The price of free speech

Two sporty developments from last week pose intriguing questions to us in India. One was the suspension by the BBC of the star football broadcaster Gary Lineker. The other was the cringe-worthy lap of honour taken by Indian PM Narendra Modi and his Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese at the cricket Test match between India and Australia in Ahmedabad.

The questions are: Should public figures associated with the media be free to air their private opinions on anything other than their own craft? Should the broadcaster preach free speech to the former colonies? Was the Modi-Albanese bromance a case of foreign policy signalling or just narcissism taken to absurd lengths? The short answers are yes, no and maybe. Lineker was stood down from his TV show Match of the Day after he tweeted, in his private capacity, sympathy for migrants. In so doing, he deplored an anti-immigrant legislation as ‘language used in Germany in the 1930s’. Taxpayer-funded BBC took the view that its employee’s private tweets breached its mandate of impartiality and urged him to apologise which he refused.

UK’s sports fraternity has stood in solidarity with Lineker’s right, as a media practitioner, to have his own point of view and give unfettered expression to it. His co-presenters walked off the show, football players and managers refused to give post-match interviews to the BBC and a host of media personalities, including those opposed to immigration, have spoken out in support of free speech.

This is in contrast to India’s sporting world — players, media, administrators — which has repeatedly bowed to the government. For the bizarre gala at Ahmedabad, the BJP cornered tickets to the game and filled the stands with supporters to cheer the leaders, driven around in a golf cart refurbished as a chariot. Not one player, commentator or administrator spoke out against cricket fans being shoved aside and the game itself reduced to a sideshow.

Sports events have in the past been shanghaied into the atmospherics of foreign policy moves to signal an olive branch, stoke goodwill or whip up euphoria. In 1987, Zia-ul Haq invited himself to an India-Pakistan Test match in Jaipur to talk India out of its warlike intentions. The jamboree at Ahmedabad can be viewed in the context of India’s enthusiasm for the Quad and its readiness to engage with the US, Australia and Japan on Indo-Pacific security issues. Or perhaps, the trade deal with Australia in which 90% of that country’s exports to India will attract no tariffs.

It’s hard to separate Modi’s periodic exuberance from his foreign policy. Was his Christmas Day tryst with Nawaz Sharif in 2015 a foreign policy master stroke or an early shot at a Nobel Prize? What were all those hugs of world leaders in aid of? What we know is that leaders—authoritarians more than others—use sporting spectacles as backdrop for foreign policy projection. If these events look like exercises in self-aggrandisation, it is because the man himself is the policy, or vice versa.

Lineker has since been reinstated as the presenter of the TV show. But the episode helps us locate where exactly the right to free speech resides. Is it a right held by the broadcaster or Lineker? Modi’s supporters will point out the irony of the broadcaster holding out for free speech in India while sticking up for propriety of language in the UK. However, the irony does not negate the value of free speech to democracy, nor does it make it relative to geography. That’s because free speech is not a right wielded by either the platform or the practitioner. It’s a service owed to the people.