NEW DELHI, July 19: The contentious sedition law as codified under Section 124A IPC has been challenged in the apex court by two women journalists from the country’s two troubled ends — Northeast and Kashmir.
The Editor of The Shillong Times, Patricia Mukhim and Executive Editor of Kashmir Times, Anuradha Bhasin filed a joint petition in the Supreme Court on Monday seeking repeal of the “colonial” era decree. This is the fifth petition to be filed in the Apex Court in recent times.
With over 300 cases registered under the controversial sedition law across the country in last five years, the matter has come under growing public scrutiny.
Both the senior women journalists have filed the petition, claiming that use of the provision has continued unrestrained to intimidate, silence and punish free-thinking journalists. Live experiences of the last six decades have led to this conclusion that unless the provision is deleted from the IPC, it will continue to ‘haunt and hinder’ the full realisation of the right to free speech and the freedom of press, they said.
The petitioners contended that the offence of sedition is an oppressive legal device inherently susceptible and amenable to being deployed to curb free speech, freedom of the Press, criticism, dissent and to punish critical voices in a democracy. “It is a relic of the colonial past, used numerous times to criminalise free speech and journalism, and was part of an arsenal of laws,” they said in their submission.
Their plea referred to data procured from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), which showed a steep rise in the cases of sedition, with a 160 percent rise from 2016 to 2019. But simultaneously there is abysmally low conviction rate, which dropped to 3.3 per cent in 2019. It stated that in view of the evolution of jurisprudence of the fundamental rights of citizens since 1970 till 2021, the provision is liable to be struck down as being ultra vires to Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution. It referred to various Supreme Court verdicts, starting from RC Cooper Vs Union of India (1970), where an 11-Judge Bench had held that the real test of constitutionality lay not in the object of the legislation, but in the “real impact” it has on the life of an individual.
The plea then referred to the case of KS Puttaswamy Vs Union of India (2017), where the test of manifest arbitration was applied. The provision was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1962 in the case of Kedar Nath Singh Vs State of Bihar.
The petitioners pointed out that the said judgment upheld the constitutionality of Section 124A IPC when it was classified as a non-cognizable offence, which is no longer valid law, as the offence of sedition is now a cognizable and non-bailable offence since 1973 under the Code of Criminal Procedure. Consequently, it impacts on life and liberty and needs fresh judicial scrutiny.
The three-tier categorisation of the punishment for the offence of sedition, ranging from life imprisonment to fine simpliciter, without any legislative guidance for sentencing, amounts to granting unbridled discretion to judges, which is hit by the doctrine of arbitrariness and violates Article 14, the petition said.
The constitutionality of sedition as a restriction on free speech does not meet the test of necessity and proportionality. In this regard it is submitted that the object of “public order” under Article 19(2) can be achieved by less restrictive means than a provision “which is so overboard and casts a chilling effect on the exercise of the right to free speech and expression”.
It is also stated that the issue of words like hatred, disaffection, disloyalty are incapable of precise construction, and are hit by the doctrine of vagueness and over-breadth, thereby falling foul of Article 14 of the Constitution.
As per data from the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), which the petitioners quoted, of the total 326 cases registered under sedition in the six-year period, (between 2014 and 2019) only six people were convicted. Interestingly, Assam reported the highest number of such cases, at 54 and none in Meghalaya.
Assam is followed by Jharkhand and Haryana, with 40 and 31 cases, respectively with one conviction each. Of these, chargesheets were filed in 26 cases, while trials were completed in 25. However, none of these cases resulted in a conviction, the data showed.
Next on the list are Bihar, Kerala and Jammu & Kashmir, with 25 cases each in this period, followed closely by Karnataka at 22. While no chargesheet was filed in both Bihar and Kerala, these were filed in three cases in Jammu & Kashmir and Karnataka saw chargesheets in 17 cases. No case ended in a conviction in any of the four states.
Among other states, 17 cases under the sedition law were reported from Uttar Pradesh, eight from West Bengal, four in Delhi, and one each in Maharashtra, Punjab and Uttarakhand. Both Uttar Pradesh and Bengal saw zero convictions, while no charge sheet was filed in Delhi.
The data also showed that no sedition case was filed in the following states and Union territories: Meghalaya, Mizoram, Tripura, Sikkim, Andaman and Nicobar, Lakshadweep, Puducherry, Chandigarh, Daman and Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli in these six years.
As per the data, the number of sedition cases registered each year from 2014 to 2019 stood at 47, 30, 35, 51, 70 and 93 respectively. Two convictions were recorded in 2018 and one each in 2014, 2016, 2017 and 2019. No conviction took place in 2015.
These numbers have come out at a time when the Supreme Court has expressed concern over “enormous” misuse of the law, which comes under section 124(A) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). The top court questioned the Union government why it is not repealing the provision which was used by the British to “silence” freedom fighters like Mahatma Gandhi to suppress the freedom movement.
Mukhim and Bhasin also pointed out the that the impugned provision violates India’s commitment under international law including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which was ratified by India in 1979.
“Pertinently, the United Kingdom, the colonial parent of the sedition penal provision, repealed the offence of sedition in 2009 with the passing of the Coroners and Justice Act,” they pointed out. Various other commonwealth nations like Australia, Canada, Scotland, Ireland, Nigeria and Uganda have also either repealed or struck down the law of sedition, they added.
Earlier, an NGO on July 16 filed a similar petition challenging constitutional validity of sedition law on grounds that it is “anachronistic” and has “lost all relevance in a free democracy like India. The petition filed by People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) said that sedition was a political crime, originally enacted to prevent political uprisings against the Crown and to control the British colonies.
Former Union Minister Arun Shourie also moved the top court last week against the law.
The Apex Court on July 15 agreed to examine the pleas filed by Editors Guild of India and a former major general, challenging the constitutionality of the law, and said its main concern was the “misuse of law”. Shourie, in his petition, urged the court to declare the law as “unconstitutional” as “it has come to be heavily abused with cases being filed against citizens for exercising their freedom of speech and expression.
Section 124A under the IPC is a non-bailable provision and it makes any speech or expression that brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the Government established by law in India a criminal offence punishable with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. (With PTI input)
