Let freedom reign: Manish Tewari in 'Ode to Free Speech'

Congress leader Manish Tewari has come out with a book a collection of various articles written over the past year or so which he calls his "ode to free speech".

The articles in "Tidings of Troubled Times" touch upon subjects like Indo-Pak relations, China, the US, free speech, Kashmir, economy, governance and state of the nation.

In the foreword of the book, Tewari begins with a quote from a German Pastor at Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the Holocaust victims in Jerusalem, which he says "sums up the Nazi monstrosity rather poignantly".

" When silence is mistaken for acquiescence it becomes a crime to stay silent. As Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi put it rather succinctly, 'silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly'," he goes on to say.

He writes his book, brought out by Palimpsest, comes at a time when "freedom of speech and expression guaranteed in the Constitution as a fundamental right is coming under sustained assault in India where any criticism of the government is being dubbed as anti-national, questioning the establishment is equivalent to treason, and even intra-institution dialogue is being muffled".

The articles, he says, would have "remained scattered and perhaps even sucked into the black hole of time but for the efforts of the publisher".

This is my ode to free speech. Let freedom reign ," he writes