One of the reasons that India continues to hold on to colonial-era laws governing sedition, criminal defamation and so on is the assumption that the collective wisdom of the people does not match up to the individual wisdom of parliamentarians.
In a session titled “Draconian laws: Defamation, sedition, contempt and privileges” at The Huddle here on Saturday, Tathagata Satpathy, MP, and Manish Tewari, politician, agreed on the tone-deafness of Parliament towards the public desire to amend these draconian laws. The two of them, and Gautam Bhatia, lawyer, were in conversation with Mini Kapoor of The Hindu .
“One unique characteristic of government is that it has made itself completely knowledge-proof. It does not allow any strain of knowledge to permeate and define it. Thus when you have a reversal, when the Opposition becomes the government, it ends up confronting the bureaucracy, which is the permanent government in residence. Attitudes change the moment you shift your seat. How you look at an issue depends on where you sit,” Mr. Tewari said.
Mr. Satpathy, who has introduced a private members’ Bill to decriminalise defamation, said that filing such a Bill, unfortunately, did not amount to very much. In free India, there had so far been only two such Bills which had been passed, both in the time of Jawaharlal Nehru.
“I personally feel that decriminalising the defamation law is an essential act to ensure a healthy society. Unless we have the freedom of speech, with due regard to the person or institution against whom you are speaking, you cannot have a healthy society. These laws were enforced by the British. They used them to clamp down on the slave population. But now, even after nearly 70 years of being a free country, we have not been able to evolve and free ourselves from the shackles of these colonial laws,” he said.
Haze of glory
A similar shackle enforced by the British which continues to endure in the country is the contempt of court law.
“Contempt of court is an English law, and the idea was to maintain a ‘haze of glory’ — that’s the official language used — so that if the court is criticised, it allows it to come down heavily on the critic. If you look at jurisdictions in South Africa, the U.K. or the U.S., they have narrowed down the scope of contempt to a very tiny degree. There, for example, if you attribute racist motivations against judges, then that amounts to contempt — the reason being that judges, unlike others, cannot answer back in public. Unfortunately here, we have a very wide definition of contempt. We need a more carefully worded law; we need to ensure that the scope of contempt is narrowed down ... ,” Mr. Bhatia said.
The sedition law is the one that needs a completely new interpretation. Mr. Tewari pointed out that the definition of sovereignty itself was under challenge now. With the Internet becoming the largest ungoverned space, it was only a question of time until virtual sovereignties emerged.
“And these virtual nations will have to be recognised and therefore, you will have a kind of a serious redefinition of the concept of sovereignty. To repeal the sedition law, which needs to be done, will entail looking at the idea of sovereignty at first,” Mr. Tewari said.
