3 Jan 2013 | Asia and Pacific, India
From journalists murdered for chasing stories of illegal mining to exploding packages delivered to newspaper offices, India battled with a range of free expression and censorship issues in 2012, a report released this week by media watchdog The Hoot shows.
Harassment in the form of stone-throwing, physical assault and even bullets was meted out to journalists exposing the underbelly of India, especially when reporting on cases of deep corruption by politicians.
The arts also saw censorship in the form of cancelled shows due to objections of themes such as homosexuality, and the much-publicised cancelled visit of Salman Rushdie to the Jaipur Literary Festival due to “security concerns”.
Section 66A of the IT Act 2000 also made headlines when ordinary citizens were arrested for criticising politicians on social media platforms, leading to massive public outrage.
Read the full report here
More on this story:
Salil Tripathi on why India must choose to defend free speech
The threat of colonial-era sedition laws
28 Dec 2012 | India
The film of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is set to be released on 1 February. If the team behind the movie adaptation is at all nervous about screening the film they have good reason. Rushdie, who wrote the screenplay, and has been the literary face for freedom of expression for years, has a tumultuous history of censorship with India.
The Booker prize-winning book is about two children, born at the stroke of midnight as India gained its independence. Their lives become intertwined with the life of this new country.
One of the figures in the book, The Widow, was based on former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In the book, the character, through genocide and several wars, helps destroy Midnight’s Children. Gandhi had imposed a widely-criticised State of Emergency in India.
In an interesting turn of events, Gandhi threatened Rushdie libel over a single line. That line suggested that Gandhi’s son Sanjay had accused his mother of bringing about his father’s heart attack through neglect. Rushdie settled out of court, and the single line was removed from the book.
The movie adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
The real controversy that followed, the one that changed Rushdie’s life completely, came after the 1988 release of his book The Satanic Verses. While the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa against Rushdie and called for his execution (citing the book as blasphemous), the author saw many countries, including India, indulge in their own brand of censorship.
As has been revealed in Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton, the author felt the Indian government banned his book without much scrutiny. The Finance Ministry banned the book under section 11 of the Customs Act, and in that order stated that this ban did not detract from the literary and artistic merit of his work. Rushdie, appalled at the logic penned a letter to the then prime minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, stating:
Apparently, my book is not deemed blasphemous or objectionable in itself, but is being proscribed for, so to speak, its own good… From where I sit, Mr Gandhi, it looks very much as if your government has become unable or unwilling to resist pressure from more or less any extremist religious grouping; that, in short, it’s the fundamentalists who now control the political agenda.
Rushdie was right, of course. Years later, in 2007, he attended the first Jaipur Literary Festival in India unnoticed. Without any security or fuss, he arrived unannounced, mingling with the crowd. Things had changed dramatically by 2012, when Rushdie’s arrival to the now must-attend literary festival was much publicised, and predictably attracted controversy.
Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani, vice-chancellor at India’s Muslim Deoband School, called for the government to cancel Rusdie’s visa for the event as he had annoyed the religious sentiments of Muslims in the past. (Incidentally, Rushdie does not need a visa to enter India as he holds a PIO — “Person of Indian Origin” — card.)
The controversy escalated quickly, with the organisers first attempting to link Rushdie via video instead of having him physically present, but then cancelling the arrangement when the Festival came under graver physical threat. It was a sad day for freedom of expression in India, especially considering the fact that many, including Rushdie felt these moves were politically motivated because of upcoming elections in Uttar Pradesh, where the Muslim vote is very important. The government vehemently denied these claims.
Liberals in India were shocked at the illiberal values that the modern India state espoused, feigning to not be able to protect a writer and a festival against the threats of protestors. Shoma Chaudhary of Tehelka wrote:
The trouble is nobody any longer knows what Rushdie was doing in The Satanic Verses: neither those who are offended by him, nor those who defend him. Almost no one, including this writer, was given a chance to read the book.
Later in the year, initial press reports around Midnight’s Children revealed that the film could not find a distributor in India. The production team thought it might be a case of self-censorship as the film featured a controversial portrayal of Indira Gandhi. However, PVR Pictures, a major distributor in India, has plans to release the film in the country in February 2013.
