This title breaks the site guidelines, which ask: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." Not only did you rewrite it to make it more baity, you added something ("locked up") that doesn't appear to me to be in the article. Breaking the guidelines in this way eventually causes an account to lose submission privileges on HN, so please don't do it.
Please also don't post articles that are primarily appeals to nationalistic indignation (for and against). HN exists for intellectual curiosity, and there's none of that in this thread. This was entirely predictable.
The children have been questioned for 4-5 days at a stretched and a parent has been detained without being named in the police report illegally. It is absurd, to what length that this nationalist government would go to remain in power. I feel sorry for these kids and all those who are suffering at the hands of this government.
Of course you wan't a government with the nations interest at heart. But I don't think the phrase is just a slur.
Governments that are described as nationalist have a tendency to find enemies within its own borders by claiming that a subset of the population aren't true nationals because they don't originate from the country or because they don't share some cultural norm.
Just as a hypothetical... Is it possible for a minority within a nation to be hostile to the majority? And if so, how do you propose to deal with the issue of having a fifth column within your borders?
Is it possible? Yes. But that doesn't make it a "fifth column". The country is not the majority, it's everyone. Maybe start dealing with it by looking at why the minority is hostile, and creating a country where they feel included rather than excluded.
You are shadowbanned. You might want to do something about that. (you can begin by increasing the quality of your posts. posting "You just posed a question no socialist can truthfully answer!" lowers the quality of the discussion)
>This appears to be a slur of some sort. What kind of government would you want for your nation other than a nationalistic one?
given that this incident seems to be sparked by the children's opposition to the anti-muslim legislation, it's safe to assume that "nationalist" really means "hindu-nationalist".
I am a bit hesitant to engage with this comment. I am not sure whether it comes a lack of understanding of what Nationalism actually means, in which case education will consist of reading history, or wether you understand what it means and think it is appropriate to turn a secular country into a Hindu nation and disenfranchise hundreds of millions of non Hindus.
Nationalism has (and this is getting quite political) a shameful and ugly record in history. It is not something to aspire to nor is it an ideology you should find particularly appealing.
Looks like this nationalist Indian government is very thin skinned and cannot take any form of criticism directed towards its policies and laws. Sad. Any form of government which takes such extreme steps towards its citizens for expressing their opinion in a non violent manner has lost its credibility to uphold the constitution.
What are you defending or advocating here exactly? Are you justifying the forced detention by police of 9 year olds for participating in a school play?
>“The government is telling Muslims to leave India and go away.” In reply, the other child says, “Amma, Modi is saying show documents of your father and grandfather otherwise he is telling us to leave the country.” At this point, another child is heard saying, “Hit them with slippers if anybody asks for documents.”
The last one is directed at survey workers who have been (mis)targeted recently.
>Following instances of workers, engaged to conduct Poshan Abhiyan survey, facing hostile behaviour, the state government had issued an ad explaining that the survey had nothing to do with Census and NPR.
>In Kota, the woman attacked was a surveyor from the National Economic Census department collecting data for the National Economics Census 2019- 2020 in Brijdham area. Nazeeran Bano was let off only after she was able to convince the crowd that she, too, was a Muslim, like them. The police later arrested one person for the attack.
>The house of a 20-year-old woman was set on fire by a mob in West Bengal's Birbhum district on Wednesday, following rumours that she was collecting data for the proposed nationwide NRC.
>Chumki Khatun and her family are now under police protection after the incident happened in Gourbazar village in Mallarpur police station area, officials said.
I don't support sedition charges, but there should be a penalty for (1) promoting (even petty) violence against government workers and (2) getting your children to express this promotion.
I don't mean to engage in whataboutism, but the play had a line which said "hit them with slippers", it's not "sedition". It sure might be wrong, but not "Sedition".
Yes, the sedition charge is ridiculous. It's a relic of colonial times that should be done away with. However, that doesn't justify calls for beating anyone.
The indian democracy is in shambles at the minute. In Kashmir there are children as young as 19 months being maimed with pellet guns for "unlawful assembly".
