Is There A Cure For A Bad Law?

Sedition Charges Are Being Levelled Against People At An Epidemic Rate. And It’S Going To Get Worse. Is There A Cure For A Bad Law?

- Damayanti Datta

Divya Spandana Ramya is busy on Twitter. She is talking about the welfare of farmers, the Cauvery water row, retweeting Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Happy Teacher’s Day’ message or sending good vibes on Ganesh Chaturthi: ‘May you receive many blessings for your new beginnings.’ But sometimes, just some- times, there’s an unsettling edge to her tweets: “Kid says Mysore ‘Pak’ is very nice. Father says—Be careful, don’t say Pak loudly, you will be labelled deshdrohi :)”. The actor-cum-politician is facing summons from a Karnataka court on October 19. She will need to explain why she should not be punished as a deshdrohi (traitor).

She is not alone. The year 2016 has turned out to be the ‘year of sedition’. Not a month has gone by without one or more people being charged with it (see graphic: This Year of Sedition). The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) figures for 2014 (the first year it started collecting data on sedition) say 47 cases were registered across the country, 58 people arrested and one convicted across nine Indian states—with Bihar leading the list, followed by Jharkhand, Kerala and Odisha. The NCRB’s 2015 numbers are yet to come, but at least 14 sedition charges, filed against 35 people, have been collated by media watchdog, The Hoot. This year, no less than 21 cases have already been lodged against at least 170 citizens. And those are just cases reported in the media. “The number of sedition charges is rising dramatically and most charges are in complete violation of the scope of the sedition law,” says Prashant Bhushan, counsel and member of advocacy group Common Cause, which filed a PIL against “rampant abuse of the law”,with the Supreme Court on August 16, along with S.P. Udayakumar, the anti-nuclear activist facing sedition charges for protesting against the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant project in TamilNadu.