SC seeks response from Centre on plea difficult sedition legislation

The Supreme Court Friday sought response from the Centre on a plea difficult the Constitutional validity of sedition legislation.
A bench Justice U U Lalit, Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice Okay M Joseph had been listening to a plea difficult part 124-A of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, which penalises the crime of sedition.
The plea, filed by two journalists – Kishorechandra Wangkhemcha and Kanhaiya Lal Shukla – working in Manipur and Chhattisgarh respectively, have urged the courtroom to declare Section 124-A as unconstitutional.
The petition claimed that part 124-A infringes the elemental proper of freedom of speech and expression, assured below Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution.

The petitioners claimed that they’ve been elevating questions in opposition to their respective state governments and central authorities, and have been charged with sedition below part 124A of IPC in numerous FIRs for feedback and cartoons shared by them on the social networking web site Facebook.
There is frequent phenomenon of misuse, misapplication and abuse of Section 124-A since 1962, the petition mentioned, including that the abuse of a legislation, in itself, could not bear on the validity of the legislation however clearly factors to the vagueness and uncertainty of the present legislation.
The sections of sedition have been repealed in comparative post-colonial democratic jurisdictions around the globe. While India calls itself a ‘democracy’, all through the democratic world the offence of sedition has been condemned as undemocratic, undesirable and pointless, it mentioned.

The petition additionally argued that the vagueness of Section 124-A exerts an unacceptable chilling impact on the democratic freedoms of people who can’t get pleasure from there legit democratic rights and freedoms for worry of life imprisonment.
While citing the Supreme Court’s choice to uphold the validity of the legislation in 1962 within the case of Kedar Nath Singh v. State of Bihar, the petitioner mentioned that the courtroom could have been right in its discovering almost sixty a long time in the past, however the legislation now not passes constitutional muster as we speak.