31 years after the Midnight’s Children hit the stands, and the same year as he was bullied into cancelling a visit to a literary festival, it seems Salman Rushdie will yet again challenge Indian society. It remains to be seen if he will, yet again, become a pawn in the internal politics of the country.
27 Dec 2012 | Middle East and North Africa
The Gulf monarchies have, in recent years, invested considerable resources and efforts in finding ways to censor interactions between their citizens, and between their citizens and other parties. As such, each new communications technology that has become available in the region has either been sponsored by the state, for example, the state-backed newspapers, radio stations, and television stations; or it has been blocked, such as unpalatable foreign newspapers, unwanted foreign radio and television signals, satellite broadcasts and foreign books.
A case can even be made that the internet itself — predicted by many to lead to sweeping changes in such tightly controlled societies — was also successfully co-opted by the Gulf monarchies, at least in the early days. The blocking of offensive websites, including blogs critical of the regimes, has occurred, while many other basic internet communications methods such as email or messenger software can either be blocked or — more usefully — monitored by the state so as to provide information and details on opponents and opposition movements.
Moreover, some Gulf monarchies have actively exploited internet communications, arguably having done so much better than most governments in developed states, with an array of e-government web services having been launched, most of which allow citizens to feel more closely connected to government departments and helping to echo the earlier era of direct, personal relations between the rulers and ruled.
Meanwhile, the rulers themselves have often established presences online, and their self-glorifying websites usually also feature discussion forums to facilitate interaction between themselves (or rather their employees) and the general public. Many other lesser ruling family members, ministers, police chiefs, and other establishment figures in the region have also set up interactive Twitter feeds and Facebook fan sites for the same purposes, and some of these are now ‘followed’ by thousands of citizens and other well-wishers.
Unsurprisingly, all six Gulf states have slipped further down Reporters Without Borders’ latest World Press Freedom Index. In 2012, the highest ranked Gulf monarchy was Kuwait — in 78th position — with the UAE, Qatar, and Oman ranked firmly below dozens of African dictatorships, and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain ranking among the very worst countries in the world. Although superficially successful in the short term in limiting opposition voices, the various censorship strategies employed have been leading to heightened fears and widespread criticism and condemnation of the regimes responsible, not only from the international community, but also from resident national and expatriate populations, and most especially in the wake of the region’s “Arab Spring” revolutions.
Nevertheless, the seemingly unstoppable wave of new, participatory and user-centred Web 2.0 internet technologies — from social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to video-sharing site YouTube — seem to be finally having the expected impact on the region’s population and its political consciousness. While these and other Web 2.0 applications can still be blocked in their entirety by cautious regimes, this is now unlikely to happen in the Gulf monarchies, as the inevitable outcry from the large numbers of users would be difficult or perhaps impossible to appease.
Inevitably these applications are being increasingly used to host discussions, videos, pictures, cartoons, and newsfeeds that criticise ruling families, highlight corruption in governments, and emphasise the need for significant political reform and increasingly even revolution in the Gulf. Leading opposition figures are now attracting as many followers on these applications as members of ruling families. While there have been some attempts by regimes to counter-attack against this cyber opposition, often by deploying fake social media profiles so as to threaten genuine users, or by establishing so-called “honey pot” websites to lure in activists and help reveal their identity, for the most part the applications are effectively bypassing censorship controls and the mechanisms used to control earlier modernising forces.
As such they are facilitating an unprecedented set of horizontal connections forming between Gulf nationals and between Gulf nationals and outside parties — connections which are crucially now beyond the jurisdiction or interference of the ruling families and their security services.
Christopher Davidson is the author of Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success
24 Dec 2012 | Turkey
Judging by sales figures, Turkish readers love comics magazines and graphic novels, but the political and military leaders of the country have had little patience for them, an examination of Turkey’s banned books revealed last month.
On 5 January 2013, the Turkish government will lift bans against 453 books and 645 periodicals blacklisted over a 63 year period. It is part of a package of judicial reforms that will also offer a conditional pardon for certain media and freedom of expression offences and secure greater free expression in the publishing field.
