How the colonial-era sedition law is being employed by governments to target critics, from journalists to activists to rival politicians
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Next month, the Supreme Court will hear pleas challenging the sedition law, and the hopes of thousands rest on the verdict

June 24, 2022 09:39 am | Updated April 27, 2023 07:40 am IST

Despite court reminders that criticism is not seditious, many such cases have been filed over the years.

Despite court reminders that criticism is not seditious, many such cases have been filed over the years. | Photo Credit: Illustration: Kannan Sundar

A Facebook post changed Kishorechandra Wangkhemcha’s life, forever. All Wangkhemcha, then 39, a journalist, wanted to do was to air his critical opinion on the state of politics in the country and his home-State, Manipur. In a video, he criticised the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the then BJP chief minister in Manipur, N. Biren Singh.

Days after he did that in November 2018, the Manipur police came knocking on the door of his Imphal home and charged him with sedition and defamation. If that wasn’t enough, Wangkhemcha was slapped with the stringent National Security Act (NSA), 1980. He spent 140 days in jail.

His travails did not end there. Wangkhemcha was out of prison in April 2019 but the sedition tag, in times of hyper-nationalistic politics, weighed heavy. He was sacked from his job as an anchor and a desk-editor at a local news channel and struggled to get a new job. “They fired me and told me that they don’t support my behaviour,” Wangkhemcha says.

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In 2020, Wangkhemcha backed a tribal woman after the non-tribal wife of a politician from the ruling BJP made derogatory remarks about her. The cops came knocking again. The Manipuri journalist was slapped with sedition charges, yet again, and spent over two months in prison.

While he is now out on bail, if convicted, Wangkhemcha could be imprisoned for life and have a penalty to pay. Like thousands of others, Wangkhemcha will likely know his fate soon: come July, the Supreme Court (SC) will be all set to hear a clutch of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, which deals with sedition.

Silencing tool

The colonial law has been increasingly employed by governments to target critics, from journalists to activists to rival politicians. Last year, the Bengaluru police booked former Union minister Shashi Tharoor and journalists Rajdeep Sardesai, Mrinal Pande and Vinod K. Jose, among others, for sedition on the basis of their tweets and reports around the farmers’ protests in Delhi. Around the same time, climate activist Disha Ravi too was booked under sedition by the Delhi Police and was jailed for five days, in connection with a ‘toolkit’ around the farmers’ protest. Recently, the Mumbai Police pressed sedition charges against politician-couple, Navneet Kaur Rana and Ravi Rana, after they threatened to assemble outside Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray’s residence and read the Hanuman Chalisa. In the past, activists Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid, author-activist Arundhati Roy, journalists Vinod Dua and Siddique Kappan have also been charged with sedition. Kappan continues to be in prison since his arrest in October 2020.

A students’ protest in New Delhi.

A students’ protest in New Delhi. | Photo Credit: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar

A clutch of petitions, including one by Wangkhemcha, has gone to the apex court alleging the targeted use of the law, and asking it to be scrapped. In May, the SC had asked for all pending trials, appeals and proceedings to be kept on hold till it decides on the petitions. The court had also said that it “hopes and expects” that the Centre and the State governments will restrain themselves from registering new FIRs or continue existing investigations under sedition till it hears the matter again in July.

As the date for the hearing approaches, the hopes of thousands like Wangkhemcha rest on what the three-judge bench led by the Chief Justice of India, N.V. Ramana, decides.

Process as punishment

For a good reason. The sedition law was inserted into the Indian Penal Code in 1870 by the colonial rulers to quell nationalism and maintain a strict control on the activities of Indian freedom fighters and revolutionaries. From Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to Bal Gangadhar Tilak, many Indian anti-colonial nationalists found themselves charged with sedition by the British empire.

However, 152 years later, the section remains a potent tool for post-colonial governments to target critics with. In its interim order in May, the SC said the sedition law was “not in tune with the current social milieu and was intended for a time when this country was under a colonial regime.”

There is mounting evidence of its misuse, especially under the Narendra Modi government. A new database by Article14, a news website based out of Bengaluru, points this out vividly. Called ‘A Decade of Darkness’, the database records all sedition cases lodged between 2010 and 2020 and has found that sedition cases had been lodged against nearly 11,000 individuals in this period. The database found a 28% rise in new sedition cases filed each year, since Modi came into office in 2014.

Despite reminders by the SC that criticism was not seditious, many of these sedition cases have been targeted at critics like Wangkhemcha. The database found how various governments had lodged sedition cases against 405 people for criticising politicians and governments in the last decade. But 98% of these cases were registered after the Modi government came to power, with 149 people accused of making ‘critical/derogatory’ remarks against Modi and 144 against Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath.

