Direction: Read the following passage and answer the questions given below.
Khunti’s sedition cases go back to 2017, and the start of the “Pathalgadi movement”. Adivasis who were faced with the corporate takeover of their land resorted to an innovative form of protest: they began to carve provisions of the Indian Constitution’s Fifth Schedule — that guarantees tribal autonomy — upon stone slabs placed upon the boundaries of the village. The first information reports (FIRs) that follow allege that the police were attacked with “sticks and traditional weapons” (an allegation that the Adivasis dispute); but additionally, the FIRs also state that the leaders of the movement have been “misleading the innocent people in the name of scheduled areas”, and “erecting stone slabs presenting a wrong interpretation of the Constitution”. As a result of these FIRs, individuals spent many months in jail.
The ongoing events in Khunti reveal multiple faultlines in the legal system and multiple faults in those who implement it. A century-and-a-half after it was first enacted into the Indian Penal Code by the colonial government, the vague, ambiguous, and unclear wording of the sedition provision continues to make it ripe for abuse. Sedition is defined as “disaffection” against the government, or bringing it into “hatred or contempt”.
It should be immediately obvious that the scope of these words is boundless and boundlessly manipulable. However, when the sedition law was challenged in 1962, the Supreme Court of India chose to uphold it, while claiming to “narrow it down”. The court noted that only acts that had a “tendency” to cause public disorder would fall within the scope of the section.
As the years since that judgment has shown, however, this dictum had no impact whatsoever on the abuse of the sedition law. To start with “tendency to cause public disorder” was almost as vague as the text or the original section. Second, as long as the section continued to exist in the form that it did, the police could, and did continue to invoke it to stifle protest and dissent; and trial courts could and did continue to refuse bail to jailed people. The failure, thus, extended to every wing of the state: to Parliament, for allowing the provision to remain on the statute books, to the Supreme Court for not striking it down when it had the chance, to State governments and State police, that have found in it a ready tool of oppression, and to lower courts, that enable prolonged incarceration of people under the section.
It hardly needs to be said that “encounters” — and “fake encounters” — take place because there do not exist adequate structures of accountability. Without those structures, the police effectively operate in a zone of impunity. In 2009, the then High Court of Andhra Pradesh passed a landmark judgment, in which it attempted to create a regime of accountability. Central to this regime was the requirement that encounter deaths would be investigated as if they were murder cases. An FIR would have to be registered against the police officers responsible for the encounter, and to the extent that they invoked self-defence, they would have to prove it.