We need to curb the crime, but we also need to be wary of the political dimension that curbing it might acquire

Updated on: Aug 30, 2026, 06:22:10 IST

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A particular “crime” and the punishment laid down for it in India are the subject of this column today. As well as an associated dilemma.

The issue in question is defamation, and more specifically, insults offered by political persons to other political persons, and by anyone, wittingly or unwittingly, to the State and its symbols. The dilemma is this: We need to curb this, but we also need to be wary of how this curbing can have a political dimension. Together, these two situations constitute a problem in themselves. I have no solutions to offer for this problem, only ruminations and the busy reader may disengage right here, and only read on if interested.

Let us take the act first. Using hurtful and insulting words to make the targeted person feel shocked and humiliated is one of humankind’s timeless weapons of belligerence. In India, we have used it with abandon. What in Hindi is called gaali-galauch, has been, down the centuries, deployed to cause a person, and his or her self-respect, hurt. Defamation is only the legal name for the old practice. The laws of libel or defamation in India as elsewhere are designed to curb the pernicious practice and protect victims of it. Typically, gaali-type oral defamation does not get carried to courts — the process is too intimidating. But when the persons concerned are famous, and the insult has been hurled in the public domain, the matter gets to be known widely and can lead to the courts’ doors being knocked on. This has happened in recent months, noticeably.

Of such insults, the most hurtful are those that bring in the mothers and female relatives of the one being taunted. Even as the nation is engaged in reverencing the National Song with its invocation of Mother India, sons of Mother India, in the course of arguments or brawls, have no difficulty insulting mothers of fellow Indians. None at all. Or the daughters of Mother India.

The insult is spat out, horror results, apologies are demanded, the charge is denied or ascribed to provocation, the demand gets reiterated, and the episode is magnified. Social media blares: “What have we come to?” The fact is we have come to no place that we were not already in. The vocabularies of our great languages have, since God knows when, had to endure an unprinted supplement of lewd swear words. The supplement has yet another sub-supplement, involving the genitalia of the female of our species. This is a hideous truth about our vocabularies of abuse; let prudishness not deny it, nor primness shy from it. That the world’s other languages may be no different in this, is certainly no consolation.

Like any reader of this column, I am nauseated by the phenomenon of gaali-galauch and its manifestation in the public arena. Bringing in mothers and sisters and wives directly and through innuendos is simply hideous. Anyone with a sense of decency would want to see it put down. But how should that be done?

Penology is influenced by precedents and conventions. So, let us see what Kautilya’s Arthashastra, written about 2,400 years ago, says on the subject. This grand text is, in its own way, a penal code, listing and defining crimes and prescribing penalties for a range of criminal acts for the guidance of the Mauryan State. Kautilya, better known as Chanakya, goes in great detail into the nature and variety of defamatory acts. I have not enough Sanskrit to read the original, but have gathered from the late Indian diplomat LN Rangarajan’s stunning translation into English (Penguin Classics, 1992, p. 436) that the Mauryan-era mastermind divided defamation into simple defamation and aggravated defamation. The latter category included as a crime “insulting” , in the following order : “one’s mother, father, brother, teacher or an ascetic”. And the punishment he laid down for such an offence was “cutting off the tongue”. Ouch!

This punishment was the same as that for “insulting the king; divulging State secrets; spreading false rumours [about the king]”. Cutting off the tongue, in all these cases.

So, in the Mauryan State, Kautilya equated insulting a mother with insulting a guru or the sovereign himself, no less. One part of me — the part that is disgusted by the phenomenon of gaali-galauch — says, “Bravo, Kautilya! Bravo for equating the mother with the sovereign.” The king says, “Anyone insulting a mother in my realm, insults me.” Or almost that. A tongue that insults the king will get cut off, a tongue that insults a mother will, too. Or almost that.

Loose tongues in today’s India will thank God they are not in Mauryan India. Ancient India had its norms; we are, 2,000 years later, not bound by that manner of punishment, thank God. But I would say this: For insults that bring in matrimony, maternity, sorority, a wholly civilised, non-corporal, and appealable equivalent of the barbaric punishment prescribed by Kautilya would not be a bad thing.

Another part of me would immediately say, “Hold it! Any punishment code has to have a common definitional base point on the mens rea (the accused’s intent) and on the objective of the punishment (retribution, prevention, or reform).

That is where the question boils down to one word: disrespect. The onus for determining the disrespect-quotient in a charge of defamation lies on the Courts and is indeed onerous. Why, their own orders could themselves come up for the same determination in a higher court!

To sum up: Insulting and humiliating through words or action, an old and ugly trait, is now particularly active in the public, specifically, political arena where maternity-based and matrimony-related swear words, insinuations, and innuendos are traded by politicians and their supporters. Individual insults suffer little or no risk of judicial miscarriage but when the plaintiff is a political entity, including the State, the situation gets complicated.

Can political defamation be checked without political score-settling? This is a dilemma. And it is not an ordinary one. Seemingly right and good things are done with dubious intentions, and patently wrong and bad steps are taken wearing noiseless and soft footwear.

This is where statespersons in office like Presidents Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, R Venkataraman and KR Narayanan are missed. They would have consulted the country’s Prime Minister and law minister and even held informal soundings with them. They were thought-partners with the people. And apart from them, the country had tribunes such as Bhimrao Ambedkar, C Rajagopalachari, Muthulakshmi Reddy, Jayaprakash Narayan, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Acharya and Sucheta Kripalani, and VR Krishna Iyer. That word — tribune — has a meaning we need to recall. In ancient Rome, a tribune was an elected official who protected the common people (plebeians) from the ruling class (patricians).

Whether as elected representatives or otherwise, they and others like them were there in the public proscenium to counsel and to guide us through existential crises affecting our nationhood.

Nostalgia for them and for those times, I know, is no cure for the specific malaise described here. But awareness of the diagnosis and of the absence of medication can perhaps be the beginning of change. We need tribunes, men and women of stature, esteemed in their persons and for values who can chasten society and check the State. The judiciary, overburdened as it is, can only act on matters before it. Tribunes can choose their matters. The matters are many; tribunes few if any.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a student of modern Indian history and the author of The Undying Light: A Personal History of Independent India. The views expressed are personal

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