How a Supreme Court judgement brought back the sedition law in India – By A.G. Noorani
Read the newspapers carefully and you will find that second only to murder and rape, the offence which has seized the small minds of our ministers and the police is sedition. It is as if the country is infested with sedition and the people are in a mind to revolt. The offence is initially tried by magistrates, and they have to grapple with the elastic definition of sedition….
Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Annie Besant, the Ali Brothers, Maulana Azad, Gandhi and very many others suffered imprisonment under this archaic, barbaric law. It is to the credit of K.M. Munshi that he single-handedly secured its deletion from the Constitution.
It is the lasting disgrace of the Supreme Court that it brought it back by the back door 14 years later, ignoring totally the Constituent Assembly Debates and the enormous labour preceding it. K.M. Munshi was a member of the Drafting Committee….
