If criticism of government is seditious, many journalists will be locked up

As in the case of JNU student leader Kanhaiya Kumar, the police have charged former Delhi University lecturer S.A.R. Geelani with sedition, and a trial magistrate in Delhi refused to give him bail on Friday, arguing, “ Since the accused, along with 20 to 25 youth, raised anti-national slogans... it can be inferred that they intended to bring the Government of India into contempt with likelihood of eruption of violence and public disorder.”

If bringing a government into contempt could be deemed seditious — just as in colonial times — many journalists and columnists will have to be locked up. They routinely make mince-meat of governments. Under IPC 124-A, as interpreted by the Supreme Court in 1961, hostile speech against the state, not the government, can be seen as sedition provided it is accompanied by incitement to violence, not otherwise.

The poor trial magistrate clearly had no idea of the facts of the case, so he cleverly used the word “inferred” in relation to the question of incitement to violence and public disorder.

As is not unusual, the police did not do their job in gathering the facts to present to the court.

This writer was present in the premises of the Press Club of India on February 10, when Mr Geelani and his cohorts were holding forth. His meeting was in the Club’s first floor small hall, while I was in the lawn at an obituary gathering along with some twenty other journalists and other friends of the late Kewal Varma of Business Standard and the Telegraph.

From time to time, we heard occasional sloganeering, but the words were muffled even from a distance of less than fifty metres.

I assumed Club employees were engaged in some trade union action somewhere on the premises. It was only two days later that I learnt that it was a Kashmir group raising slogans in support of Afzal Guru.

Mr Geelani has drawn the ire of many as he had been charged in the Parliament House attack case in 2001, along with Guru, who was convicted and hanged. He got due process in its entirety, but some in the country and many in the Kashmir Valley felt he did not get a fair trial. Mr Geelani was acquitted for want of sufficient evidence while Guru was convicted.

If we hold that Guru was convicted in a transparent and fair legal process, we must accept that Mr Geelani was allowed to go free through exactly the same clean process.

Legally and constitutionally he cannot, therefore, continue to be regarded with suspicion.

That would make Indian democracy look pathetically infantile, and dim India’s much-vaunted soft power. And, if the former DU lecturer is not seen with suspicion, then it is hard to hold him to the guilt of sedition.

As an Indian national, he has the constitutional latitude to call for Kashmir’s freedom, to exalt Pakistan or any country of his choosing, and to treat as “martyrs” those who have been sent to the gallows by the Indian state, although all of these may be deeply offensive to many of us.

As for the trial magistrate’s inference that Mr. Geelani’s speech and sloganeering at the PCI premises- if indeed he personally had raised the controversial slogans — constituted incitement to violence, then it is worth asking who would he have tried to incite when those sitting barely 50 metres away downstairs from him couldn’t make out what was being said through the slogans.

Let’s face it, it was a plain and simple memorial meeting for Afzal Guru that many Kashmir groups hold annually in an effort to keep the “flame” alive.

To get carried away, and bring the harshest provisions of the law to deal with such matters does no credit to the Indian state and can only be grist to the mill of the secessionists.