SRINGAR: It is now possible for a Hindutva leader, who had attracted international attention with his call for genocide against Muslims only three months ago, to make another call, in a public gathering, for taking up arms against Muslims.
This has happened while he was out on bail, not in some hinterland, but in the capital city of India, the largest (and, dare we say, secular) democracy in the world. That such calls for violence and genocide are becoming regular events show how much the Republic has travelled in the last few years.
Hate speech in India has become endemic now, aided to a large extent by state as well as societal silence. But often hate speech is considered to be harmful only if it is directly linked to violence, and hate speech is tolerated if the intention was to only “win the election” as in a recent high court observation, or when it is claimed that it does not lead to actual social discrimination.
Thus, there are serious confusions about what hate speech does to our body politic. The contribution of hate speech or its subset known as dangerous speech (especially circulating like whirlwind through social media) to anti-minority violence is very obvious in the recent times, whether it is the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, anti-Muslim riots in Sri Lanka, anti-Hindu riots in Bangladesh, or the Delhi violence of 2020. This is easily discernible.
But there is non-physical violence, the violence that hate speech does to our understanding and psyche. This is not as easily and so obviously visible.
And this violence has long-term manifold effects, including setting the stage for actual physical violence as well as actual social discrimination (think laws which have serious implications for religious minorities like the Citizenship (Amendment) Act-National Register of Citizens/love jihad, ban on Muslim traders in temple fairs, the BJP being the only ruling party in India’s history which has no Muslim Lok Sabha MP, and hate on daily primetime TV news shows, etc.). That is why philosopher Jeremy Waldron calls hate speech “an environmental threat to social peace, a sort of slow-acting poison, accumulating here and there, word by word”.
The verbal violence on vulnerable or powerless minorities, as scholars on hate speech point out, injures the victims’ dignity, causes fear and emotional distress, and affects psychological wellbeing besides rendering them even more silent and as second-class citizens. This verbal violence, even without leading to direct violence, is itself discriminatory.
