Liberal democracies claim to give constitutional and legal protection of varying degrees to the right to free speech of which political speech and the right to dissent are extensions. Within the right to freedom of expression, however, some category of speeches do not enjoy protection as they are believed to be ‘injurious’ to society. One such unprotected form of political speech is sedition which is criminalized for the repercussions it may have on the authority of the government and the state. The cases registered in India in recent months under the law against sedition show that the law in its wide and diverse deployment was used against agitators in a community-based pro-reservation movement, a group of university students for their alleged ‘anti-national’ statements, anti-liquor activists, to name a few. Set against its contemporary use, this book has used sedition as a lens to probe the fate of political speech in liberal democracies. The work is done in a comparative framework keeping the Indian experience as its focus, bringing in inferences from England, USA, and Australia to intervene and contribute to the debates on the concept of sedition within liberal democracies at large. On the basis of an analytical enquiry into the judicial discourse around sedition, the text of the sedition laws, their political uses, their quotidian existence, and their entanglement with the counter-terror legislations, the book theorizes upon the life of the law within liberal democracies.
