Of all the reactions to the arrests of left-leaning intellectuals, writers and activists in India last week, perhaps the most ironic was the tweet from Palaniappan Chidambaram, the former home minister in the Congress government. The Harvard-educated lawyer, who has also been India's finance minister, apparently discovered his inner faux-Voltaire and said: "I will strongly disagree with those who hold extreme left or extreme right views, but I will defend his right to hold that view. That is the essence of freedom. Anyone holding extreme views is punishable only if he indulges in violence or incites violence or aids and abets violence in support of his ideology."
Voltaire is supposed to have said, "I don't agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it." I say faux-Voltaire because nobody quite knows who said that first, but the thought has been ascribed to Voltaire, because it sounds like something Voltaire would have said.
Attacking norms using Congress laws
Be that as it may, what Chidambaram said was, of course, noble, and what any liberal democrat ought to say. The irony lies in the kind of laws Chidambaram put in place when he was the home minister (from 2008 to 2012), and the sort of people the home ministry arrested during his time in government. Arun Ferreira, one of those arrested in the simultaneous raids across India on 28 August was previously arrested in 2007 and charged with 11 offences, acquitted of all charges, and released four years later. Ferreira, who has written a poignant yet scathing memoir of his time in prison, Colours of the Cage: A prison memoir, then became a lawyer. Now it is possible that the state thinks that Ferreira is up to no good (because he represents victims of human-rights abuses) and believes that since his release he may have done something other than writing a book and speaking out against injustice but the flimsy nature of the case presented by the police would embarrass most B-grade crime writers, and delight only someone like the Bollywood film director Kundan Shah, who could have made a sequel to his remarkable satire, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro. Levity apart, the fact remains that Vijay Mallya is right on that narrow point, that Indian jails aren't comfortable for anyone, and incarceration means freedom is taken away, even if it is for only a few days. Even if the prisoner is released for lack of evidence, there is no compensation for the time lost, the life lived on terms decided by others.