How to Read a Sentence: The Supreme Court’s Order in Mahmudabad’s Case https://indconlawphil.wordpress.com/2025/05/21/how-to-read-a-sentence-the-supreme-courts-order-in-mahmudabads-case/
May 21, 2025 Gautam Bhatia One might expect the Court to explain why a Facebook post that fulsomely praised the Indian Armed Forces, before going on to gently suggest that the optics of having a Muslim woman army officer address the army’s press conference would remain only optics without addressing violence against Muslims, merits this judicial response of blood, thunder, and steel. One would search in vain. In its two-page order, the Supreme Court does not consider the substance of the allegations against Mahmudabad, and whether his Facebook post, on a plain reading, meets the ingredients of the offences that he has been accused of (and imprisoned for)...The Court says that it is setting up this SIT “to holistically understand the complexity of the phraseology employed and for proper appreciation of some of the expressions used in these two online posts.”
Article 19(2). of the Constitution does not proscribe unpatriotic speech, no matter what our personal views on the subject. The reasons for this are two-fold, and they are important. First, what constitutes “patriotism” is deeply subjective, and not at all susceptible to judicial standards – certainly not enough to imprison a man over.
the Constitution very sensibly does not outlaw “unpatriotic” speech: it, and the framers, recognised that it is futile to try and criminalise contested concepts out of existence. I believe this point important to make, because sometimes the effect of good legal strategy in a particular case can be to narrow the bounds of constitutional rights and freedoms for all other cases. In our desire to affirm Mahmudabad’s patriotism, thus, it is equally necessary to affirm that the Constitution is not in the business of compelling patriotism; it only steps in where speech constitutes incitement to violence or public disorder, and not before.