 The Delhi police finally filed a charge sheet against the JNU students Kanaya Kumar, Umar Khaled and several others on charges of sedition. The Delhi police filed sedition charges against JNU students and Shaheen Bagh activists Rajilima. Sedition. Sedition. Sedition. Sedition. The Bharatiya Janta Party's favorite tool for dissenters has once again come to its rescue as the anti-CA and RC protests have erupted across the country. The draconian law has been used without restraint to intimidate the protesters. The most bizarre case of this use was in Karnataka, where the state has filed a sedition case against the management of a school for staging a play which reportedly had anti-CA sentiments. On top of that, the school children who performed in the play haven't made the subject of the investigation. The section 124A of the Indian Penal Code defines sedition as an offense committed by a person by words either spoken or written by science or visible representation which brings or attempts to bring hatred or contempt, excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the government of India. Here disaffection is described as disloyalty and feeling of enmity. The gravity of the misuse of this law could be understood by the fact that in the last four years there have been 186 cases of sedition with only four convictions in the country. Each government has failed, perhaps knowingly, in differentiating between the country and the government, but they most certainly cannot be treated as the same. There are a large number of people outside the government who belong to and represent their country just as much. Any government on the other hand represents a country only for a specific period of time. It's been observed that whenever a government wants to curb the free flow of expression, the sedition law is used to reduce a person to an anti-national and discredit their dissent. Some of the people who have been on the receiving end of such attacks are Arun Dati Roy, doctor and human rights activist Benayak Sen, cartoonist Asin Trivedi, student leader Kanhaiya Kumar and hundreds of tribals from Jharkhand. In his book The Great Repression, the story of sedition in India, author and columnist Chitran Shal Sena gives many examples of cases being filed on insubstantial ground. In his book His Sites and Indian Express report, which mentions a case of Karnataka's Idindha Karai and Kundan Kulam villages where 8,956 people have been slapped with sedition cases since 2011. And why? Because of their sustained protests against the commissioning of the coaster Kundan Kulam nuclear power plant. A police officer probing the case even said, and I quote, These were all cases to scare them. When I look back after five years, I see that those sedition charges on 8,000 random people did serve the purpose. To understand the origin of sedition, we need to go back to the British era. Yes, that's right. That's when this law had emerged. In 1832, a member of the Viceroy's Council, James Fism Steffens, wrote persecutions for sedition in England. Then in 1837, the Indian Law Commission headed by T. B. Macaulay wrote the original draft of the IPC. Though section 124 made its official entry in the IPC in 1870 when it was allegedly brought in to counter the Wahhabi activities. The first case of sedition was registered in 1891 when the editor of a newspaper called Bangobasi published an article criticizing the age of consent bill. The charges were later dropped when the editor issued an apology. But the famous trial of 1897 changed the perception of this law when Bal Gangadhar Tilak was charged with sedition twice in 1897 and in 1917 for its speeches and writings in his newspaper KSRI. And because of its sketchy interpretation, the law was then again used against the leaders who British thought are disloyal to their government. Lawyers like Mahatma Gandhi were also charged with sedition under the British rule. The irony is that the British, who introduced the law in India, no longer practice it themselves. You can ask that when we have a fundamental right like freedom of speech in the constitution, how is a person charged under sedition for making comments? To understand this, we spoke with Sadan Farasher, an advocate with the Supreme Court. Sedition is a provision which has been used a lot in recent times. It's in 124A of the Indian Penal Court. So really speaking, if you look at the text, it's really broad. It basically, the text would cover anybody who criticizes the government of the day and then that would be subject to legal punishment of imprisonment which extends up to life. Now this provision is of course a provision which was introduced in the Indian Penal Court by the colonial government and it suited the objectives of the colonial government. There was substantial amount of debate whether this provision should continue after India got independence and was a constitutional republic and there were two high courts in the initial years post 1950 which set it aside as unconstitutional because in the text of it effectively bars all kinds of criticism of the government. However, subsequently in the Kedarnath judgment, the constitution bench of the Supreme Court when it considered the constitutionality of this provision said that if we go by the text of course this will be unconstitutional but we are when we construe a statute or a provision of a statute we are required to see if by giving it an interpretation which is reading it down if we can still uphold it to be a constitutional and therefore they sort of put forth certain conditionalities and thereafter held it to be constitutional. Now effectively the conditionality what they held is is that just plain criticism the two broad points which they held to keep it simple. One is just plain criticism of the government of the day is not by itself sedition at all and it is not a specific bunch of people who are running the government of the day but the attempt has to be to de-establish the entire governmental machinery which runs the country. It's not a criticism of those people who are occupying the chair of the government of the day but really speaking the government which runs the country if that is sought to be de-established or any of the other things which are stated then the provision can kick in and even in that context it is not just criticism or other kinds of you know verbiage use of verbiage which will be against the government but really speaking it has to incite some kind of a violence to de-establish the government and if it's only a very proximate language which clearly or proximately is seeking to incite that kind of a violence that can it can cover under sedition at all. Now thereafter there have been cases which have come to the Supreme Court but this judgment really has held the key for interpretation. The problem which has been happening is that in case of sedition when the authorities on the ground apply this provision they use it in the exact context in which the Supreme Court has said it should not be used. Now if we presently look at for instance the Karnataka case where a mother of a child who participated in a NTCA play in a school has been booked in sedition and as of today she is still in custody this is clearly a case which Kedarnath said cannot be covered under sedition but the problem with what happens is that by the time the law takes this process I mean the law sort of runs its course and she gets a bail and maybe when the trial does not start or charges are not even framed but in that process the person is damaged and this is a classically good example to show that because a woman today is in jail for what is clearly by the Supreme Court held to be not seditious and therefore when we have a provision as broad as this and what we have seen is that the police is not able to either consciously or maybe by design see that in cases where sedition does not have to be applied as interpreted by the Supreme Court they go ahead and apply it basically as a political tool to stop a view which a government of the day does not lie and I think that has been the biggest problem now sedition also requires for charges to be framed a sanction under the CRPC now that of course the government may or may not grant but the question which arises is by the time the sanction is required like all other cases of sanction at the stage of the when the trial court takes cognizance of the offense now that stage arrives after of course investigation if a charge sheet is filed along with the charge sheet a sanction order is required but by that time is still a substantial amount of damage may happen so the government may eventually choose not to give sanction for the offense of sedition but the person may have spent few weeks or months or even possibly in some cases years is unlikely but at least a few weeks or months on the allegation the allegation of sedition even though finally a government says this is not actually sedition and therefore the we can't grant sanction so I think that's the fundamental problem with this law which is its broad text allows the police to misuse it in cases where it should not be used as held by the Supreme Court and that's where we stand today another problem with the sedition law is that more than the punishment the process of fighting the case is a punishment in itself as the constitutional jurist and senior advocate to the Supreme Court Fahli Nariman had pointed out in an article in the Indian Express that mere expression of hate and even contempt for one's government are not sedition