Opinions can be offensive. That's a good thing. And that's now legal, too.

These are interesting times on the interwebs. Just a few days ago, I was accused online of sodomising my children, by fringe supporters of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the extreme-right wing Hindu nationalist organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS.

While that attack on me could be called ‘offensive’ by most measures, I’m actually happy that the Supreme Court of India has come out and ruled that it’s not automatically a crime to say stuff like this online. The court today struck down a particularly draconian law called Section 66A of the Information Technology Act of India.

What this means, in effect, is that I can still sue the goons who wrote this stuff under existing libel and slander laws, in Civil courts and elsewhere – and get them sentenced if I win. But nothing is left to the discretion of the cops or their masters, the political party in power. And no one can be sent to jail automatically for saying what they think. Like they could, till today.

Congress’ turn. BJP’s u-turn.

This law, with its equally draconian siblings Sections 66B, 66C, 69 and 79, was brought in by former law minister Kapil Sibal when the Congress (I) was in power.

Some of us in the internet business know this was after Sibal called in representatives from Facebook, Google, Twitter and IndiaTimes to his office and railed on about stuff on their sites that was uncomplimentary to Sonia Gandhi, the capo di tutti capi of the Congress.

While the famously pragmatic IndiaTimes capitulated right away to remove unflattering Sonia-stuff and Facebook did so a little more slowly, the others told them there was nothing they could do to remove stuff that the old lady might feel slighted about. At which point Sibal quite literally took the law into his own hands.

Ironically, 66A was widely opposed by the then-opposition Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP. Arun Jaitley made an impassioned speech in parliament on why it needed to be toned down.

Then a few years later when the BJP came to power, they just as surely turned full circle. The new government went back to court to defend the earlier government’s law in its entirety, claiming it was necessary to control “offensive remarks”. Such is the seductive power of controlling dissent.

India’s way, not China’s.

Striking down 66A is the one keystone that will mark the divergence between where India will go and where China has gone. And that’s a good thing.

Some of my more right-wing friends tell me, screw it – there’s no problem if you have to jail a few people who say unpopular things and shut the others up as long as the economy develops faster and we all make money. That’s the Lee Kuan Yew, Deng Xiao Ping and Dubai school of governance I guess. But I disagree entirely.

For me, quality of life is not just an economic construct. I see little point in having better food, shelter and clothing if you’re not allowed to have the quality of thought and expression that should go along with it.

Better to have no cage than a gilded one.

Sure, the progress of a democracy with real dissent is slower than that of near-autocracies like China, Singapore or the United Arab Emirates.

I don’t buy the recently-departed Singaporean founder’s idea that Asia needs development, not democracy. Maybe he didn’t like it being pointed out that, for all the talk of Singapore’s apparent world-class governance, his son is the prime minister and his son’s wife runs the Singapore government’s global economic weapon – the $175 billion Temasek fund.

And that it all was perhaps just a different form of government-is-family-business as the Gandhis in India and the al-Maktoums in the Middle East.

One step forward.

A democracy with dissent means that while it is two steps forward for others (or two steps backward in less fortunate cases) it is often two steps forward and one step back for places like India, the US and the UK.

But that is still net one step forward. One noisy, well-debated, hard-won but healthy step.

And the ramifications are a more thought-through process of making and acting on law – and a slower – but more irreversible and more stable development of every citizen’s body and mind.

So what does this mean for us? As businesses as well as individuals?

Sharper ears, thicker skin.

Not many here might know that Indian organisations have often used the IT Act to have stuff uncomplimentary to them deleted from the internet. We’ve seen India’s biggest banks, telcos, political parties and family-run businesses petition Police cybercrime cells under 66A to summarily have complaints of bad customer service and even allegations of corruption and outright fraud removed from public viewing. That will stop now, thankfully.

And it’s a very good thing, too. If someone is unhappy with your products and services or functioning, they have a right to vent their feelings in public – and you, dear Sirs and Madams, have even more of a responsibility to hear them out and fix what’s wrong. Or defend yourself if there’s nothing wrong.

Sure, there’ll be the oddball who is perhaps blackmailing you by airing fake dirty linen. But you do have enough ways and means to tackle such instances. Even under current law minus 66A.

What you need to do is to get your digital media monitoring up, listen harder, act faster and handle complaints more transparently and sooner.

Yes, that might also mean that if you actually have bad customer service, or instances of fraud and corruption in your organisation, it would help to have those stop. Sad, I know, but still.

And when it comes to your personal digital life? It’s a different sort of responsibility. The right to free speech and expression necessarily means it comes with the right to offend.

That’s a key one. That means whether you’re famous or not, people will say things about you that may offend you.

And your duty in this case is to actually not get offended and react violently. You actually have a duty to develop a thick skin.

Not necessarily to let things pass – but to take each case you deem illegal and push it through the right judicial process to have it adjudicated and resolved.

Then to stay vigilant online and defend yourself in public. Often, all it takes is just to shine a light on trolls – and like their namesake creatures of myth – they tend to vanish when you expose them to the public.

We have a choice - we can live in a noisy, vibrant democracy. Or in a quiet, whitewashed prison cell. I believe the Supreme Court made the right choice.

There are seven billion voices on this planet. Not all will be kind to you.

Let's learn to live with that.

(Mahesh Murthy is a marketer and investor. He tweets @maheshmurthy)