Concerned over the misuse of India’s sedition law, the Supreme Court on Monday said that it will define the contours of the colonial era penal provision to indicate what does and does not constitute sedition. It is time we define what is sedition and what is not,” said a bench headed by justice Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud as it restrained the Andhra Pradesh government from taking adverse action against two Telugu news channels booked under Section 124A (sedition) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). History of the lawIndia’s sedition law has an interesting past -- it was introduced by the British in 1870, and almost dropped from the Constitution in 1948 after discussions of the Constituent Assembly. In its judgment in the Kedar Nath case in 1962, a Constitution bench upheld the validity of the sedition law under IPC and also defined the scope of it. According to the data from the National Crime Records Bureau, uploaded on its website, cases of sedition and under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act showed a rise in 2019, but only 3% of the sedition cases resulted in convictions.

Source: Hindustan Times May 31, 2021 18:33 UTC