Nitasha Kaul Exemplifies Academic Double-Speak On Freedom Of Expression And Democracy

A British citizen and 'academic', Nitasha Kaul, raised a minor storm on X (formerly Twitter) after she was sent back on arrival in Bengaluru airport. She claimed to be a victim of Indian authoritarianism.

In the past, she has been criticised for being an indirect denier of the Hindu ethnic cleansing in Kashmir by jihadi groups, and, now that she has been deported, she further alleges that academics are being silenced in India.

You can read her long rant in this thread on X here, but what is astonishing is how she comes with a huge sense of entitlement about her right to enter India. You can make that out from the very first word in her tweet yesterday (25 February), which reads:

“IMPORTANT: Denied entry to #India for speaking on democratic & constitutional values. I was invited to a conference as esteemed delegate by Govt of #Karnataka (Congress-ruled state) but Centre refused me entry. All my documents were valid & current (UK passport & OCI)...”.

She apparently thinks the people on X cannot for themselves judge whether what she has to say is important or not. She has to flag it for them. 

Next, the fact that she was invited by the government of Karnataka for “speaking on democratic and constitutional values” does not matter, for in the past rank anti-nationals and India- and Hindu-bashers have been invited to talk here for purely political reasons.

Many of them claimed to be constitutionalists and democrats even while calling for India’s dismemberment. It is also quite clear why the Congress government in Karnataka wants Kaul to speak, for they need someone to take up cudgels against the Narendra Modi government’s alleged efforts to destroy our liberal constitution. Who better than a British citizen with a Kashmiri Pandit surname to do this hatchet job?

Kaul also goes to extraordinary lengths to claim huge academic acclaim and credentials in championing democratic values. She says: 

“I am a globally respected academic & public intellectual, passionate about liberal democratic values. I care for gender equity, challenging misogyny, sustainability, civil & political liberties, rule of law. I am not anti-Indian, I am anti-authoritarian & pro-#democracy.” 

One must suspect the credentials of anyone who claims such things about herself. It either indicates an inflated ego or a huge deficit in self-confidence. 

Then she raises the usual issue of suppression of academics and freedom of expression (FoE) in India. She tweeted: 

“This is also about what knowledge-making can do! Banning academics, journalists, activists, writers from India in spite of all valid documents is pathetic. The evidence is in public. In the country, academic institutions are being forced to toe the line (I have published on this), and outside the country now too, academic silencing?”

This article is to address the FoE issue, and not about rebutting any of her views and positions on Indian affairs. 

First, FoE in India is not unlimited. Article 19(2) clearly says that the right to free speech can be restricted “in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states, public order, decency or morality or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.”

Now, you can agree or disagree on whether Kaul’s views can be construed to be in violation of this sub-clause, but there is no reason why a holocaust denier should be given freedom to offer her dubious intellectual wares here. She is entitled to her views, but India is not obliged to give her a platform. If the Karnataka government thinks she does, she can anyway address them over a Zoom link.

Second, FoE is not endangered merely by states or governments. They can be endangered by private interests, or social groups with the power to intimidate or indulge in violent behaviour.

We saw this when the social media deplatformed a sitting US President in January 2021 after his supporters stormed Capitol Hill; we saw how three presidents of Ivy League institutions refused to stand up against calls for the genocide of Jews, when Left-Liberals and Islamists rampaged on campuses after the 7 October terror attacks on Israel by Hamas.

We saw this when the US denied Modi a visa to speak in America before he became Prime Minister. We have been seeing another anti-FoE game being played out against two whistle-blowers, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, who are being hounded by Uncle Sam for daring to leak confidential information on Wikileaks.

Snowden has received Russian refuge, and Assange may be about to be extradited from the United Kingdom to face various charges related to these leaks.

More recently, a Harvard economics professor, Roland Fryer, an Afro-American himself, said in an interview that he had to move with a police escort as his research showed no particular racial bias in police shootings. So academics can be threatened in pro-FoE America if their research leads them to arrive at politically-inconvenient conclusions. So much for academic freedom.

Cancel culture, now predominantly used by an alliance of Left-Liberals and Islamists, is how free speech is throttled in the US and Europe. In fact, even the media, which advocates free speech, practices cancel culture, as we saw in a case involving the publication of a story on the dubious business dealings of Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

The New York Post did a story before the 2020 presidential elections suggesting that there was crucial evidence on Hunter Biden’s laptop, but the NYT dismissed it as “Russian disinformation”. The real reason: they did not want any story spoiling Joe Biden’s victory march against Donald Trump. And it took them a year and a half to indirectly admit that they were wrong. 

Third, effective FoE is hugely impacted by the asymmetry of economic and media power. Within a country, it is the Left-liberal narrative that trumps other voices, and between countries, FoE is hugely tilted in favour of the powerful Western media. In the Russia-Ukraine war, for example, right-wing voices are overwhelmed by the former.

This is why Tucker Carlson, who interviewed Vladimir Putin, has been heavily criticised by the liberal media and dissed. Consider how the liberal National Public Radio chose to headline and deal with the subject of Carlson’s Putin interview. The story was headlined, “Tucker Carlson, the fired Fox News star, makes bid for relevance with Putin interview.”

So it is not the substance of the interview that matters, but whether Carlson was fired from Fox News, and his (alleged) selfish motivations in seeking an interview with Putin. Carlson is also described as a “television provocateur”, in order to indicate to dumb-witted readers that you can only expect nonsense from such guys.

When it comes to India, it is similarly normal for Western publications, and also Islamist ones like Al Jazeera, to use quasi-pejorative descriptions of nationalist voices in order to devalue what they are saying.

Of course, what is most often done by the likes of the New York Times, Washington Post, The Economist, The Guardian or even the Financial Times, is to use quotes only from ideologically aligned intellectuals from India, or Indian-origin academics with similar views.

This is why Nitasha Kaul’s views get traction in Western media, and why opposition politicians call her to discuss democracy in India, for she will mirror their political world views.

Fourth, FoE is often cancelled by intimidation and violence. If today few media outlets will call a spade a spade when it comes to calling out violent Islamists, it is because they understand that it could invite violence. 

Denmark, the bastion of Nordic democracy with unlimited free speech rights once upon a time, recently passed what can only be called an anti-blasphemy law, which makes it illegal to burn the Quran or other religious texts.

No prizes for guessing why this law had to come: soon after some Danish and French papers published Prophet cartoons, violence was unleashed by Islamists in many parts of the world.

FoE goes out of the window when communities with a penchant for violence and a willingness to use physical attacks to intimidate people are given free rein in the name upholding democracy.

Nitasha Kaul should be giving her pro-democracy speeches in jihadi heartlands. But unlike India, she won’t be catching the next plane back home — except in a casket.