Actress Gul Panag came out in support of ‘The Skin Doctor’, a non-Left Twitter account which was suspended recently due to mass reporting by left-wing outrage mobs. After his Twitter account was restored, Gul Panag commented ‘You are back’ with a rose emoji.

However, while supporting ‘The Skin Doctor’, the former AAP member blamed the ‘right-wing’ for the outrage culture embraced by the Left, and created by the Left-wing. It was quite clearly a disingenuous and dishonest attempt to slander the right for something she knew would attract the wrath of the left-wing outrage mob.

Gul Panag said, “The problem with the liberal left is that it’s increasingly becoming like the right. All well till you agree with their narrative. Disagree and all hell breaks lose.” Such a comment could only be made by someone who has her head buried under the sand or believes that the rest of us do.

Censorship is a tool that has been embraced by the left-wing across the world to further their political objectives. And it is not anonymous ‘right-wing trolls’ who are driving the censorship regime, it is prominent cultural institutions, primarily the media, which are overwhelmingly left-wing that is driving the censorship regime.

When Donald Trump first drew attention to the fact that the Coronavirus came out of China and ought to be called the China virus, or Chinese Coronavirus, it was the Democrat party and the corporate media that worked first to brand the term racist and ostracised anyone who used the term.

When the lab-leak hypothesis of the Wuhan Coronavirus gained prominence, it was the left-wing corporate media and social media giants, which are left-wing, that censored the hypothesis and did everything in their power to silence those who voiced support for the hypothesis.

And these are just a couple of instances. We have now reached a point where the left-wing claims that biological sex is not real and not significant and claims that a man can a woman simply if he feels that is the case. And the media establishment with a left-wing bias threaten to report people to authorities if they refuse to comply with the dogma.

Historical roots of censorship

Anyone who takes a cursory glance at history will conclude that left-wing regimes have run some of the most brutal censorship regimes in the history of humanity. The Stalinist Soviet regime relied on mass surveillance and censorship to retain its authority.

China is another Communist country that embraces censorship and surveillance to maintain its authority over the masses. North Korea, probably the last Stalinist regime in the world, is a Communist country.

Therefore, the accusation that the ‘liberal left’ is ‘increasingly’ becoming like the ‘Right’ is a series of buzzwords that have very little to do with actual reality.

Roots of Censorship in India

India is a unique case in that censorship was integrated into the Constitution by a Prime Minister who remains the icon of liberalism in the country to this day. Indeed, it was the first Prime Minister of the country, Jawaharlal Nehru, who implemented the 1st amendment and curtailed free speech rights in India.

It was ‘right-wing’ political stalwarts such as Shyama Prasad Mukherjee who vehemently opposed the move. It was quite clearly an attempt to curtail the freedom of the press and it was led by the icon of liberalism in India, Nehru.

Nehru claimed that the First Amendment was necessary because of the “vulgarity, indecency and falsehood” that the press was supposedly indulging in. He said, “It has become a matter of the deepest distress to me to see the way in which the less responsible news sheets are being conducted… not injuring me on this House much, but poisoning the minds of the younger generation and degrading their mental integrity and moral standards.”

“It is not for me a political problem but a moral problem,” Nehru said before opining that it had become “impossible to distinguish what is true and what is false.” Consequently, Nehru presided over a regime of censorship that persecuted cartoonists and journalists at will.

Since then, the Congress party has only carried forward the censorious legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru and persecuted journalists at will. Most notably, only months ago, they were after Republic TV Editor-In-Chief Arnab Goswami for his criticism of the Congress party.

Cancel Culture in the 21st Century

Thus, quite clearly, it is historically inaccurate to claim that the right-wing is intolerant and when the left engages in censorship, it is ‘increasingly becoming like the right’. It is especially the case in India, where the censorship regime has been established and furthered by the left-wing.

In the 21st century, another menace has presented itself in the form of ‘cancel culture‘. In this particular phenomenon, left-wing outrage mobs run online campaigns to bully corporate houses to drop sponsorship deals, publishers to withdraw book deals, social media platforms to suspend accounts among other things. It is almost exclusively run by the left-wing.

In the current scenario, a non-Left Twitter account, ‘The Skin Doctor’, was suspended by the platform due to the efforts of outrage mobs. And yet, instead of an unequivocal condemnation of the same, all we get from Gul Panag is a flimsy attempt to draw a false equivalence with the right.