Karnataka’ hate speech law comes at a time when governments the world over are grappling with aggressive campaigns against individuals or groups, amplified quickly by social media and sometimes provoking violence.
The idea of stronger laws tailored to counter the more serious forms of hate speech that result in violence is being actively discussed in Australia and Europe, for instance, while the UK has been using higher sentences as a deterrent. Australia has taken the lead in reframing its law on hate speech after the mass shooting at a Jewish celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach that killed 15 people.
Apparently, Karnataka’s bill, which awaits the framing of rules, draws upon international examples to lay down a list of offences which will attract punishment for hate crimes going up to seven or ten years in prison. These include provoking prejudice due to religion, race, caste, community, sex, gender, sexual orientation, place of birth, residence, language, disability or tribe.
Many of these factors are in UK law, which was cited by police to act against hundreds during the Palestine-Gaza protests. Demands for curbs on hate speech have grown louder in the wake of mob lynchings, attacks on minorities, violent vigilante patrols and ‘love jihad’ moral policing in India, and antisemitism, mass shootings, knife attacks and mob violence elsewhere.
This is unexceptionable, although there are crucial differences between the international efforts and the moves in India. Australia’s proposed changes focus on placing religious preachers and leaders in a different category to be prosecuted for aggravated offences, increasing penalties for promoting violence, listing organisations engaging in speech that promotes violence, linking hate with online threats and harassment, and a federal offence categorisation for racial supremacist hate.
India’s experience with restraints on hate speech has been uneven. Dog whistling by some political leaders against specific communities and their culture has gone unchecked, while politically motivated cases have been filed under criminal laws and the Information Technology Act against opponents. Retributive violence has been used to hobble influential social media personalities, such as stand-up comedians.
A few hundred million Indians use social media every minute, and much of the serious hate speech gets amplified by these channels. The challenge before the government is to frame laws to deter actual calls to violence and require tech companies to identify the more obnoxious messages using technology.
A recent study published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour says multimodal large language models in artificial intelligence did as well as humans in identifying hate speech, making stronger controls possible at scale.
Such a careful approach to weeding out hate speech would preserve basic democratic freedoms and limit the scope to harass political opponents. Precisely defining hate speech is crucial. The basic test has to be whether it stigmatises or shames with no public interest involved or incites violence.