Nah, it's a narrative that has been built around the use of pellet guns and even live ammunition on civilians who are exercising their right to peaceful protest. Surely a 19-month-old cannot be a "Stone pelter"?
By creating a war-like hysteria in the country, India gets away with doing absurd things: make people believe they are perpetually at war with someone (Pakistan, the muslims, the illegal immigrants, etc) and you can justify bizarre things like firing at civilians, cow terrorism, etc
You're missing the point. There have been people protesting (for good reason, because Kashmir is not a part of India) and using footages of stone pelters to shoot children is the issue I'm talking about.
As many have pointed out, no kids are being locked up. They are being questioned without a parent or lawyer present. This is wrong.
As for the free speech issue: Disclaimer - I'm in favor of all speech, including hate speech. If it sounds like I'm defending the administration or police, I am not.
There are many "sacred" political figures. Michelle Obama, for example, is one of them. If there were a school play held in the deep south in which children were made to advocate for her to be physically beaten, as a response to some Obama government policy - I'm quite sure many folks in places like California would want the secret service or some offical government agency to formally investigate what's going on there. The police presence itself is not as unusual or "nationalist" as some seem to be suggesting here.
For a concrete example - the musician Ted Nugent said at an NRA event that if Barack Obama were to become President, he (Nugent) would be dead or in jail by November. The Secret Service paid him a visit following that statement and (correctly) did not arrest him.
Investigating threats of violence against the leader of a country is common. In this case, the fact that a teacher made kids say it, is not really very different in this context.
Unfortunately, India does not really have freedom of speech. The right to say things that are encouraging political violence is not covered by India's toothless right to free speech.
In this case, Modi is a similarly "sacred" figure to many, and he's also the Prime Minister. Some people made children put on a play in which they suggest physically beating the Prime Minister, and then a video of this gets shared on WhatsApp.
Had the play been put on and nothing happened thereafter, it would have been an entirely different matter. The fact that it started spreading on WhatsApp now gives the police grounds to suspect that this is part of a conspiracy to call for political violence.
The police in this case have gone ahead and actually arrested the teacher and parent who wrote the script. If (and only if) they conspired to spread the WhatsApp video, under the existing terrible laws, the police may have a case. I'm not a lawyer, but it seems that way as a layperson reading the statutes. I hope I'm wrong.
As many comments have pointed out, no kids are locked up. The police went to their school and questioned them. I am not debating whether it is wrong or immoral to question minors without their parents present or the nature of the charges, However, no child is arrested, charged, locked up, booked or entered into justice system in any way. The article is click-bait and an appeal to emotion, not facts.
It does, but headlines like these are a distraction from the actual facts. All it takes is a series of half-truths to form a false narrative that doesn't serve anyone constructively. With an ineffective law enforcement, parts of India are like a tinderbox waiting to go off as people act on emotions.
Another instance of what's happening now: The ruling party is promoting hate speech against anyone who is liberal, left leaning or left of center and anyone who expresses dissent, who disagrees with the government..
And so there have been numerous clear instances of violence against university students, professors and protestors on the street.
>a play that the police said criticised the Citizenship Amendment Act. The mother and the teacher were allegedly involved in the creation of the play, while the school management has been booked for allowing the play to be staged in its premises.
A play that criticizes an act passed by the government and now you've got the government after you / questioning children.
No child seems to have been locked up. The kids are being questioned without parents or lawyers present, and the case itself is baseless, but not sure where locked up bit comes in.
Sure sounds like they're being held against their will, which is one form of being "locked up". If I lock you inside my house and prevent you from leaving, I can be charged with false imprisonment, even though you're not in a prison.
The kids were questioned in the school which is certainly wrong. But that doesn't mean they were "locked up" somewhere. Locked up (in India at least) usually means being jailed.
They are children. Do children have no special protections in India? Is interrogation much better?
This tactic of defending the government by trying to distract from this heinous set of events by arguing semantics is not new, but doesn’t deserve to be HN.
