Self-censorship, the anti-innovation vax

Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, Mumbai's annual celebration of creativity, has long prided itself on being a bazaar of ideas. Yet, last week, its organisers cancelled a scheduled talk by human-rights activist and scholar Anand Teltumbde, citing 'withdrawal of permission from police', bureaucratese camouflage for something more troubling: members of civil society pre-emptively clamping down dissent by a member of civil society.

Teltumbde, a trenchant critic of caste hierarchies and state overreach, is no stranger to controversy. But the manner of his exclusion is telling: no courtroom summon - as was the case last month with nine Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) students who had gathered to commemorate another scholar-activist G N Saibaba's death anniversary - but self-censorship. Not to sound too theoretical, this is precisely the sort of power that philosopher Michel Foucault diagnosed: authority that need not punish, because institutions and individuals do the 'needful'.

Foucault's metaphor of the panopticon - a prison where inmates behave as if watched, even when they are not - is apt. Kala Ghoda became its own warden. This is no longer in the realm of conspiracy theory, but increasingly the new normal: fear of displeasing authority - central, state or even local - is enough to ensure compliance. When institutions begin to act as extensions of the state's nervous system, surveillance is internalised and becomes a competitive space for a new definition of 'good citizenry' - ease of living without 'inviting any jhamela'. By narrowing the field of permissible thought, exchange of ideas is selectively choked. In a society that purportedly celebrates and encourages innovation and out-of-the-box thinking more than ever, the irony is staggering.