The database found overwhelming evidence of the legal flimsiness of these cases — of the 126 people whose trials had concluded, 98 were acquitted of all charges. Yet, the journey to these acquittals is often arduously long, filled with despondency and uncertainty. For instance, when Wangkhemcha lost his job after being jailed for sedition, he saw people’s attitudes towards him change drastically. “Most media houses refused to hire me. In fact, many people were hesitant to even talk to me,” he says.

The struggle did not end even after he got a job. Wangkhemcha realised that hiring him, a known dissenter, comes at a price to the media organisation. “The Manipur government would reduce contact with that organisation — they would give fewer advertisements and interviews than before,” he says. He realised a hard truth about what it means to dissent and be tagged under sedition. “The authorities, they try to squeeze you out,” he says. “They squeeze your income and slowly let you die.”

Sedition through history
1837: The draft penal code, prepared by the first Law Commission chaired by Thomas Babington Macaulay, proposes sedition as one of the clauses
1860: The Indian Penal Code (IPC) is finalised, but sedition is not included
1870: Sedition as an offence gets added to the IPC
1891: The first-­ever trial in a sedition case, against Jogendra Chunder Bose, the owner of a Bengali language newspaper called Bangobasi
1897: Bal Gangadhar Tilak is charged with sedition for his criticism of British rule in his Marathi­ language newspaper, Kesari
1922: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is charged with sedition

This is a common experience. In September 2012, cartoonist Aseem Trivedi was arrested and charged for sedition, after he drew cartoons that depicted the Parliament as the ‘national toilet’ and the National Emblem as having wolves instead of lions, to allude to the growing corruption. Trivedi’s sedition clause was withdrawn days later after national outrage. But that didn’t make things easier for him. “No one wanted to give me work, even after the court said that my work was not seditious,” says Trivedi. His career as a cartoonist suffered immensely — newspapers refused to publish him, editors stopped taking his calls. All this forced him to give up his profession.

Possible reprieve

Travails like these make those like Wangkhemcha and Trivedi look forward eagerly to July, when the SC hears the matter afresh. “The court has shown real intent in the issue and if the government doesn’t delay the matter any more, we could have a real victory coming,” says Wangkhemcha. Experts, however, are divided over whether such a victory is near.

After insisting that the sedition law was not misused, the Modi government made a U-turn in the SC in May and promised the court an ‘internal review’ of the law. The court had acceded to this prayer. Lubhyathi Rangarajan, the head of the Article14 Sedition Database, says the SC’s move to allow the Modi government to review the law could have been framed better. “The SC should have asked for more details of this review,” says Rangarajan. “It was important to know, for instance, the government authority that would review the section and the time it would take for this review.”

In the absence of such details, the Modi government might have got a long rope. Such long rope, combined with existing data showing the government’s own extensive use of sedition law and its previously-stated positions on strengthening the sedition law, have raised doubts about whether there is real hope at the end of the tunnel.

There is another reason why, even if it does come, the celebration over repealing sedition might be short-lived.

Hydra-headed problem

It isn’t just sedition. Over the last few years, experts and civil rights activists have pointed out how laws such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), the NSA as well as other existing provisions of the IPC, have been weaponised to crack down on criticism and dissent. “Doing away with sedition is a very important start and I wouldn’t undermine the gains that we will make if that happens,” says Mihir Desai, a senior counsel at the Bombay High Court and co-founder of the Human Rights Law Network. “But governments tend to weaponise whatever laws they have. They don’t need sedition for it.”

Desai points to how the UAPA, for instance, essentially an anti-terror law, allows the police six months to file a chargesheet as against three months under the Code of Criminal Procedure. The Act also makes it difficult for the accused to obtain bail and allows the police to detain and arrest individuals suspected of terrorist activity. These provisions have been increasingly used to stifle criticism. Last November, the Tripura government charged 102 social media users, including SC lawyers, journalists and activists, with UAPA after they posted about the riots that had engulfed the State.

Rangarajan agrees with Desai, saying that the law’s repeal isn’t enough. “The use of laws such as the UAPA and the NSA shows that if the state is inclined to [target critics and dissenters], it will do it, no matter what the law.” What experts like Desai and Rangarajan believe we must aim for is more holistic law-making. The first step after sedition is a re-look at laws like UAPA, which “needs to go,” says Desai. “We need laws that are in consonance with our fundamental rights.”

The writer is an independent journalist based in Mumbai.

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