Sections 153-A and 295-A of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 (IPC) have persistently played an integral part in political and legal discourse, forming part of the State response to everything from tweets to riots.


Over the past eight years, there has been a near six-fold increase in the number of cases registered under section 153-A.


The more infamous recent examples include:


– a case registered in May 2022 against Ratan Lal, a Delhi University professor, for comments he made about the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh (UP)


– a first information report (FIR) in 2021 by the Ghaziabad police, also in UP, against journalists Rana Ayyub, Saba Naqvi, Mohammad Zubair and others over tweets about an elderly Muslim man being beaten


– a June 2022 case registered against 30 people, including now-suspended Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson Nupur Sharma, by the Delhi police, in connection with the controversial comments about the Prophet, which led to violent clashes in many parts of the country.


In this climate of communally-charged violence and the state’s uneven response to it, the relevance of understanding and engaging with these legal provisions cannot be understated.


Most commonly understood as part of the legal tools to combat hate speech in India, sections 153-A and 295-A of the IPC are directed towards curbing offensive speech per se, even when not accompanied by violent conduct.


Section 153-A is primarily invoked in contexts where offensive speech is used to whip up tensions between groups on various grounds or disturb public tranquillity, and section 295-A is invoked in cases of offensive speech targeting religious feelings of certain persons.


Both these clauses (as well as others associated with curbing ‘hate speech’) are derided by commentators for being used more often to combat merely inconvenient speech rather than problematic speech, and are flagged by lawyers as being overbroad in their restriction of legally permissible speech.

Here, I hope to take the existing conversations on these clauses forward.

Read more - https://article-14.com/post/pursuing-unity-through-lathis-the-pitfalls-of-arming-the-state-to-secure-social-harmony-62aa949a6f4ca