The British police, reacting sharply like the Ahmedabad top cop did against the TOI editor and reporter, slapped sedition charges against Tilak under Section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code. He was arrested on May 25, 1908, convicted by jury trial on July 17, 1908, and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment in the case, popularly known as ‘Second Sedition Case’.
    This is the centenary year of Tilak’s conviction. The Ahmedabad top cop celebrated this centenary by slapping identical charges (124-A IPC) against journalists for writing against him. How identical or whimsical his allegations are will be judged by courts of law in independent India.
    Sedition, as Section 124-A reads, has to be an act to do something diabolic against the “government established by law”. One has to give his imagination wings to assume that a top cop, at best a senior public servant, is synonymous with a government.
    The SC has made clear a distinction in this regard in the Kedar Nath Singh Vs State of Bihar [AIR 1962 SC 955 at page 967], especially in the context of sedition charges. Crystallizing the difference between a government servant and a government, a five-judge constitution Bench had said: “The expression ‘the government established by law’ has to be distinguished from the persons for the time being engaged in carrying on the administration.”
    The British judiciary showed admirable understanding of the pre-independence political scenario in 1935 and acquitted one Kamal Krishna, who faced sedition charges for making a speech advocating replacement of the government with a communist regime. Justice Lord Williams, delivering the
judgment in the Kamal Krishna vs Emperor [AIR 1935 Cal 636], said: “It is really absurd to say that speeches of this kind amount to sedition. If such were the case, then every argument against the present form of government and in favour of some other form of government might be allowed to lead to hatred of the government, and it might be suggested that such ideas brought the government in to contempt.”
    History is replete with officials suffering sedition hangups. Copernicus and Galileo faced death on sedition charges in the 16th and 17th century for saying the earth moves around the sun, diametrically opposite to then clergy-driven popular belief.
    The sedition jurisprudence has undergone a sea change in the last few centuries. In one loyalty oath case in the US, Weiman Vs Updegraff, Justice Black had sounded the grave warning of misuse of sedition laws at the hands of overzealous officials, who thought it was dangerous to allow people to think, speak or write critically about the government. Justice Black had said: “We must have freedom of speech for all or we will in the long run have it for none but the cringing and the craven.”
    Justice Black’s words retain their golden touch. For, the Supreme Court in its 1989 judgment in the case S Rangarajan Vs P Jagjivan Ram had said: “Freedom of expression is the rule. Our commitment to freedom of expression demands that it cannot be suppressed unless the situation created by allowing the freedom are pressing and the community interest is endangered.” <<back