‘With Sec 66A, half the population could get other half arrested’
ANUSHREE GOEL spoke to Shreya Singhal, the law student who took the bold initiative to file a PIL and challenged the Section 66A of the IT Act in the Supreme Court. Excerpts from the interview. You had filed the PIL back in late 2012. Did you expect anything would come out of it, considering the pace of the Indian legal system? Yeah, it’s a great feeling, it’s a very positive development. You know, in our petition we had said that we had to stop whatever that was completely unconstitutional, this section (Section 66A), it is something that we had dreamt of and this is literally a dream come true. The problem was that in their arguments, the government was arguing for reading down the section along with guidelines, while the court held very clearly that how do you read down vague terms like “objectionable” and that too with guidelines. So what was bone of contention here? What made you take this decision to file a petition with the Supreme Court? I was back home in Delhi after my undergraduation in Astrophysics from Bristol University in 2012 and that year had a string of cases of arbitrary arrests for exercising their right to free speech and expression on the Internet. The Palghar case where two girls were arrested when one of them posted a comment on how Mumbai had come to a standstill because of Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray’s funeral procession, and the other like it, the arrest of Jadavpur University professor, really shocked me. The language of this particular section was so subjective, so vague, none of the terms were defined and it was being misused. To make something as innocuous as posting a comment or sharing something or liking it a criminal offence, which could invite a jail term for three years, is completely unconstitutional. If you don’t like something on the Internet, it doesn’t give you the right to have someone put in prison for it. People were getting arrested for it within 24 hours, it takes longer for rapists and murderers to get arrested. So who did you take help from in filing the PIL? Yes, my lawyer Ranjita Rohatgi helped me draft the petition and Soli Sorabjee argued the case. Now with Section 66A is gone, how do you think hate or defamatory speech — a lot of it is going online — can be dealt with? Section 66A was a blanket provision that was used for anything being put up on the Internet. There are enough existing laws under the Indian Penal Code and the IT Act dealing with hate speech and incitement. So it’s not that there aren’t any laws to deal with hate speech, there are reasonable restrictions under Article 19A.
There are certain ethics and morals that apply everywhere — both in speech, on radio or TV and while posting anything on the Internet. There were pictures of Mumbai shut, shops closed down in newspapers and TV debates on the city coming to a standstill, but no one has arrested these media, so why only the Internet. In our society, there are so many views on any subject and this section gave the right to anyone to have the other person arrested. Like that, half the population could get the other half arrested.