Not interrogated at police station. The police went to the school. No kid is detained or under arrest. They are free to go but they probably don't know that, being kids. Is is morally wrong? Yes. But the article is click-bait.
As another commentator mentioned, these kids aren’t free to leave. As you said, there aren’t any lawyers or parents present. Not sure how you aren’t classifying their situation as locked-up.
They have no liberty or agency, and putting them in a cell will not change their predicament in the slightest.
Nobody should be locked up for speech (threats and similar notwithstanding). Many people chanting "free speech" these days seem to mean "consequence-free speech", such as "nobody should adjust their opinion of me no matter what I say", or "everyone should be forced to carry my words and see my words no matter what I say". That's not free speech, that's compelled listening and controlled public opinion, and other such tools that only the most authoritarian governments would consider.
> such as "nobody should adjust their opinion of me no matter what I say", or "everyone should be forced to carry my words and see my words no matter what I say".
More like "I should not be fired, refused service, and kicked out of teams/events due to my speech/opinions".
I don’t agree with that. All those are voluntary associations, and freedom of association is at least as important as freedom of speech.
What I do think is that being fired should not be a death sentence; that there should be a mechanism, possibly the Government in our current society, by which one can continue living with food and a roof over one’s head even if people refuse to associate with that person. Generally speaking, I don’t think there should be an entity which can prevent you from feeding and housing yourself in the first place, though.
> freedom of association is at least as important as freedom of speech.
In that case, do you believe that it should be legal to fire/refuse service/kick out of teams and events someone due to their gender, religion, or sexual orientation?
The fact of the matter is that all this happens, legal or not. I’ve not had work in years, in the first instances because of illegal discrimination. I’ve been assaulted for being in the “wrong” spaces. People care so intensely much about freedom of association that they’ll break the law and use violence in order to maintain it.
So what should we do, given that enforcing association by law doesn’t work?
My solution is in anarchism; stop preventing me from living my own life (through a capitalist society enforced by the state, police and prisons) and I’ll stop forcing myself on yours.
People make and break friendships, or make any number of other associations, based on any factors they want, such as common interests and opinions, aligned goals and values, or just a common idea of fun and enjoyment. People have a right to decide who is welcome and who isn't, by any number of factors (modulo the interaction of protected classes with services offered to the public).
"Obnoxious" is not a protected class, nor should it be. You have a right to not be arrested for your words or opinions or expression. You are not entitled to (for instance) other people's business, patronage, custom, service, friendship, or any other kind of association. You do not have the right to control other people's reactions to you.
It doesn't matter if we're talking about a hobby group, a sports team, a software project, a company, or a social network. "I don't enjoy being around this person" is more than reason enough to stop associating with someone, let alone more critical reasons such as "I don't want to be around someone who wants to deprive me of my rights as a person" or "this person is driving other people away".
> I don't enjoy being around this person" is more than reason enough to stop associating with someone
So I should be able refuse to sell bread to someone with green hair, right? Or if they have a specific skin deformation.
Now, what if all shops in an area refuse to sell food to people with these characteristics?
> let alone more critical reasons such as "I don't want to be around someone who wants to deprive me of my rights as a person"
In that case I will be able to pretty much ban anyone I want as the vast majority of people think that certain victimless crimes should be illegal (and thus they deprive me of my rights as a person), right?
The lovely thing is that there's no symmetry required here. Excluding someone because they're intolerant/obnoxious/etc is very different than excluding someone because of who they are. It's perfectly consistent to consider it morally wrong to exclude someone because of who they are, and simultaneously consider it not wrong to exclude someone because of their prejudice. Those exclusions are not equivalent, and do not need to be treated as such.
Bringing up someone's employer in the middle of a flamewar is a really bad idea. Maybe you just sincerely became more interested in whether ME will be open-sourced, but a general reader (let alone the person you've just been in a flamewar with) could easily read this in a much nastier way; so please don't go there.
