Between 2009 and February 2011, at least 14 people were charged with sedition in India London: The typical citizen could be forgiven for fearing that the world’s largest democracy is hurtling towards George Orwell’s 1984 rather than 2013. In late August the government’s department of telecommunications, citing the “communal tensions” around Assam, blocked more than 300 individual web addresses, including the Twitter profile pages of some journalists. It also ordered a limit...

-The Business Standard SC's order on trial coverage is prone to misuse The Supreme Court has ruled that if publishing news concerning a trial creates “a real and substantial risk of prejudice to the proper administration of justice or to the fairness of trial”, the court could allow a postponement of its publication through an appropriate order. The order was passed on complaints that had alleged breach of confidentiality during the...

-The Hindu We live in a legal environment where the rule of sub judice is regarded as an anachronism, emanating from a time when all trials were decided by jurors susceptible to influence by what was published in the press. By and large, the law of sub judice, which regulates the dissemination of matter under the consideration of the court, is a dead letter. In such a context, the Supreme Court’s...

-The Economic Times "Sedition" is a legal construct from less enlightened times, when the sovereign power claimed a divine sanction and subjects were expected to live in awe and fear. So what is republican India doing, in its seventh decade, in bringing a charge of sedition against a self-publishing cartoonist with a propensity for scatology and lurid imagery? A convulsive attack of folly that the agencies of the Indian state have...

-The Indian Express Concerned about instances of reporting that breached confidentiality and threatened to hurt litigants, the Supreme Court has been, for a while, contemplating the way to regulate the journalistic coverage of ongoing cases. While the court has done well to refuse to lay down any overarching rule for all sub-judice cases, it did make a significant and troubling change by allowing a case-by-case appeal for postponing media coverage. Essentially,...