Who Is An Enemy Of The State?

Ordinary citizens face the peril of draconian laws increasingly invoked by the state to stifle dissent

- Kaushik Deka

ON February 14, when Delhi Police arrested 21-year old Bengaluru-based climate activist Disha Ravi and slapped charges of sedition on her, two distinct narratives emerged in the media. One group of people branded Ravi, who has been accused of making edits on a controversial online ‘toolkit’ to allegedly defame India, an enemy of the state. The other called the Delhi Police act ion another instance of the blatant abuse of the sedition law by people in power to curb dissenting voices. And it’s not just Ravi. In January this year, three sedition cases were filed against Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor and six journalists, including India Today Group’s Rajdeep Sardesai, for tweeting “unverified” news about the farmers’ tractor rally in Delhi on January 26. Last year, Section 124A of the IPC (Indian Penal Code), which deals with sedition, was invoked against nearly two dozen people protesting the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in January-February. Back in February 2016, Jawaharlal Nehru University students Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid were taken into custody on the same charge for allegedly raising seditious slogans on the occasion of Afzal Guru’s death anniversary at the university campus in Delhi.

Are the authorities misreading the scope of sedition? According to Article 14, an independent research initiative founded by a group of lawyers, academics and journalists, 10,938 individuals were booked in 816 sedition cases across India between 2010 and 2020. While the popular discourse tends to blame the Union government—it’s responsible only for Delhi Police and central agencies—the state governments are the ones which invoke this provision frequently as law and order is a state subject. Five states—Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and Karnataka—accounted for nearly 65 percent of the sedition cases.