Repeal the sedition law
The British-era act is antithetical to the march of democratic thought and expansion of rights
Liking a social media post; cheering a team in a cricket match; criticising government policy or leaders — these are some of the grounds on which authorities have slapped sedition charges on citizens in the past five years, underlining how the stringent provision, a relic of colonial-era law-making, was increasingly being used as a tool by governments of various dispensations and political ideologies to blunt dissent and free speech.
Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code was introduced in 1870 to muzzle the freedom struggle and dissent; though the United Kingdom repealed the provision in 2009, it has continued to not only remain on the books in India but also becomes preferred law for administrations looking to intimidate political opponents and making errant citizens fall in line in India. Though conviction remains abysmal — the National Crime Records Bureau found the conviction rate in 2019 to be around 3% — the difficulty in obtaining bail and the vagaries of the criminal justice system ensure that the threat of the charge is a significant deterrent for free expression. It is possibly due to such worries that the Constituent Assembly refused to include sedition as a reasonable restriction to free speech. Flagging the most famous victim of sedition laws in British India, Mahatma Gandhi, the freedom fighter KM Munshi argued that the chilling effect of the provision outweighed any potential benefits. “The word sedition has been omitted…the essence of democracy is criticism of government,” he observed.
Every nation has a right to zealously guard its sovereignty from internal and external aggression, and, therefore, penal provisions to punish violence and threats to security are justified and necessary. But there is a raft of civil, criminal and anti-terror statutes to deal effectively with such exigencies. A mature democracy doesn’t need a colonial-era law kept alive by administrative hubris. The law is antithetical to the march of democratic thought and expansion of rights, which have progressed far beyond what law-makers could have imagined in 1870. In the Supreme Court, the government has argued that the sedition law is necessary, leaning on a 1962 judgment that upheld the provision. But the same verdict also held that the presence of a pernicious tendency to incite violence is a precondition to invoke the clause and that it shouldn’t be used to stifle free speech. In both letter and spirit, governments across the land have violated this pronouncement for years. It is, therefore, time for the muchabused sedition law to be repealed.