Feel free to insult but not in India – Freedom of speech cry in UK

A Conservative politician and a gay rights activist have combined forces to promote the cause of free speech in Britain, the campaign gathering steam at a time a cartoon led to a furore in the Indian Parliament.

The campaign, under the slogan Feel free to insult me, is against a law banning insulting language and behaviour and has brought together religious and secular groups along with human rights and minority organisations.

Right-wing Tory David Davis, a former shadow home secretary, said the law was strangling free speech and should be scrapped.

Davis, once expected to become the Conservative Party leader, said Section 5 of the 1986 Public Order Act was having a terrible, chilling effect on democracy.

Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, who has himself been arrested under Section 5, agreed. The open exchange of ideas including unpalatable, even offensive, ideas is a hallmark of a free and democratic society, he said.

It is commendable that David Davis and the Christian Institute are prepared to work with a gay Left-wing green atheist secularist like me, he added. Were all putting the right to free speech before our personal politics and beliefs.

In India, a seven-decade-old cartoon in a Class XI textbook showing Jawaharlal Nehru purportedly whipping B.R. Ambedkar to hurry him up with the Constitution created a furore in Parliament and forced an apology from a minister outside the House.

In Calcutta last month, a Jadavpur University professor was arrested for circulating the clip of a joke that lampooned Mamata Banerjee and a central minister. The Bengal chief minister recently said the email lampooning her amounted to character assassination and couldnt be termed a cartoon.

Tatchell said the Section 5 ban on insults was a menace to liberty. It has been abused to variously arrest or threaten with arrest people protesting non-violently against abortion and for gay equality and animal welfare. Other victims include Christian street preachers, critics of scientology and even students making jokes.

Under the legislation, the use of insulting words or behaviour is outlawed, but opponents say there is too little clarity on what that includes, leading to spurious arrests. One teenage boy was arrested for holding a Scientology is a dangerous cult placard and a student was held for telling a police officer his horse was gay, they said.

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Feel free to insult but not in India - Freedom of speech cry in UK