is a gag order rather than a revision.
The lyric "Sticks and stones/May break my bones/Oh but your words/They really kill me" is a singularly appropriate fit for the new politics that is unfolding in India's 75th year of Independence, the Azaadi ka Amrit Mahotsav and its 25-year extension to an Amrit Kaal, when presumably India will morph into a land of milk and honey.
The MPs are not off the mark because the list includes words that the opposition ought to use, frequently and loudly, as part of its principal responsibility to hold the government in office to account. Alert oppositions in mature, healthy democracies that top the list of legislatures where freedom of expression is fully respected use many words that would make the Lok Sabha Speaker and Rajya Sabha Chairperson presumably swoon.
Sensibilities of the governing order, it would seem, exceed the sensibilities of the socially uptight Victorian age, given that the list of revisions includes "ghadiyali aansu" (crocodile tears), "apmaan" (insult), "asatya" (falsehood), "ahankaar" (arrogance/pride)," 'corrupt", "kala din" (black days)", 'kala bazaari" (black market-marketeer) and "khareed farokht" (literally marketing, but it is safe to assume it would be all references to wheeling and dealing). The list is a deep cleaning exercise in expunging words that could be used in criticisms of the ruling regime or the opposition.
There are a few notable exceptions; "Pappu" (meaning immature adolescent), "termites" (meaning illegal cross-border immigrants), "appeasers" (meaning secular parties), "sickular", "tukde-tukde gang" (divisive opposition) and "topi wallahs" (capped Muslims). The list is open to additions and revisions, provided the political opposition, not only in Parliament but in the states, decides to join battle with the Bharatiya Janata Party.
This year, 2022, has been a period of inventiveness.
Sadly, these creative endeavours are commercially useless because not even the BJP can apply for a patent, not even in India, for its original and entirely suspicious use of bulldozers in demolishing the homes of preponderantly Muslim protestors in the auspicious period of Ram Navami. The use of bulldozers has been selective; demolitions, sometimes without adequate notice, and sometimes properties that are neither illegal nor owned by offenders named in the notices, whenever those are issued, have been targeted at citizens from the largest minority community. The inventiveness of inflicting immediate punishment on protestors by declaring the property as illegal construction was noticeably absent when thousands of young men and women went on the rampage after the innovative Agnipath recruitment drive for the defence services was unveiled.
Under the scrutiny of the international community like the European Union, including the governments of the United States of America and Germany, the Indian Parliament's list of prohibited words is a challenge to critics. The German foreign ministry recently warned that the "freedom of expression and freedom of the press are a focus of discussion with India" and that the European Union would be roped into this dialogue. It provoked India's ministry of external affairs to reject the criticism and effectively declare that arrests of newspersons, including Mohammed Zubair of Altnews, were domestic issues and sub-judice, hence off limits for meddling external actors.
The declaration of sovereign control over actions and words by India every time a foreign government or international body raises the growing concern over India's increasingly autocratic democracy signals the ever-increasing sensitivity of the ruling regime to being held to account for infringements of human rights. The need to build protective walls around the actions and words of the ruling government is a manifestation of its awareness and intransigence about crossing the Lakshman Rekha of a specific code of conduct expected of robust democracies. The boundary is open to interpretation; it also means that trespass is equally subjective.
The timing of the release of the list of unparliamentary words is an act of aggression in a political environment that is already intensely confrontational. The Monsoon session of the Lok Sabha begins next week, and the ruling majority has come to a decision, though exactly what that may be will be determined as it follows up its declaration of prohibited words with more actions.
The word list may be a language test of how good the opposition is about substituting the prohibited with antonyms. It may be an act of dictating the terms of political discourse and policing compliance or violations. It may be an incendiary invitation to the opposition to take the language fight to the public, in much the same way that the Supreme Court of India held Nupur Sharma's "loose tongue" responsible for setting "the entire country on fire."
A printed list of words issued by India's Parliament, oral orders issued by a galaxy of BJP spokespersons, saffron-clad seers, legitimised by appointments by the independently constituted orders to which they belong, since there is no one governing-appointing institution of the diversity of sects, orders and cults that are Hindu by faith on kosher practice for Kali Puja are signs of growing confidence and consequently intolerance.
The "average Indian," a person frequently invoked by BJP spokespersons to declare that this individual and community were offended and disapproved of oblations of meat and liquor to "Kali Mata", is a figment of the imagination. The average Indian uses words that are now held to be unparliamentary, like corrupt, arrogant, chamcha, and kala bazaari, to express dissatisfaction with the prevailing ruling order and local functionaries of ruling parties, the states and the Centre. The Agnipath generation repeatedly used "bekaar", meaning useless, and "dhokha", meaning cheating-fraud-deception, against the Narendra Modi government for its inventive recruitment strategy of four-year contracts.
The Lok Sabha Speaker and the Rajya Sabha Chairperson can expunge the records of prohibited words. Neither of them has the power to control the language of the average Indian. Nor do these persons have the power to control what was once and may be said again by leaders like the union minister Anurag Thakur, who famously used the word "gaddar" to tell a mob that the traitors should be used as target practice "goli maaro saalo ko."
Between dictating what is blasphemy in the worship of the goddess Kali and prohibited words in Parliament, the BJP has taken a giant stride forward in laying down the rules of expected conduct in a new order governed by the agenda of Hindutva and the politics of the majoritarian Hindu Rashtra. The Speaker can police the words said inside the Lok Sabha. Does the BJP have the capacity to police the diversity of religious ritual practices in India and the words of the masses of average Indians? Is India set to usher in an Inquisition to separate the heretic from the true believers?
Word policing is already in place, given the inclusion of the word "snoopgate" in the prohibited list, with its obvious reference to the use of Pegasus spyware to unlawfully eavesdrop on the conversations and communications of journalists, activists, judges and ministers, including the current Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw. The sense of prevailing insecurity about "agencies" overhearing conversations and monitoring social media traffic, including Facebook posts, points to the extent of concern about the Modi regime's operations and intentions. The confiscation of mobile phones and laptops by police and agencies of people who have been arrested and are under investigation is another pointer to how sensitive the government is about the usage of words.
It would appear that the Modi regime has decided to learn from the instructions for rulers in the Arthashastra, where Kautilya urges the monarch to establish an efficient network of spies, not against an external hostile entity but the domestic population. The legitimation of a new order, in education, in governance by insistently invoking the ancient texts is a pointer to how the future could pan out.
(Shikha Mukerjee is a journalist based in Kolkata)
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.
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