On March 30, the Lahore High Court annulled the offence of ‘sedition’ in the Pakistan Penal code. Embarrassingly, around the same time in India, the police registered a series of complaints in Delhi and in Ahmedabad, and also arrested several people, including owners of the printing presses involved, for posting anti-government (and specifically, anti-Modi) posters across town. The detainees were not accused of ‘sedition,’ but were booked for criminal conspiracy to cause public mischief and to deface public property. The printing press is alleged to have breached some provision of the Press and Registration of Books Act, 1867.
A rose by any other name
The law that was struck down in Lahore is almost identical to India’s Section 124A, which seeks to criminalise words that bring “into hatred or contempt, or excite disaffection” towards the government established by law. In India, too, a challenge is pending before the Supreme Court. The law is in abeyance, although not formally struck down. Yet, the logic of the law of sedition, which demands reverence to established ideas and to those who espouse them, survives. Pakistan has a thriving practice in the use of the law of blasphemy, exercised usually on its poorest citizens. India, which is secular and does not criminalise blasphemy, has a near approximation in the “hurting of sentiments.” The state recently arrested actor Chetan Kumar and remanded him to 14 days in judicial custody, before granting him bail and threatening to revoke his overseas citizenship, for his tweet on Hindutva. It would seem that while constitutional courts are examining the validity of the law of sedition, its defining logic has already leaped forward and transplanted itself into several different provisions of law that criminalise speech.
