The cases just keep coming. India’s mullahs are against Salman Rushdie and his verses. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad and its sister-affiliates do not tolerate M F Hussain and his paintings. The Communists and the Congress object to Taslima Nasreen’s words. Some Marathis cannot stand a book on Chhatrapati Shivaji, just as some Christians cannot bear to watch The Da Vinci Code. And now this: cartoons. Offended by what they consider as polluting minds of children, last week India’s parliamentarians across party lines rose in uniform to ban political satire from school textbooks in India.The latest controversy erupted when some lower caste MPs protested against a cartoon in a textbook that they claimed showed Dr B R Ambedkar, the leader of their community, in a poor light. Published in 1948, the cartoon shows Jawaharlal Nehru cracking a whip at Dr Ambedkar who is seated on a snail with the word ‘Constitution’ written on it. Presumably, the point was to satirise the Constitution-drafting process, which had till then moved at a relatively slow pace.In Parliament, Kapil Sibal, the Union Human Resource Development Minister, lost no time in apologising for the ‘offensive’ cartoon. He pointed fingers at the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) as responsible for the textbook in question and assured parliamentarians that the offending book would be withdrawn, while imposing a blanket ban on political satire in all school textbooks.Still unsatisfied by this act of remarkable censorship, Dalit activists vandalised the office of Suhas Palshikar, the political scientist associated with the NCERT and the textbook in question. And this hasty descent into violence calls into question the very character of India’s liberal democracy.A liberal democracy, at the very least, requires two things. First, political offices must be elected, not inherited. Second, disputes (or differences) must be settled by words, not wars. But it is this second facet that stands thoroughly compromised in India today.In the last three decades, there has been an alarming rise in the numbers of instances when people claimed to have been offended. A quick search online will substantiate this claim. Almost every conceivable medium has borne the brunt: speeches, books, art, movies, paintings and anything else you can imagine. More importantly, this ‘offence-taking’ cuts across castes, religions, regions and political affiliations. No group or community seems immune from it.By itself, however, feeling offended is not problematic, for offence may be proof of quality. After all, it is hard to imagine a stirring piece of writing that does not offend at least someone. What is problematic is the ease with which those offended object to offensive speech through violence. Today, almost any claim of being offended comes with a liberal dose of violence; it is the new normal in India. A statement of disapproval or outage is not enough: it must be accompanied by threats, coercion or vandalising.Worse still, this likelihood of violence is often the basis on which state authorities censor speech. The argument is simple: these words might offend, which might then lead to violence. The safe thing, therefore, is to ban or censor in other ways possible. In fact, political parties in power routinely orchestrate violence to justify assaulting citizens’ freedom of speech.Article 19 in India’s Constitution guarantees all citizens the freedom of speech. But this freedom stands curiously inverted today, for speech is free only so long as those offended are willing to tolerate it. In that sense, the Constitution no longer tells us what speech is acceptable. That task has been outsourced to India’s self-appointed custodians of communities and their sense of worth.This takes me back to the point about liberal democracy. If offended by speech, citizens in such a democracy have two options. Retort with more speech, or let courts adjudicate on the claim that that speech is offensive. Either way, it is words for words, not wars for words.But with every act of offence and the accompanying violence, this approach no longer feels prized in India. With the state unwilling to rein in hooligans or control their brand of violence, India’s liberal democratic traditions are beginning to feel the strain. The writer is an Assistant Professor of Law at Singapore Management University School of Law, Singapore