9 highlights
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The Renaissance attitudes in Europe had an aspect that was much less talked about, perhaps even unseemly. Though it ushered in an age of scientific inquiry and human creativity, it had a hidden disdain for ordinariness. It was democratic to the extent of seeking the extraordinary, irrespective of birth and status, but it lacked the deeper humanism of engaging with all and sundry.
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Leonardo da Vinci chose to paint a woman of exceptional beauty, and Machiavelli premised his political treatise on the expedient ways of strengthening a powerful prince. In the process, the Renaissance promoted the cult of spectacular individuals — what the modern world knows as celebrities. In some ways, this insight, offered in a 1979 essay by scholar Sudipta Kaviraj, is relevant to understanding an aspect of the controversies that have been recently invoked in the name of media freedom in India
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Both journalists and historians have ardent “followers”, which explains the origins of why certain forms of victimhood stories gain traction in the way they do in times of neat binaries.
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Citing the length of his interrogation as a measure of harassment reveals a type of elitism, while also misguiding Goswami’s online gladiators of outrage production
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such an attack on the due process of law enforcement undermines the key value inherent in the larger ideological fold of conservatism: the value of order.
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Second, while it’s possible that even without state intervention, some media platforms might resort to self-censorship, there is a parallel development that has made any durable censoring an anachronism. The rapid expansion of news media has implied that one media platform’s censored or dropped report or column is a prize catch for another.
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The first amendment significantly curtailed the scope of freedom of speech and expression, and opened the doors for state intervention under certain conditions. It was also used to overcome constitutional hindrances in the way of the Jawaharlal Nehru government’s socialist objectives like land reforms, limiting property rights, etc. However, it’s the curbing of the right to free speech and expression which was of specific relevance to how press freedom (an inferred right) evolved vis-à-vis the state under the new clauses of Article 19.
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Interestingly, the need to curb free speech and expression through the constitutional amendment was triggered by the fact that the government had lost judicial cases against two publications of very different ideological affiliations: for banning the Left-leaning Cross Roads and for censoring the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh mouthpiece The Organiser.
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It’s important that the fight for free speech has a sense of which battles to pick. The most vocal and celebrated ones of them may need a closer look, the ordinary ones may not be that small. However, whether small or big, there is also a need to uphold the order which protects the right once it’s threatened again.