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Why dissent is not sedition in India's democracy

This is a difficult time; this is a time when words like secular are thrown around as abuse, when it becomes important to remind ourselves that a nation is its people.

Basanagouda Patil Yatnal, former union minister in India and BJP MLA from the state of Karnataka, has called H S Doreswamy, a 101-year-old freedom fighter, a 'Pakistan agent'.
This is in apparent retort to the centenarian's criticism of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, implemented by the BJP-led government. The BJP leader is also reported to have said that people who take anti-national positions should be shot.
The MLA's remarks have hit headlines but the normalisation of hate speech and aggressive nationalism is so rapid in new India that it could soon be reduced to news-in-brief spaces.
Yatnal, arguably, is not a leader of national standing but his language is now familiar across India; so familiar he could be the man next door who tells you that "we" need to stick together against "them" and that "foreign-funded" protesters are out to destabilise the nation.
Earlier this week, a court in Karnataka witnessed dramatic scenes after a group of men prevented lawyers from filing a bail petition for three Kashmiri engineering students booked in connection with a case of sedition. News reports quoted the lawyers as saying that some of them were roughed up and their vehicles targeted during the protests, at the Principal District and Sessions Court in Dharwad. The protesting men were also advocates, members of the Hubballi Bar Association, who were following the association's directive that no member should appear in court for the students.
The Karnataka High Court had criticised the bar association's decision and directed the local police to provide security for the lawyers who represent the students. Reports said the protest was staged amid chants of 'bharat mata ki jai'.
The day the advocates turned up in protest, Supreme Court judge Deepak Gupta made pertinent points during his lecture on 'Democracy and Dissent', in New Delhi. He explained why no idea was so holy in the Bar room that it could not be disagreed with. "That is the essence of dissent. If anything, the Bar is a shrine for dissent", he said.
The crushing of voices that question the State or back ideologies that are in conflict with the State is not new in India. Income Tax raids have been a sure-shot formula for State coercion and are now seen as integral to the structure of abusive power in the country.
This, however, is a different time, when the fear of shame is still real but less damning than the fear of being called a traitor.
That some of the advocates have positioned themselves as protesters in the Hubballi case reflects a reality not entirely new in India. The protest in the court, again, points to bigger, contentious questions and how they shape public opinion outside of the courts - What constitutes sedition? Why is dissent against policies of the State increasingly interpreted as sedition? Have we, as a people, defined national well enough for us to see what is anti-national?
What is new is a mobilisation of public outrage; an angry noise to shout down dissent against governments by equating it with a war against the nation, by calling the dissenters agents of the "enemy". What is new is people's representatives, influential politicians and sections of the media aggressively pushing this narrative without even a token touch of balance, calling democratic protests against the government anti-national and leaving the protesters exposed to this collective rage.
The month also saw an Uber driver in Mumbai drive poet Bappaditya Sarkar to a police station after he overheard the "Communist" passenger speaking on his phone about protests against the CAA.
The lines are blurring - lines of reason that become even more important now, when people die and streets burn in communal riots in Delhi, when violence unleashed around the CAA threatens to hit India's liberal, democratic core. This is a difficult time; this is a time when words like secular are thrown around as abuse, when it becomes important to remind ourselves that a nation is its people. Justice Gupta calls majoritarianism the antithesis of democracy. He details dangers in the contention that any government that represents more than 50% of the electorate can afford to ignore the remaining 49% if they oppose the government.
Gupta's talk came a week after another Supreme Court judge, D Y Chandrachud, said use of state machinery to silence dissent was in conflict with what the Constitution conceives as a pluralist society. The judge called dissent a "safety valve" of democracy. "The blanket labelling of dissent as anti-national or anti-democratic strikes at the heart of our commitment to protect constitutional values and the promotion of deliberative democracy," he said during a lecture in Ahmedabad.
Calls to repeal Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code that deals with sedition have not made headway as successive governments continued to mine the British-era law for political gains. Reports quoting statistics from the National Crime Records Bureau say there has been an increase in the number of sedition-related cases. Arguments favouring the law are invariably based on its relevance to matters of national security and the contention that the final call on sedition cases are still made by the courts.
Senior judges who come out to back the right to dissent are a sign of hope but there's no nicer way to put what selective use of the law could translate to in the existing political climate - a fear of an opinion clampdown, a fear of speaking up.
- The writer is a senior journalist based in Bangalore