Opinion: Who Decides What Is "In Good Taste"?

A Supreme Court order recently reversed Rahul Gandhi's disqualification from parliament for his remark in 2019 at a political gathering in Karnataka's Kolar district. Framed as an expression of naive wonder, the utterance was allegedly the following: "Achchha ek chhota sa sawal, in sab choron ka naam, Modi, Modi, Modi kaise hain...Lalit Modi, Nirav Modi ("Just a small question: how is it that all these thieves have the name Modi...Lalit Modi, Nirav Modi..."). Mr. Gandhi tells us that he has no recollection of producing such a memorable comment. However, it apparently left an indelible impression on the complainant, BJP MLA Purnesh Ishwarbhai Modi, who took it to imply that the entire "Modi community" of perhaps as many as "13 crores", especially those of Gujarat's modh vanik caste to which he himself belonged, were dishonest. So, he believed, it constituted an intolerable insult to a large group of Indian citizens.

In this piece, I want to concentrate on a tiny, inconspicuous phrase in the Supreme Court's judgment, since it seems to raise unexpectedly big questions about freedom of speech, about identity, about the separation of the public and private spheres, and about "expectations" of social normativity. This is the phrase "in good taste" that appears in Section 8 of their Proceedings dated 07.08. 2023.  

No doubt that the alleged comments are not in good taste. A person in public life is expected to exercise a degree of restraint while making public speeches. Rahul Gandhi ought to have been more careful.
     
"Good taste" is not, in fact, a metaphor that trips easily off Indian tongues. It translates very awkwardly. We cannot, for example, say in Hindi that a piece of language is swaadisht (tasty) although perhaps we can say that it has mithaas (sweetness). But then again, not everyone has a sweet tooth.

The point here is that "good taste" is an abstract, highly wrought concept peculiarly and powerfully tied to the social history of class in many European cultures. There is "no doubt" that this language of taste came to us, in considerable measure, from colonial precedent, as did our laws.

As the French theorist Pierre Bourdieu has amply demonstrated in his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979, 1986), the idea of good and bad taste - in food, in dress, in speech and in behaviour - came to mark class distinctions as "the West" zigzagged its tortuous way towards modernity. The new bourgeoisie, the old aristocracy, the working classes and so on, were identified on the basis of these parameters.

Yet, as Bourdieu suggests, there is surely no intrinsic merit, say, to the act of smiling demurely versus laughing raucously; to eating daintily with an array of cutlery versus using a single spoon or no cutlery at all; to wearing muted, demure shades versus a medley of bright colours. Similarly, we might ask why one form of human behaviour (call it "restrained" and "careful") should necessarily be regarded as more meritorious than another (call it "rash" and "spontaneous")? It is these questions about how we come to judgments about "good" taste that are concerning.

We should note at this point, though, that a final decision in the case has not yet been delivered by the High Court of Gujarat. So, far be it from me to anticipate the rights and wrongs of that opinion. At the same time, as an ordinary citizen whom the courts of India sometimes term a "Mr (or Mrs.) X", I do have some naive questions of my own while we wait for the law to speak.

These questions have to do, for instance, with the assumption made by both Mr. Gandhi and Mr. Purnesh Modi in their own unique ways, that every individual with the surname 'Modi' can be grouped under a single identifying term. All thieves or all insulted en masse? It is curious how these views - the snidely jokey and earnestly hokey - constitute mirror images of each other. India, as everyone keeps repeating, is bafflingly plural. So it is quite understandable that our very language of thought is strained when the Indian state has to apply the law uniformly to every citizen.

To use the odd phrasing of Section 499 of the Indian Penal Code under which Mr. Gandhi was convicted, the "identifiable collection of people" who happen to have the surname "Modi" is also typically multidimensional. They are not all charismatic Prime Ministers, to be sure, but they do practise a wide range of professions, belong to different social strata, regions and even religions. So would each of these individuals called "Modi" cede to Mr. Purnesh Modi the right to speak for them? Would each of these persons feel deeply offended by Mr. Gandhi's insinuation? We can certainly use social science tools such as targeted surveys and qualitative interviews but we can never capture with certainty the beliefs shared by all members of a large "community". This is particularly so in a period of rapid social change or "churn" (manthan) where in India, as elsewhere across the globe, a major communications revolution is underway.  

Today, like it or not, social media has erased many longstanding boundaries, including those between public and private domains. Gravitas and restraint may be important social values but they are arguably patriarchal and require the support of other softer prosocial virtues such as empathy, engagement and honesty. After all, why should a public display of dignity convince us of a politician's trustworthiness, when we have plenty of evidence - audio and video - that politicians are prone to showing one face in public and another in private?

We live at present in a media habitus (a word made famous by Bourdieu and defined in the dictionary as "the way a person of a particular background perceives and reacts to the world... depending on their position in a given social field they develop a certain habitus typical of their position") that is at once polarized and fluid. This blurs the distinction between public and private figures on- and off-line. We therefore need to ask anew - who exactly do we identify as our "leaders" and why?   

Likewise, we need to ask whether our present legal constraints on "free speech", based on considerations of decorum and caution, remain adequate in times when both our netas (politicians) and our niti (laws) have to compete with a number of other role models and "influencers".  

India in the early 21st century is both the world's most populous country and an astonishingly youthful nation in terms of demographics with a median age as low as 28.2. Under these conditions, where "self" and "other" identities and identifications are changing fast, we cannot afford to be complacent about the vocabulary that our legal system and our public discourse have comfortably relied on for the past century or two. Words like "rectitude", "probity", "dignified silence", "moral turpitude" etc. appear to require urgent refurbishing at a time when stable  expectations of social norms with regard to age, speech, gender, illness, ideology, employment, technology, and what have you, are being challenged across the board.   

Yet, the fact is that even our High Courts in different jurisdictions appear to hold vastly different views on free speech. For example, the Madras High Court held that the writer Perumal Murugan had not defamed the customs of the local people (belonging to the Kongu Vellala Gounder caste) in his fictional depiction of the Thiruchengode Arthanaarishwara temple. They made two crucial observations in the case: first, people did not have to read Murugan's work if they found it offensive; two, a writer should not "feel fear" when he wrote.

Couldn't the same be argued in the Rahul Gandhi case, at least for starters? People can turn off their devices the minute he appears on screen and he, like the rest of us, should not have to "feel fear", even if his language is not "in good taste." Or should politicians be held to different standards? If so, why and how?

The Indian subcontinent has always been a space that has had fearless traditions of sarcasm (vyang). From Tenali Rama to Birbal witticism, it has revelled in jokes about "court power". These subversive modes of questioning authority haven't disappeared; they've just relocated to shiny new 24X7 homes on the Internet. Above all, whether we are comedians, bureaucrats, judges, housewives, politicians, student leaders or writers, we should remind ourselves that fear is probably not the best guide when we are trying to debate our common future. Every person knows in their bones that moral panic militates against rational thought. This is not just a matter of exercising "good taste". It is a matter of summoning up the courage to retrieve that famous amrit (the nectar of immortality) from the dangerous seas of current social upheaval if we wish not only to survive but to thrive as a democracy.       

Rukmini Bhaya Nair is Honorary Professor at IIT Delhi and Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.