Just a month ago, Manipur was immersed in a controversy over the life attempt on the editor of a local vernacular daily by unknown men. Whatever the background of that frightful threat has not been made public. Coinciding with this incident, another underground organization had issued threats to the media over the non publication of a press statement, prompting the government to provide security cover to prominent editors of the state, at their homes as well as offices. Thankfully both issues have been settled, and life is back to normal. It is also quite a coincidence that this incident came not so long after the worldwide outrage over the murderous attack at the office of Charlie Hebdo a French satirical weekly, by two Muslim extremists killing 12 staff of the journal, including its editor. There is unlikely to be anybody who did not condemn the Charlie Hebdo attack, although this does not necessarily mean everybody who condemned the attack agreed with the manner in which the weekly was pursuing its so called satires. Indeed, many of the cartoons were in extremely bad taste, at least this was how they appeared to us in the IFP as individual critics.
That an overwhelming number of these lampooning were directed at the Muslim community and Prophet Mohammed was incidental for it could also have been any other community and religion. However, whichever community or religion it was which came under attack of this weekly, the nature of their satire still would have remained distasteful. There was for instance, absolutely no need to portray religious figures naked and as sex crazy homosexuals in the act of copulation. In the secular world, there is nothing as blasphemy, but in its place there are laws against slander. Obviously and expectedly, the outrage of the killings overshadowed these issues of legal limits, but we wonder why the French law enforcers never made the weekly know its limits earlier, for their slanderous cartooning tradition was known for a long time. Years earlier, another issue of the nature dominated international headlines. A Danish newspapers published a series of cartoons about Mohammed. Though not as repulsive as the Charlie Hebdo version, some of these too lampooned the Prophet as a terrorist. The issue was met with a muted response from the Muslim world until French journals and weeklies decided to reprint them in the name of freedom of the press, despite efforts by their government to stop them. The explosions of sentiments ever since in the Muslim world are now well known. This was somewhat ironic, for in much of Europe, denying the Holocaust, in which an estimated six millions European Jews were exterminated by Hitler in his infamous `Final Solution` campaign, is a legal offence.
Indeed, freedom of the press is not such an easy thing to describe. The difficulty is to do with the very concept of freedom itself. Can freedom be defined in absolute terms? Can anybody be free to hurt or kill another? Like so many propositions of modern life, freedom must also have to be about negotiation for a compromise where one comes to term with a consensual sense of freedom enjoyed within a definite space, or better still, many individuals and communities finding a way to share the same space without trampling on each other`™s feet. The closest anybody has got to absolute freedom ironically was in literature. Daniel Defoe`™s Robinson Crusoe in this sense has become an immortal example that has thrown invaluable lights on so many different fields of study into human society including economics, psychology, political science, to name just a few. In this story, absolute freedom becomes a trap from which Crusoe desperately tried to escape. Freedom, depending on how it is defined, can actually be frightening. As indeed, amidst all the violence and bloodshed Manipur is witness to in the name of freedom, those who keep their ears close enough to the ground would have heard the same fear whispered by many ordinary men and women. Beyond all the passionate rhetoric, the moot question is, what indeed would be, or should be, the true essence of freedom in the Manipur context? The important clue to this question perhaps lies in a set of two alternatives before all. Should we be looking to the past to conjure up an image of this freedom, or should we be looking to the future for it?
Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam