Sedition and its roots in rudeness as an Offence

Context:

The police registered a series of complaints in Delhi and in Ahmedabad, and also arrested several people, including owners of the printing presses involved, for posting anti-government posters across town.
The detainees were not accused of ‘sedition,’ but were booked for criminal conspiracy to cause public mischief and to deface public property.
The printing press is alleged to have breached some provision of the Press and Registration of Books Act, 1867.

Section 124A:

It seeks to criminalize words that bring “into hatred or contempt, or excite disaffection” towards the government established by law.
In India, the law is in abeyance, although not formally struck down.
Yet, the logic of the law of sedition, which demands reverence to established ideas and to those who espouse them, survives.

Hurting of Sentiments:

India is secular and does not criminalize blasphemy, has a near approximation in the “hurting of sentiments.”
The state recently arrested actor Chetan Kumar and remanded him to 14 days in judicial custody, before granting him bail and threatening to revoke his overseas citizenship, for his tweet on Hindutva.
It would seem that while constitutional courts are examining the validity of the law of sedition, its defining logic has already leaped forward and transplanted itself into several different provisions of law that criminalize speech.

Hierarchy of Social Positions:

The state (through its officials) has appropriated for itself a station quite at the top in the hierarchy of social positions.
Thus, the lowest state functionary addresses the citizen in the most commanding voice, as if that were the natural order of things.
Law-and-order issues arise only when the policeman is challenged — when the citizen heckles the policeman, or bangs at the barricades — but never in the policeman’s own arbitrary commands to the citizenry.

Relations of Power:

In present times, this relationship of power and its attendant courtesies (of normalization, of endorsement) is more explicitly extended to political power, and to all the ideas that such power supports.
The use of law, unless checked by the constitutional courts, often tends to mirror these social-political relations of power.

Defacement:

Offenses are framed mostly against those who challenge political or social power and its attendant narratives.
Theoretically, anybody may be prosecuted for defacement of public property, irrespective of the contents of the graffiti.
In the event, prosecution usually follows the logic of badtameezi, or sedition, focusing mostly on content.
We have always had a problem of entrenched hierarchical relations, most prominently in the form of caste.
- Our understanding of violence (and sexual violence) is mediated by this understanding.
- But for those hierarchies to be now reflected in law, in a way that speech is made prosecutable depending on whom it targets, points to the entangled relationship of law and society.
The courts do not always endorse the prosecutors’ views, and sometimes even call out the power play.

Media One Case:

The Supreme Court pronounced judgment in the Media One case, which addresses the logic of sedition.
It struck down the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s decision to not renew the broadcast license for the channel on grounds that their programming was ‘anti-establishment’, and was a threat to national security.

Mutating logic of sedition:

The Court specifically decried the cavalier manner in which the state uses ‘national security’ as a catch phrase to censor speech.
- The state is using national security as a tool to deny citizens remedies that are provided under the law. This is not compatible with the rule of law.
The judgment speaks to the mutating, resettling logic of the law of sedition.
A homogenized view on issues that range from socio-economic policy to political ideologies would pose grave dangers to democracy.
In that sense, it is even more important than a mere striking down of Section 124A. Only if it is a continued engagement, of course.