I woke up to this morning reading all about how Pakistan as a country has banned FaceBook for a page called “Everybody Draw Mohammed” day. You may see the page here.

The page when I saw it in the morning had around 6000 odd Fans and around 200 odd photos. Its now doing at 7500 fans and around 450 photographs. Probably must have been triggered as news reports of the Pakistan ban started doing its rounds across various media. The number of people liking and unliking this page notwithstanding, the trend is for number of people going up.

Some of the depictions there are pretty humorous and creative, while some are absolutely shocking and offending, demeaning even. Standards depictions averaged out relate to three major associations : porcine assortments, an arsenal of explosives and little girls. The underlying, veiled expressions however, point to an overall mood of “getting back” … at terror in the name of religion, at threats to the Danish illustrator, at threats IN the name of religion and so on.

Which brings me to the question of the extremely thin, and sometimes vanishing line between Freedom of Speech and Slander.

Freedom of Speech is all about liberty of an individual to express oneself against any thought, person, concept or expression that comes by one. SLANDER is all about using Freedom of Expression, to denigrate a belief or a faith, and moves away from black and white expressions of denial based on logical foundations, to outright abuse, offending depictions and abusive caricaturing. This is where I believe that this group has cross the line. They started off by expressing a PROTEST against the way a section of the Islamic world handled the Danish cartoonist, and somewhere down the line, personal angst, and in cases personal experiences, or thought processes took on abusive representations.

In India, we have had our share of this too. Remember MF Hussain ? And his depictions of Indian Gods and Goddesses that sparked off huge protests, controversies, calls for legal action and so on? This is what I’m talking about. MF did the same thing that this FB group is now doing, SLANDER. The similarity? He called it art, and so does this group.

I would like to point out that MF depicting figureheads of his own religion would have been an acceptable point. Creativity is not really about poking fun / caricaturing / hurting people of other religions right ? And so also I say to the people in this group. I would have LOVED it if you had made a group to caricature figureheads from all religions. Not just targeting a single religion.

The arguments for and against this on various spaces are strong. One side of the argument questions a religion’s law itself in restrictions and impositions of various dogma and funda. To them, I would say that since it is NOT imposed on you, and since one who it has been imposed on does not really seek your aid, stay away. To those that say this is too radical, and calls for death, I would say that human life and peace is above all Gods and religions. Find a resolution peacefully.