The recently concluded 19-day monsoon session of Parliament which ended on September 7 without any orderly debate or passage of legislation, is a blot on India’s experiment in democracy. Although media pundits excoriated all political parties for the daily disruption of both houses of Parliament during the entire monsoon session of the country’s apex legislative forums, the blame for this shameful chapter in the history of post-independence India must be squarely laid on the leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the major opposition party and leader of the National Democratic Alliance.

Admittedly, the BJP leadership in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha had some cause for disrupting the legislative business of Parliament. They were outraged by a report of the comptroller and auditor general (CAG) of India indicting the Congress-led, ten-party UPA government for allegedly allocating 90 coal mining blocks to private sector crony capitalists including front companies and relatives of Union ministers at throwaway prices, thus inflicting a revenue loss conservatively estimated at a mind-boggling Rs.1860,000 crore, the insinuation being that government ministers and the Congress party had received kickbacks for exercising selective discretion.

The CAG report on the allocations of coal blocks owned by the public sector Coal India Ltd based upon debatable assumptions and calculus, was seized upon by the opposition and BJP in particular, to demand the resignation of prime minister Manmohan Singh. During the period between 2007 until early this year, when the coal blocks were discretionally allotted to steel and cement among other companies, he was also the Union minister for coal and in 2004 had circulated a note to state governments inviting their comments on switching to an auction system. Ill-advisedly, the BJP made the resignation of the prime minister the precondition of permitting Parliament to function without organised disruption. The Congress rejoinder is that during its term in office (1999-2004), the BJP-led NDA government had also allocated coal blocks discretionally, and that even after 2004, several BJP state governments had objected in writing to the prime minister’s proposal to switch to the auction system.

Against this murky backdrop, the BJP’s dogged insistence on the prime minister’s resignation as a precondition of parliamentary debate, is a shocking breach of constitutional propriety, tantamount to plain political blackmail. The raison d’etre of Parliament is to debate such issues in an orderly and transparent manner so the relative merits of the contentions and arguments of both parties can be adjudicated at the bar of public opinion. By continuously shouting down the speakers of the Lok and Rajya Sabha, the BJP leadership has committed grave contempt of Parliament and the Constitution, shooting itself in the foot during the run-up to the general election scheduled for 2014. Moreover its myopic party leadership has confirmed the worst fears of liberal and right-thinking citizens that despite its repeated assertions of commitment to democracy, the BJP is driven by fascist and authoritarian ideology, which bodes ill for the country. 

Cavalier invocation of sedition law

The leaders of India’s independence movement, Bhagat Singh, Mahatma Gandhi, and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, social activist Dr. Binayak Sen, writer Arundhati Roy and cartoonist Aneesh Trivedi have suffered a common fate: they were all accused of sedition under a law incorporated into the antiquated Indian Penal Code, 1860 (s.124 A). In fact, according to a research study of the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, and the NGO Alternative Law Forum, between 2009 and February 2011, 14 journalists, activists and academics were charged with sedition.

The phrasing of the non-bailable s.124 A is sweeping. Any attempt to “bring into hatred or contempt’’ or “excite disaffection’’ towards the Central or state governments could result in life imprisonment. Under this draconian law, Dr. Binayak Sen, a respected paediatrician and human rights activist, was sentenced to life imprisonment by the additional sessions judge, Raipur, in 2009 and spent over two years in jail (including four months in solitary confinement), before the Supreme Court upheld his bail petition. Incredibly, even protesters at the Kudankulam nuclear site in Tamil Nadu have been charged with sedition.

On the other hand, not a single member of Parliament, or even the secessionary hate-spewing Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena has ever been charged under this widely-worded law. Curiously, there seems little awareness within the judiciary and the intelligentsia of the glaring contradiction between s. 124 A and Article 19 (1) (a) of the Constitution which guarantees all citizens freedom of speech and expression as a fundamental right. The latest victim of s.124 A is Aneesh Trivedi, a cartoonist and activist of Anna Hazare’s India Against Corruption movement, who was arrested on the charge of sedition by Mumbai police on September 8. His alleged offence: publishing cartoons highlighting corruption, with one of them derogatively depicting the Ashoka pillar, a national symbol.

Clearly, it’s high time the courts came down heavily on the Central and state governments for cavalierly misusing this provision, which abridges the citizen’s constitutional right to freedom of speech and expression. It’s pertinent to note that in the US, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of an individual who had publicly burnt the national flag, on grounds that every citizen is endowed with a constitutional right of freedom of expression. In India, there’s an urgent need for the courts and intelligentsia to speak up similarly against cavalier abridgement of the right to free speech and expression.

Cartoons and writings have also aroused the ire of the West Bengal government and even the social media are under threat of censorship. Certainly there is a case for reasonable restrictions being imposed to curb inflammatory writings and speech which incite religious, caste and communal hatred. But to curb such activity, there are other provisions of IPC (ss 153, 153-A and 153-B) which can be invoked to charge and imprison offenders. To invoke the grave charge of sedition — which should only be used in exceptional circumstances — is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.