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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Over the years, poets, students, and even a village have been booked under the sedition law -Chakshu Roy

Over the years, poets, students, and even a village have been booked under the sedition law -Chakshu Roy

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published Published on Feb 14, 2021   modified Modified on Feb 27, 2021

-The Indian Express

Governments past and present have used a colonial-era law to charge many ‘seditious’ men and women, most recently during the farmer protests, when a series of cases were filed against journalists and politicians.

The Central Hall of Parliament doubles up as a portrait gallery. On its walls hang portraits of leaders who shaped the destiny of India. If a viceroy from British India were to walk into the hall today, his mind will find a different commonality between the portraits of M K Gandhi, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Jawaharlal Nehru, Abul Kalam Azad and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. All seditious men, he would think, rightly jailed by the government of British India.

Governments past and present have used a colonial-era law to charge many more ‘seditious’ men and women, most recently during the farmer protests, when a series of cases were filed against journalists and politicians. The crime of sedition first found mention in the draft Indian Penal Code of 1837. Englishman Thomas Macaulay was responsible for codifying the mishmash of laws applicable in different parts of the country into a draft code. Macaulay had studied law at Cambridge but never seriously practised it. He ventured into writing and politics and even after being elected to the House of Commons (twice), he found his political and financial future bleak. A yearly salary of 10,000 pounds was 34-year-old Macaulay’s incentive for coming to India as a member of the Governor General’s council and chairing the first law commission.

Macaulay’s draft code provided that anyone who by speaking or writing attempts to “excite feelings of disaffection” towards the government in the territories of the East India Company will be punished with banishment for life or with imprisonment for three years. The clause did not use the word sedition and was loosely modelled on old English law. The draft code was finished in 1837 and the mutiny of 1857 catalysed its becoming into law in 1860, a year after Macaulay’s death. But the law missed out on including the clause related to sedition. The ‘mistake’ was rectified 10 years later by the insertion of Section 124A in the penal code.

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The Indian Express, 14 February, 2021, https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/bal-gangadhar-tilak-mahatma-gandhi-sedition-law-chakshu-roy-7187591/?fbclid=IwAR2FVBbO4s3TcEbD_ykWYKamodLa-crJke3NjwOkX-EDMW_5_-aN6OOUHdU


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