-Kafila.org News reports are indicating that an FIR has been registered with respect to a public meeting organized on the JNU campus on the evening of 9th February. These reports claim that the meeting was about the hanging of Afzal Guru, and it is alleged that during its course, some people raised incendiary slogans. According to reports, the FIR has been registered under Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code (sedition),...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: Alarmed by stringent criticism of his government, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis on Saturday said the controversial order on sedition charges will be scrapped as early as possible. "We are scrapping the controversial circular. We do not require it. We will inform the Bombay high court accordingly," Fadnavis told TOI. In response to a petition filed by cartoonist Aseem Trivedi and a public interest litigation by Narendra Sharma, a...

-The Hindu With its judgment to strike down a legal provision for violating freedom of speech, the Supreme Court has paved the way for thoughtful jurisprudence in the age of the Internet While describing Sec.124A of the IPC (sedition) as the "prince among the political sections designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen", Mahatma Gandhi offered us an ironic way of thinking about liberty-curbing laws through the metaphor of illegal tyrants....

-The Hindu Ongoing agitation in Kudankulam illustrates how State criminalises popular protest To what extent will the State go to criminalise an agitation, especially a prolonged popular struggle against a project seen by the government as a vital necessity, but as a hazard by the people living in its vicinity? It will charge the protesters with grave offences such as “waging war” and “sedition” regardless of whether there is any basis. The ongoing...

The speed and determination with which the Tamil Nadu government has been slapping its citizens right, left and centre with colonial-era laws, it would seem as if a full-fledged war of independence is raging in the fishing villages of Idinthakarai and Kudankulam along the coast of Tamil Nadu. According to findings by a team led senior journalist Sam Rajappa, in just four months between September (when the protest movement against the...