SC to hear pleas on sedition law today
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court is set to take up a clutch of petitions on Wednesday that have demanded the scrapping of the penal provision of sedition in India, which is punishable with a jail term ranging between three years to life.
A special bench, headed by Chief Justice of India NV Ramana, will consider the batch of four petitions pending since 2021. The other members of the special bench are justices Surya Kant and Hima Kohli.
The last hearing in the matter was conducted on July 15, 2021 when the top court rued the “enormous power of misuse” of the sedition law in India, and asked the Union government why it should not scrap a colonial law that was used by the British government to oppress freedom movements and leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Bal Gangadhar Tilak.
The court, on that day, observed that indiscriminate use of Section 124A (sedition) in the Indian Penal Code is like a saw in
the hands of a carpenter who cuts the entire forest instead of a tree. Putting the Centre to notice on the petitions that have pressed for striking down Section 124A, the court emphasised that it was concerned about “misuse of the law and lack of accountability of executive and the investigating agencies”.
During the proceedings on July 15, 2021, solicitor general (SG) Tushar Mehta, who appeared for the Union government on that day, sought time to place the formal response on record. However, according to people aware of the matter, no affidavit has been filed by the Centre till date.
The court’s comments in July 2021 came amid a sharp increase in the number of sedition cases filed. Between 2016 and 2019, according to data from the National Crime Records Bureau, the number of such cases rose by 160% to 93. But in 2019, the conviction rate was a mere 3.3% — just two people were convicted.
India’s sedition law has an interesting past — it was introduced by the British in 1870, and almost dropped from the Constitution in 1948 after discussions of the Constituent Assembly. The word “sedition” disappeared from the Constitution on November 26, 1949 and Article 19 (1)(a) gave absolute freedom of speech and expression. However, Section 124A stayed in IPC.
In its judgment in the Kedar Nath case in 1962, a Constitution bench upheld the validity of the sedition law under IPC and also defined the scope of it. It held that Section 124A only penalised words that reveal an intent or tendency to disturb law and order or that seem to incite violence.
This definition has been taken as precedent for all matters pertaining to section 124A ever since.