The Assam police crossed several lines of propriety while issuing summons to The Wire’s founding editor Siddharth Varadarajan and consulting editor Karan Thapar to appear before the Guwahati crime branch. It sent the summons on the day the Supreme Court issued a notice on the online publication’s petition challenging the constitutional validity of the new sedition law—Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita— and protected them from any “coercive action” by Assam police. The FIR concerns an article mentioning an Indian defence attaché’s claim on fighter jets downed during Operation Sindoor. During the August 12 hearing, Justice Surya Kant had asked, “Does an article pose an imminent threat to the unity and integrity of the country?”
The law of sedition has been criticised for long. Citing a sharp increase in its use since 2016, senior journalist Sashi Kumar had filed an intervention plea with the Supreme Court in 2021 challenging the Indian Penal Code’s Section 124A, the earlier provision on sedition. Worries peaked when the Law Commission suggested its retention in 2023 and the BNS, while replacing the IPC, lowered the bar for weighing offence under it. Acknowledging the possibility of its abuse, the Law Commission had suggested guardrails that included a written police report within seven days showing “cogent evidence” of offence, on which the government would base its decision to lodge an FIR. None of these are in the new law. Neither was the basic requirement of sharing the FIR with the accused initially followed in the case of The Wire.
If reports are inaccurate or indecent, journalists should indeed be hauled up. Other laws can be invoked to seek redress for such faults. However, if democracy is to be protected, the right of journalists to ask questions of the government should be accorded at least as much weight as the State’s prerogative to avert such questions in the name of protecting public order or national security. To level a charge as serious as sedition to tilt the scale the other way is to debilitate democracy itself. It’s not because the law has its roots in the colonial era that it should be repealed, but because of the colonial-minded silencing it’s being used for. A ‘tendency test’ similar to the one invoked in Kedar Nath Singh (1962) should be applied to governments’ intent as well.