St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (Autonomous)
End Semester Examination – March /APRIL 2016
B.Com – II Semester
c1 15 2 ge: GENERAL ENGLISH
Duration: 3 Hours Max. Marks: 100
Note: Read the questions carefully and answer.
Do not exceed the paragraph limit.
Each paragraph should contain at least four sentences.
SECTION – A
Read the passage below and answer the questions.
Freedom of speech: Is there really any difference between sedition and blasphemy?
Freedom of speech is one of the cornerstones of liberal government. In his famous philosophical work On Liberty, John Stuart Mill laid out the basic principle of how free speech should work:
If the arguments of the present chapter are of any validity, there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.
“However immoral”, though, is a high bar. What if a person’s speech and ideas are terribly odious to the people and society around him? Here Mill is even more emphatic:
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
Of course, the one ideology that this sort of unrestrained freedom of speech runs smack into is religion. It is rather easy to talk of offending everyone as long the discussion is about the more banal facets of human existence. However, once talk turns to gods, goddesses, prophets and seers, believers tend to get a bit more heated. As a result, even self-proclaimed liberal democracies have allowed the criminalisation of speech that seem to hurt religious sentiments. For example, England had a law that penalised the blaspheming of the Christian religion, which was on its books right till 2008. This was in spite of the fact that its 17th century Bill of Rights protected free speech.
Interestingly, the other thing that is usually shielded from freedom of speech is the state. Even countries which have liberalism as their ruling ideology have, through history, penalised offensive speech against the state. The United States, a country that almost fetishes free speech, has a sedition law on its books that it used to target people branded “anti-national”. This law was used against Communists and Nazi sympathisers in the 1940s but, within a decade, its judiciary had ruled that ideas, no matter how seemingly harmful, can never be a basis for charging someone with sedition. As a result, the Unites States’ sedition law has remained unused since 1961.
Free speech in India
Matters in India are a bit less promising. Free speech is curbed by a fairly stringent blasphemy law, Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, introduced by the British Raj in 1932. “Anti-national” speech is curbed by India’s sedition law, section 124A, also introduced by the Raj. There is however, a fair bit of opinion ranged against blasphemy laws. The United Nations, for example, recognises that blasphemy laws are incompatible with civil rights. In India too, while free speech has frequently been proscribed as a result of religion, there has also been a strong backlash against the blasphemy law within the framework of the modernist tradition that attempts to move beyond the irrationality of religion.
The question here, of course, is whether a liberal state should be in the business of outlawing speech just because people’s feelings are hurt? India’s sedition law itself has been read down and is fairly liberal on paper now, given that only speech that directly incites violence against the government is liable to be prosecuted as seditious.
(An edited excerpt of an article published in Scroll.in, Feb 12, 2016 by Shoaib Daniyal)
- Answer the following in about two paragraphs each. (2 x 10 = 20)
- What have you understood by the terms ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’? How is it relevant to Mill’s statement on free speech?
- In what cases does free speech come into direct conflict according to the above article? And, how are ‘liberalism’ and ‘free speech’ as ideas connected to each other?
Answer in about three or four paragraphs each. (2 x 20 = 40)
- The word sedition means “the crime of saying, writing, or doing something that encourages people to disobey their government” and blasphemy means “great disrespect shown to God or to something holy”.
But Gandhi had this to say in a trial when he was charged under “Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code” in 1922 for sedition “Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law. If one has no affection for a person or system, one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote, or incite to violence.”
Is expressing disaffection towards the government, nation or religion the same as being seditious or blasphemous? State your opinion and prove it through arguments and explanations.
- Here is a quote from Rosa Luxemburg on free speech: “the freedom of speech is meaningless unless it means the freedom of the person who thinks differently”. In the above article the writer while commenting on free speech in India says “Matters in India are a bit less promising.”
What do you think is the status of ‘free speech’ in India? How would you make sense of Rosa Luxemburg’s quote on free speech in the Indian context? Use observations, readings and experiences in answering the question.
SECTION – B
- Answer the questions in about two paragraphs each. (2 x 10 = 20)
Read the extract from Amartya Sen’s “What Clash of Civilization?”
A person’s religion need not be his or her all-encompassing and exclusive identity. Islam, as a religion, does not obliterate responsible choice for Muslims in many spheres of life. Indeed, it is possible for one Muslim to take a confrontational view and another to be thoroughly tolerant of heterodoxy without either of them ceasing to be a Muslim for that reason alone.
The response to Islamic fundamentalism and to the terrorism linked with it also becomes particularly confused when there is a general failure to distinguish between Islamic history and the history of Muslim people. Muslims, like all other people in the world, have many different pursuits, and not all their priorities and values need be placed within their singular identity of being Islamic. It is, of course, not surprising at all that the champions of Islamic fundamentalism would like to suppress all other identities of Muslims in favor of being only Islamic. But it is extremely odd that those who want to overcome the tensions and conflicts linked with Islamic fundamentalism also seem unable to see Muslim people in any form other than their being just Islamic.
People see themselves—and have reason to see themselves—in many different ways. For example, a Bangladeshi Muslim is not only a Muslim but also a Bengali and a Bangladeshi, typically quite proud of the Bengali language, literature, and music, not to mention the other identities he or she may have connected with class, gender, occupation, politics, aesthetic taste, and so on. Bangladesh’s separation from Pakistan was not based on religion at all, since a Muslim identity was shared by the bulk of the population in the two wings of undivided Pakistan. The separatist issues related to language, literature, and politics.
Similarly, there is no empirical reason at all why champions of the Muslim past, or for that matter of the Arab heritage, have to concentrate specifically on religious beliefs only and not also on science and mathematics, to which Arab and Muslim societies have contributed so much, and which can also be part of a Muslim or an Arab identity. Despite the importance of this heritage, crude classifications have tended to put science and mathematics in the basket of “Western science,” leaving other people to mine their pride in religious depths. If the disaffected Arab activist today can take pride only in the purity of Islam, rather than in the many-sided richness of Arab history, the unique prioritization of religion, shared by warriors on both sides, plays a major part in incarcerating people within the enclosure of a singular identity.
- Do you agree with the statement “A person’s religion need not be his or her all-encompassing and exclusive identity.”? Comment on the concept of ‘singular identity’.
- Relate Mona’s Story with Amartya Sen’s idea of singular and multiple identities. Also, comment on the vachanas of Basavanna and Dasimmaiah that talk about gender identities.
SECTION – C
III. Answer the questions in about two paragraphs each. (2 x10 = 20)
- Write about any two themes/ideas/metaphors/images from the poems of Robert Frost and Faiz Ahmad Faiz.
- Write about a poem that you read in the class and that was very relatable to your experiences in life? What is your perspective on reading and writing poetry?
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