When T-Shirts Become Seditious
By Peoples Union for Democratic Rights
13 November, 2014
Countercurrents.org
The course of democracy in India is witnessing a major turn towards
constricting the freedom of expression. Peoples Union for Democratic
Rights has time and again critiqued the use of draconian laws, of
which sedition is a putrid kind, to stifle political dissent and
eliminate political and ideological opposition. However, the recent
use of the law of sedition shows its widening use in a manner which
takes this defacement to the basic freedoms of individuals to express
and conduct themselves in public spaces. Acts such as wearing T-shirts
of a rival cricket team or cheering for it and not standing up for the
national anthem in a theatre are regarded as offence enough to be
charged under the law of sedition. These cases of sedition are far
from being sporadic and random and are part of a chain of events along
the slippery slope of majoritarianism. Most of the cases of sedition
do not result in successful prosecution but the law gives the
government and the police immense and unaccountable powers to arrest
and endlessly detain people as under-trials.
On November 8, 2014, ten school going boys in the Kushinagar district
of Uttar Pradesh, were charged for sedition, for wearing T-shirts of
the Pakistani cricket team during a Muharram procession. Though no
arrests have been made, an FIR against these boys aged 10-12 has been
registered, at the behest of Bhartiya Janta Party MP. Any show of
affection for Pakistani cricket team is tantamount to be anti-India
act and therefore seditious and this has been exemplified time and
again by political authorities. In March this year the Meerut Police
registered a case of sedition against 67 Kashmiri students of Meerut's
Swami Vivekanand Subharti University (SVSU) under pressure from the
BJP party workers for cheering Pakistan’s victory in a cricket match.
Since supporting our arch rival Pakistani cricket team is sedition,
not-standing up for the national anthem certainly becomes seditious!
So when a young boy from Kerala did not stand up in a theatre for the
national anthem, he committed an obnoxious offence of sedition for
which was arrested and denied bail for months by the court.
There was a time in this country when Tilak and Gandhi were convicted
for sedition for the crime of spreading disaffection against the
British Raj. In those times, section 124A of Indian Penal Code
defining the British made law of sedition penalized any expression
that incited feelings of disaffection among the colonized subjects
against the colonial British government. India’s independence from the
colonial rule brought in a native democratically elected government
but not much changed in the domain of the colonial law, except for the
fact that now the government found it expedient to manufacture
affection by penalizing incitement to disaffection (read as absence of
disaffection) against the elected government instead of a colonial
one. However, recognizing that this law had the potential to truncate
the fundamental right to freedom of expression and was theoretically
in dissonance with the values of democracy, the Supreme Court in 1962
authored a progressive judgment in Kedar Nath Singh v. State of Bihar
(AIR 1962 SC 955), qualifying that unless an expression had tendency
to create public disorder through incitement to violence, it can’t be
prosecuted under the law of sedition. It is evident that apex court's
admonitions have made little impact on those tasked to uphold the
constitution and enforce law.
It is actually paradoxical that the a grave act of ‘inciting people to
resort to violence’ or threat of public disorder were all inherent in
the actions of the BJP and its cohorts who pressured police to file
charge of sedition and they openly threaten and use their muscle power
to impose their parochial moral code on the society. The police it
seems have become pall bearers for the bigoted mobs who claim that
their preference over-rides right of citizens. PUDR strongly denounces
these recent attacks on people’s freedom using an archaic law of
sedition and reiterates the demand for its repeal to ensure that
constitutional freedoms are not violated by a nexus of right wing
extremists and the police.
Asish Gupta, D Manjit
(Secretaries)
Peoples Union for Democratic Rights
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