Paper short abstract:

Free speech has been a complicated issue throughout the life of the state in India. I observe the impact of criminalization of Indian politics on free speech of artists during the decade of the eighties.

Paper long abstract:

Right to freedom of speech and expression has been a complicated issue throughout the life of the state in India. Since 1980s, in a significant transformation, authority determining the limits of speech became much more expansive, with the introduction of criminality. Its distinctive perspective lay not in the traditional adjudication of criminalizing speech (through defamation, libel or sedition) but rather through the entrenchment of criminality in politics. In this chapter I try to observe the impact of criminalization of Indian politics on free speech of artists during the decade of the eighties. I do not intend to give a chronology of instances of criminalization nor of the violent attacks on artists but to understand what happened to free speech in this period of 'corruption boom' and the related criminalization (Jaffrelot 2010; 620). Did criminalization of politics challenge, undermine or alter the limits laid down by the Constitution and the courts? How did it affect artists? What changes did it bring forth in the narrative of free speech? The chapter answers these questions by focusing on two exceptional cases of violence involving artists during this period: murder of playwright and theatre director Safdar Hashmi in January 1989 and the violence surrounding novelist Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in 1988-89 despite the Indian government's announcement of its ban.