South Asian Women in the Media (SAWM), India chapter, welcomes the Supreme Court order which quashed the criminal complaint against senior journalist Vinod Dua, underlined the importance of free speech and believes the media must be protected from sedition.
In the past year, there has been a sustained attempt to pressurize journalists in one way or another so they are not critical of the government. Five journalists were arrested in January this year—including on sedition charges—the highest number since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Data compiled by Article 14, an independent media and research group, has noted that the number of sedition cases has steadily risen in the past decade.
It is unfortunate that there has been an increasing trend by the ruling regime to stifle any criticism against the government. The free functioning of the fourth estate is essential to democracy.
It is welcome that the Supreme Court has chosen a critical time — when the fear of government reprisal is real and Facebook posts can lead to arrests — to note that that “strong words’’ of disapproval about the government do not amount to sedition. The highest Court observed that it was the right of every journalist to criticise, even brutally, the government with a view to improving or altering them.
In fact, this right to honest and reasonable criticism is a source of strength, rather than a weakness, the judgment observed.
The apex court also upheld the spirit and intent of the 1962 Kedar Nath Singh verdict, which said “commenting in strong terms upon the measures or acts of government, or its agencies, so as to ameliorate the condition of the people or to secure the cancellation or alteration of those acts or measures by lawful means, that is to say, without exciting those feelings of enmity and disloyalty which imply excitement to public disorder or the use of violence is not sedition.
SAWM hopes that the order will force the government to re-examine the charges against Siddique Kappan, the journalist who has been in jail since October 2020, while he was on his way to report on the gruesome gang rape and murder in Hathras.
SAWM urges the government to immediately repeal the draconian sedition law, a vestige of the colonial era. It was imposed by the British to stop Indians from speaking out, and has routinely been used by governments to harass journalists. It is now time for it to be deleted from the law books.