India’s ongoing debate about the alleged rise of intolerance includes a curious sidelight: public attacks on social media trolls.

In recent months, figures as diverse as Congress party vice-president Rahul Gandhi, BJP MP Chandan Mitra, and former cabinet minister Arun Shourie have castigated Twitter trolls for their lack of compassion or general uselessness. Chetan Bhagat says right wing trolls are usually men who speak English poorly and lack confidence around women. Salman Rushdie dismisses them as “Modi toadies”. Sagarika Ghose once famously likened them to “swarms of bees”.

As anyone who has spent five minutes discussing India on Twitter can tell you, these criticisms are hardly baseless. At the same time, though, angst about the shrillness of the country’s social media discourse misses something important.

Many trolls may be vicious or irredeemably stupid. On the whole, though, their existence is a small price to pay for a hugely positive development: the democratisation of discourse. Indians have enjoyed universal suffrage for nearly seven decades. But only now, thanks in large part to social media, is a democratic ethos trickling down to the public square.

Of course, in an ideal world the unfettered freedom of social media would come without the baggage of trolls. Most misogynists, religious bigots and anonymous rabble-rousers could vanish without your life becoming any poorer. Imagine a world where you could discuss Modi’s fashion sense or Arvind Kejriwal’s love of the camera without immediately attracting a flurry of invective from angry people who can’t spell. Imagine one where everyone engaged calmly with actual arguments instead of furiously labelling each other as “bhakts”, “sickulars” or “Aaptards”.

Sadly, this vision of unfettered harmony is fantastical. In India, as in any country, social media simply reflects underlying reality. Twitter and Facebook didn’t invent abuse, invective and dismissiveness. They merely reflect the default method of disagreement for many people.

So instead of fantasising about making a country of 1.2 billion people look more like the sanitised confines of an Ivy League college seminar room, here’s the real question worth asking: Would India be better off if its national discourse looked more like it did before the advent of social media? For anyone interested in broadening the boundaries of free speech, the answer, quite simply, is “no”.

Moreover, not everyone casually described as a troll deserves the epithet. Often it’s merely a convenient way of dismissing someone whose arguments you disagree with. It’s much easier to swat away criticism by questioning your critics than by paying attention to what they’re saying. For celebrities in particular, troll-bashing can become an easy alternative to the dreary business of introspection.

Most importantly, discourse in India may have become coarser than before. But what’s far more significant is that it has also become broader.

By now it’s virtually a truism to point out that many Indian trolls are politically on the right, in particular BJP supporters. (Though of late AAP and even the rudderless Congress have made impressive gains in this department.) But few people ask the obvious follow up question. Why is this so? The short answer: Because the leftist gatekeepers of the Nehruvian consensus in the media and intelligentsia have kept out most of those with whom they disagree.

On economic policy, it took until the 1991 economic reforms for the Indian media to grudgingly make more room for pro-market voices. On fraught identity issues, the old monopoly remains virtually intact.

Nothing illustrates this divide between the mainstream media and social media more than the problem of fundamentalist Islam. Last week, for instance, Twitter was agog with stories of thousands of Muslim protesters across India calling for the death of Kamlesh Tiwari, a Hindu activist from Uttar Pradesh who allegedly made derogatory statements against Prophet Muhammad. In Muzaffarnagar alone close to a lakh people demanded that Tiwari’s alleged “blasphemy” be punished by death. Bhopal, Indore, Bengaluru and Rampur, among other places, witnessed similar demands.

On the face of it, whatever your view of Tiwari, this was a worthy story. In virtually any other democracy it would likely have dominated the news cycle. But in India these protests attracted a fraction of the media attention received by author and journalist Sudheendra Kulkarni when Shiv Sena goons blackened his face in October. This doesn’t condone the action against Kulkarni, but it does place in perspective the obvious one-sidedness of the intolerance debate, where one strand of intolerance is relentlessly played up while another is mostly ignored.

This one-sidedness may also help explain some of the angst about trolls and the role they allegedly play in making India less tolerant. From an establishment perspective they are simply barbarians at the gate. But from an alternative perspective, excesses notwithstanding, social media represents a grand corrective, the first genuine opportunity for those locked out of the country’s television studios and editorial pages to get across an alternative viewpoint.

This broadening of the national conversation ought to be welcome in any country, but particularly in one as hierarchical as India. That it isn’t suggests that some of those who complain the loudest about trolls are simply unused to dealing with opinions dissimilar to their own.

In the end, fears for freedom of expression in India are massively overblown. It’s only monopoly of expression that’s under threat.