Also, please don't do this sort of flamewar on HN to begin with. It's tedious, predictable, and nasty. We're trying for a quite different sort of forum here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> Bringing up someone's employer in the middle of a flamewar is a really bad idea
Guess I should have sent an email instead. In general I expect my posts to be understood as they are.
> Also, please don't do this sort of flamewar on HN to begin with
If you told me what exactly I said in the post that I should try to avoid from now I would appreciate it. I did not post anything with the intention of being flamewar-y, rather my posts were just sincere questions.
Many people calling for free speech are undisturbed by a leader that calls the press "the enemy of the people" and leads rally where the press is screamed at and intimidated and where chants to lock up political opponents are common.
That "hate speech is free speech" is not an opinion shared by many countries in Europe, nor even by many philosophers of law or legal scholars in the U.S. - it is true that 1A covers "hate speech", but whether it should be that way is a matter of intense debate.
I agree that hate speech is often the bad side of free speech. What I disagree on is who should decide what hate speech is.
Taking away the right for someone to speak their mind is too much power for one individual or group, and is ripe for abuse, so it's better to not do it at all.
>What I disagree on is who should decide what hate speech is.
It is a risky business, but so are many others: food and drug regulation, road regulation, flight regulation etc. - the case must be made why freedom of speech is such a special right as opposed to any other action, such as selling food, driving cars, or building planes.
>Taking away the right for someone to speak their mind is too much power for one individual or group
We already do this globally, with copyright law, or less controversially, laws against threats, assault and child pornography. This at least shows that there is some scope, and unless that scope is a dogma, it should be open for questioning - either in broadening or narrowing.
Indeed, that's a power you'd have to be comfortable having in the hands of your opponents. Because at some point it will be and then they'll be the ones defining what speech is restricted.
If you want, you can think of it as a continuation of laws that cover other crimes.
If I describe to you exactly how you might go about murdering someone, and they get murdered, I'm likely to be a suspect, and if you're charged, I'll be charged as an accessory. If I rouse a group of people into flipping over cars, breaking windows, and hurling rocks at the police, I'll be charged with incitement. If I yell fire in a crowded theater... I can't recall what the charge is but it's not good (endangerment?). If I con the police into arresting you for something you didn't do, I can be charged for that as well (and you probably ought to also sue me for civil penalties).
If all of that is criminal, then it's not much of a stretch to include escalation to hate crimes as a prosecutable offense. Grooming people toward these activities might be a grey area, but it's a grey area, not an unassailable one.
> If I describe to you exactly how you might go about murdering someone, and they get murdered, I'm likely to be a suspect, and if you're charged, I'll be charged as an accessory.
IANAL, but this doesn't sound quite right. I think they need to be able to show mens rea on your part, that is, that you actually believed the person might commit murder and deliberately helped them.
if you agree with my nitpick, then all of your examples show a clear intention to incite others to do specific material harm.
on the other hand, if someone says "X group doesn't deserve to live", it's hard to say whether they are deliberately inciting violence. if X is saints fans, you might reasonably assume the person is joking. if X is a marginalized group, it's still hard to say whether it's an incitement of violence or a gross opinion that lacks actual intent to incite violence. if it were easy to show that it was a deliberate incitement of violence, then it would already be illegal under current laws.
What do you mean by "free speech" if not that which is protected by the first amendment? I have seen statements like "hate speech is not free speech" quite often (as opposed to "hate speech _should not be_ free speech"), so I get the impression it is common to argue the law does not already protect it.
"Free speech" is an abstract liberal legal concept, it is not tied to any particular law. Even under countries which do implement "free speech" as a constitutional right, their legal systems have declared that some restrictions can be implemented: threats and child porn are two big ones. 1A enshrines a particular conception of freedom of speech, but it is not equal to freedom of speech in abstract (unless you want to claim that freedom of speech was only invented and only truly implemented in the U.S.)
My question was not rhetorical. If someone doesn't mean constitutional law, _then what do they mean_? You seem to be simply arguing there is no universal concept of freedom. Is that the answer then? Because we have a precedent for redefining words in various ways already, we can choose to add whatever else we desire to the list? I rather assumed it had something to do with redefining "hate speech" (e.g. as violence or something) not redefining freedom.
