Free Speech Cannot Be Conditional
Why democracies must stop treating dissent as a threat, and start treating it as a sign of strength
Across the world, and increasingly in India, free speech is treated as a favor instead of a fundamental right. Dissenters are branded as “anti-national,” students are surveilled, journalists face raids, and comedians are questioned for satire.
But a democracy that cannot tolerate criticism isn’t a democracy, it’s a performance.
Free speech does not mean freedom only for the majority voice or the ruling narrative. It means freedom for the uncomfortable, the unpopular, the unheard. It protects the activist as much as the bureaucrat, the tribal as much as the technocrat.
Every sedition case filed for a tweet, every FIR against a cartoonist, and every unlawful ban on protests are not just overreactions. They are constitutional crises in disguise.
We must ask:
When the law is used to police expression instead of protecting it,
Who gets to define what’s “acceptable”?
And who gets silenced by default?
In a healthy democracy, the answer must be: No one.
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