Manoj Mitta: Jawaharlal Nehru wanted sedition law out in 1951

By Dilip -
"Now so far as I am concerned that particular section is highly objectionable and obnoxious and it should have no place both for practical and historical reasons, if you like, in any body of laws that we might pass. The sooner we get rid of it the better." 

Jawaharlal Nehru said this about the sedition provision, Section 124A IPC, in Parliament in 1951. The scandal of a cartoonist being thrown behind bars on the charge of sedition comes as a rude reminder, six decades later, that Nehru's promise to scrap this colonial legacy has not been kept. This is despite the fact that the sedition provision has been all through notoriously prone to abuse. Take the Gujarat high court's dismissal in April of five sedition cases filed against TOI's Ahmedabad edition in 2008 by then police commissioner O P Mathur. The provocation for those cases was a series of stories showing Mathur had been rewarded by the then home minister Amit Shah for botching up a fake encounter probe. Mathur and Shah have since been arraigned together by the CBI in the same matter. 

The most controversial conviction for sedition in recent years has been of human rights defenderBinayak Sen, while activist-author Arundhati Roy is facing prosecution for her radical views on Kashmir. The police have also slapped sedition charges on Koodankulam nuclear plant protesters. Most of the cases fly in the face of the condition on which the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the sedition provision in 1962 in the Kedar Nath Singh vs Bihar case. The condition that has been lost sight of is that the sedition law must be invoked only against those found to be inciting violence or armed rebellion.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Jawaharlal-Nehru-wanted-sedition-law-out-as-early-as-1951/articleshow/16343758.cms

See also: Sedition and the death of free speech by Siddharth Narrain, in 
Infochange Agenda # on censorship: The Limits of Freedom

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