In this case it was a direct call for violence which is already spreading in this context.
Three lines from the play were highlighted.
>“The government is telling Muslims to leave India and go away.” In reply, the other child says, “Amma, Modi is saying show documents of your father and grandfather otherwise he is telling us to leave the country.” At this point, another child is heard saying, “Hit them with slippers if anybody asks for documents.”
The last one is directed at survey workers who have been (mis)targeted recently.
>Following instances of workers, engaged to conduct Poshan Abhiyan survey, facing hostile behaviour, the state government had issued an ad explaining that the survey had nothing to do with Census and NPR.
>In Kota, the woman attacked was a surveyor from the National Economic Census department collecting data for the National Economics Census 2019- 2020 in Brijdham area. Nazeeran Bano was let off only after she was able to convince the crowd that she, too, was a Muslim, like them. The police later arrested one person for the attack.
>The house of a 20-year-old woman was set on fire by a mob in West Bengal's Birbhum district on Wednesday, following rumours that she was collecting data for the proposed nationwide NRC.
>Chumki Khatun and her family are now under police protection after the incident happened in Gourbazar village in Mallarpur police station area, officials said.
I don't support sedition charges, but there should be a penalty for (1) promoting (even petty) violence against government workers and (2) getting your children to express this promotion.
Free speech is important because speech has consequences. If speech didn't matter, then it wouldn't be a right worth enshrining. One has to grapple with the fact that speech has power regardless of whether they think it is an inviolable, unrestricted right. If it has power, it has the power to be abusive.
We already have a wide body of law covering inciting others to commit crimes on our behalf or at our behest. I can't stand around working up a bunch of drunk college kids to flip over cars expect to not be implicated in the subsequent crimes, and that's just property damage.
If I'm talking about a minority student instead... it'd be pretty fucked up that a piece of insured property has more protection under the law than a fellow human being.
Especially since if you were in a car accident and bleeding out, the EMTs are allowed to engage in destruction of property in order to save your life. They can damage the car, shred your clothing. They're trained to do this without even thinking (and wasting heartbeats).
I think that if in your hypothetical you were _directly_ inciting violence against a minority student (so, "let's go fuck up X" "let's go fuck up students with Y characteristic"), you'd also definitely (and uncontroversially) be implicated.
Where it gets harder is what most people seem to want "hate speech" provisions to cover are much more diffuse forms of incitement, if you can even call it that. When you can't make a direct causal mapping between speech and crime, you start having problems. If you didn't personally direct drunk college students to flip cars, but instead had previously posted online somewhere that flipping cars while drunk is fun, it's a lot harder to say that absent your speech, the illegal act would not have occurred. Say a large number of commentators talked up how fun car-flipping is. Does each now possess 1/nth of the criminal liability for incitement? Do we know the actors read a given post? Even if we do, can we quantity the degree to which a given post influenced their actions?
Obviously IANAL, but in my lay experience it seems that the sort of incitement liability we have is limited to no-brainer cases where it's quite obvious that the speech was the primary motivating factor for the subsequent criminal action. Anything further quickly gets into an enormous can of worms of unknowables.
I think the term of art is the imminence of the incited lawless action. Without imminence, causality is difficult, and you open the door to all kinds of crazy contributory claims - are the authors of the Anarchist's Cookbook liable for every bombing to occur following its publication?
Very true; I'm reminded of the funny example used in debates on these matters, in which a legal professor is saying he'd rather have somebody break his left leg than to publish something alleging sexual misconduct with a student, and further, there are absolutely non-physical harms which can cause just as much, if not more, pain and anguish than physical harms. In this view, the idea that speech should be able to contain any content by law is about as ridiculous as saying that actions in general should be able to contain any content. The first amendment in the US is on a very shaky metaphysical model which does not accord with what we know about the brain or trauma.