When Turkish journalists got hold of the astonishing list of banned books at the end of November, a surprise awaited them. Amid titles of works by “usual suspects” — Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin; Turkish authors Nazım Hikmet and Aziz Nesin; and the theologian Said Nursî — the figure of Captain Miki (or “Tommiks” as he is known here) made an unexpected appearance. One episode among the adventures of the Italian hero, who has been popular with Turkish readers since the 1950s, was banned for more than 52 years, they learned.
So how exactly did Captain Miki offend Turkish state? The Prosecutor’s report revealed that a single issue of Captain Miki’s adventures was banned in 1961, months after the 27 May 1960 military coup took place. The generals, who hung a democratically elected prime minister the same year, accused Captain Miki of having encouraged laziness and a “spirit of adventurousness” among Turkish people.
When I called MK Perker, one of Turkey’s most prolific comic book authors, to ask about Captain Miki’s tragic fate, he didn’t sound much surprised. In 2011, Perker and a group of famous Turkish comic writers published Harakiri, a high quality comics magazine which was fined the Turkish equivalent of 50,000 GBP after putting out only two issues. They were accused of precisely the same offence: Encouraging laziness and a spirit of adventurousness among Turkish people.
“Some people spy on comics magazines,” he said, “and then complain to prosecutors about certain images they find disagreeable. These are mostly random events. You can’t foresee them. A magazine publishes content similar to ours and nothing happens. But just because someone picks on you and files a complaint, you end up getting in trouble.”
Perker, whose comics appear weekly in the Sunday supplements of two national newspapers, said he regularly feels the need to self-censor his own work. “For my newspaper pieces, I need to be cautious,” he said. “But in places like Harakiri I feel more free. We don’t have a boss at the magazine. We don’t have to show our work to an editor. We don’t run any advertisement so there is no fear of ever losing our artistic independence. Harakiri is like HBO [the American cable television network] when compared to comic sections of national newspapers,” he said.
Despite the 50,000 GBP fine in 2011 putting an end to his happy days of artistic independence, Perker and his friends put out a third issue earlier this year.
Credit: Habertürk
Perker, whose works appeared in the New Yorker, Mad Magazine, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and Heavy Metal among others, began his career at the Turkish cartoon magazine Gırgır, which used to sell half a million copies in its heyday during the 1970s. I asked Perker whether things got better in terms of freedom of expression since his days in Gırgır.
“Censorship always existed in Turkey,” he said. “It is a very consistent phenomenon. After the 12 September 1980 coup d’état, Gırgır was shut down by the military junta. Markopaşa, the weekly satirical magazine published by the Turkish author Sabahattin Ali, was closed numerous times. Its publishers had to sell the magazine personally on streets because there was simply no other way to distribute it,” he said.
In Ottoman times, under rule of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, cartoonists and comic writers faced similar problems. Perker points out that when the Sultan’s pointed nose became a subject of cartoons, a ban was issued against newspapers running such images. He says:
The Sultan’s nose became a metaphor for government. Depictions of all pointed noses were outlawed. Comic magazine publishers had to go to Geneva in order to continue their publishing operations.
According to Perker, despite the pressures on their activities, the influence of comic magazines continue to be a force in Turkey’s cultural life. The political response to weekly comic magazines has even become a subject for debate in government.
In 2005, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan sued Penguen magazine when it published a cartoon that depicted him as an elephant, giraffe, monkey, camel, frog, snake, cow and duck. Erdogan lost the case on free expression grounds. While some parliamentarians sue cartoonists in courts, others, like the deputy prime minister Bülent Arınç said he wanted all cases against cartoonists dropped and expressed his support in 2010.
This is a feeling shared by Kürşat Kayra, the Ankara prosecutor who prepared the legal documents that lifted bans placed on hundreds of books, newspapers and periodicals:
If we don’t acknowledge that the right to freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, then we won’t be able to say ‘the king is naked!’ when the occasion arises.
Kaya Genc is a Turkish essayist and novelist. Follow him on Twitter: @kayagenc
