Sedition and Western Liberal Democracies

The second chapter leads to separate inquiries into the political history of the law of sedition in the three western liberal democracies, namely, England, USA, and Australia, based upon legislations, judicial trials, targets of the law and its relationship with counterterror legislations. In each country, there is one specific moment in relation to sedition that gains prominence through the course of study. The chapter offers a framework of three specific moments, namely, ‘abolition’, ‘restriction’, ‘modernization’, which most effectively define the place of sedition in that particular country.

Political Offences and Speech Crimes

The first chapter is a comparative chapter on four legal regimes namely England, USA, Australia, and India dealing with political offences and speech crimes. The chapter analyses two particular paradigms to study the existence of sedition as an offence: first, the conventional paradigm of ‘violence as a physical act of force’ and second, the non-conventional paradigm of ‘violence through words’. Within the first paradigm, sedition is compared with the allied political offences of (a) treason, (b) incitement to disaffection/violence/overthrow, and (c) political conspiracies. Within the second paradigm, sedition is compared with four speech crimes, (a) personal libel, (b) hate speech, (c) blasphemy, and (d) pornography. Both levels of comparison offer deductions about specificity of sedition as a political speech act creating a discord within the value framework of liberal democracies.

Introduction

On 1 February 2017 at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, mob violence erupted on campus with 1,500 protesters demanding the cancellation of a public lecture by Milo Yiannopoulos, a British author notorious for his alleged racist and anti-Islamic views.1 Consequently, the event was cancelled triggering a chain of reactions on the desirability and limits of freedom of expression within American democracy. The Left-leaning intellectuals and politicians were accused of allowing the mob violence to become a riot on campus defending it in the name of protest against racism, fascism, and social injustice. In defending the rights of the protesters to not allow ‘illiberal’ or hate speech on campus, however, many claimed that the message conveyed was that only liberals had the right to free speech....

Conclusion

The life of a law exists both within and beyond the statute books and courts’ interpretations. This assertion has been made in this work in the exploration of the journey of the law of sedition primarily at three levels—the first concerns itself with analysing the language of the law of sedition; the second, with studying the judicial discourse on sedition; and the third pertains to interrogating the quotidian aspects of law as it unfolds on the ground. While this work offers a focused study on Indian democracy at all these levels, it has broadened its scope by including experiences from the liberal democracies of the west in its analysis. This work has used sedition as a lens to probe the fate of political speech in liberal democracies which 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. Despite the claims to protection, the working of such democracies has shown that the freedom of speech in relation to political speeches particularly has always been in danger. The liberal-democratic space has continued to shrink for dissident voices despite the progression of liberal democracies towards free speech jurisprudence and annulment or modification of laws related to sedition....

Indian Democracy and the ‘Moment of Contradiction’

The sixth chapter theorizes the patterns emerging in the working of the law of sedition in India by identifying specific themes along which the law has been used. It focuses on the quotidian life of the law in the hands of the state executives who have the power of law enforcement. It chronicles the various cases of sedition in contemporary times, its use against anti-nuclear movement, students’ organizations, communal politics, the dominant discourse of nation, and so on. Through these narratives, also emerges the idea of sedition in public imaginings and its identification with what is loosely termed as ‘anti-national’ or deshdroh. It also theorizes the relationship between the routine law of sedition and the exceptional or extraordinary counter terror laws. Through the patterns identified, this chapter identifies the Indian liberal democracy being characterized by a ‘moment of contradiction’ in relation to the offence of sedition.

Sedition and the Judicial Discourse in Postcolonial India

It traces the discourse on freedom of expression in postcolonial idea, the security imperatives of the state, the political history of the law of sedition post-Independence and its journey within the courts. Through this, an attempt at conceptualizing public order, security of state and other grounds along which the act of sedition is penalized, is made. This chapter begins with debates on sedition within the Constituent Assembly and systematically takes these debates to the higher courts in India employing legal hermeneutics to read into the judgements and deduce a theory of sedition coming from the judiciary. The chapter treats the judicial pronouncements as contributing to the study of sedition as a speech act to identify what emerges as the crime of sedition within the legal-juridical regime in India.

Resistance, Suppression, and Patriotism

This chapter discusses the idea of sedition from its inception within the legal code by the colonial regime and the different meanings that it acquired within colonial India. It proposes that the idea of sedition within colonial India took shape within two different discourses: the judicial and the political. These two discourses are treated as two frameworks to look at the different meanings, deployments and the politics of sedition, through a detailed study of the use of the law and various trials related to it. Subsequently it tries to see how the colonized subjects responded to the concept of sedition within the two discourses to conclude what sedition meant in colonial times. The focus of the chapter is on the early trials involving the nationalists and the emerging idea of sedition as political resistance.

Caste, Class, Community, and the Everyday Tales of Law

This chapter juxtaposes the understanding of sedition emerging from the higher judiciary with the practice of the law on the ground. The chapter is primarily field based which looks at sedition in its everydayness intertwined with the social order based on caste, class, and community in India. It proceeds through a study undertaken of three specific regions of Haryana, Maharashtra, and Punjab. The regions, are not chosen as field sites; in fact, they emerged as field areas following the case law method in which the intertwined dynamics of sedition with sociopolitical variables, lend it a different character. This included personal visits, face to face interviews, and the attempts to partially experience the lived realities of the actors involved both at the level of state institutions and otherwise.