I would recommend papers by Susan Brison for the censorship case (and an argument as to why she thinks the First Amendment is baseless), and Rae Langton's case for why pro-free speech liberals can (or even should) support a restriction on hate speech and pornography, based on their own principles.
I don't think it is that controversial in the US. There is a small, vocal minority that is against free speech but the overwhelming majority of Americans do not see things that way.
I think Americans support Free speech, but Hate speech, especially when violence is involved, elicits a far different response.
Just ask any poor woman who has had her son arrested for mouthing off in some CounterStrike session about something he's gonna do at school. Just mouthing off trying to look big and all of a sudden police are at his door the next day.
Basically, in the US, you get free speech up to the point where they think your kid is going to shoot up a school full of kids or church full of little old ladies. At that point, there will be guys knocking at your door. I understand the motivation of law enforcement there, I get the point of "terroristic threat" laws. I just don't know if we've calibrated the application of the laws correctly.
But the point is, that this "overwhelming majority of Americans" you were speaking of would tell me to get lost, and tell the police "Good job! Better safe than sorry with these school shooters."
There’s a big difference between hate speech and threats of violence. It’s never been legal to falsely yell “fire” in a theatre, much like credible threats of violence are also illegal. Hate speech is more like “group X is bad because XYZ”. Even saying “I wish they were all gone from this earth” is different from “I’m going to do something about them.”
The case promises to have widespread implications beyond Puy’s felony prosecution. It’s become the first major test of a law strengthened partly in response to the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High.
At issue: Just what makes a written threat illegal? And are all young people and others who make fake threats about mass shootings — it happens on a fairly regular basis — in serious trouble?
I just tell the young people I work with to not even go there. If someone tries to goad you into something, just don't say it, it's too risky right now. I mean, a prosecution is some chance at getting the laws relaxed I suppose? But the judges and potentially even the jurors all have kids sitting in those classrooms too. So I just don't see it as a particularly fair way to assess the appropriateness of certain laws.
I really believe the various legislatures, in the end, will need to try to recalibrate some of this. (Though I realize that's not likely to happen either. I just think it's slightly more likely than relying on courts that have repeatedly held that yelling fire in a crowded theater, or talking about bombs at airports is not protected speech.)
> relying on courts that have repeatedly held that yelling fire in a crowded theater
That phrase was used in a court case to (successfully) justify censoring someone protesting the draft during WWI [1]. We should be skeptical of any limitations on free speech because they will be abused to stifle legitimate speech.
>>While I agree with you, "hate speech" is a controversial topic outside the USA (and even inside the USA).
>I don't think it is that controversial in the US. There is a small, vocal minority that is against free speech but the overwhelming majority of Americans do not see things that way.
Looks like you're conflating free speech with hate speech? The parent mentioned "hate speech", but you're talking about "free speech".
Restricting hate speech restricts free speech, they are the same issue. You only have to look back a few years to understand why this is important. What we consider acceptable has changed vastly over time, if we don't have the freedom to discuss topics against the status quo we won't progress as a society.
They were children. Do children have no special protections in India? Is interrogation much better?
Not sure if you are a pedant who cares to an inappropriate degree about the proper use of words, or more likely, trying to distract from this heinous set of events by arguing semantics.
After a video of parts of the play did the rounds on social media, the accusation was that a child spoke a line in the play that Narendra Modi should be beaten with slippers. However, several media reports have debunked this claim. The child seems to have made a generic statement that anyone who demands documents to prove one’s citizenship should be beaten with chappals.
It's absolutely wrong to detain the kid for this. Only the one who wrote the lines for "beating" someone deserves to be questioned and that too in accordance with the law.
Lately, the government has been widely cracking down upon all sorts of dissent, claiming the excuse of 'anti-national tendencies', invoking sedition laws. The situation is pretty dire at the moment.
Laws exist on paper. Law enforcement agencies however have been historically known to act on behalf of leaders, a behaviour which also seen in many other countries.
Please also don't post articles that are primarily appeals to nationalistic indignation (for and against). HN exists for intellectual curiosity, and there's none of that in this thread. This was entirely predictable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html