Why India at 75 is ready for a sedition-less future https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/why-india-at-75-is-ready-for-a-sedition-less-future-7430939/ Upendra Baxi writes: Section 124-A needs to be wholly judicially repealed at the bar of the fundamental human right to free speech..
Kedar Nath (1962) did not go this far but the SC held that it was “reasonably clear” that the IPC punishes only “such activities as would be intended, or have a tendency, to create disorder or disturbance of public peace by resort to violence”. Put differently, “disloyalty to a government established by law is not the same thing as commenting in strong terms upon the measures or acts of the government, or its agencies”...Already, some law luminaries have found new stirrings of hope in the Supreme Court, while some others have insisted that we must not void the section but rather, as the learned attorney general observed, find constitutional ways and practical means to prevent the abuse and misuse of law.
The policy question is simple: Is the mighty sovereign Indian Republic so vulnerable to public and media criticism as to require the continuation of a colonial and repressive law? Directing the Government of India Press, on the pain of sanction, not to publish the voided sections of the law, or provisions which are read down, may be a necessary first step, but the real problem is to make political executive and law enforcement officials take most seriously the judicial directions reading down the criminal statutes...Any creation of “public disorder” or “disturbance of public tranquility” is already upheld as a reasonable restriction in other draconian collective security laws in the State’s arsenal, though even these would not justify uses of criminal law outside its stated purposes.
Democratic legality thrives on the axiom that powers given by the law must be exercised for the purpose for which it is given and for no other.