Congress toes BJP line on sedition

It is not clear when the Congress Party decided that it was expedient for it become an accomplice of the BJP in wantonly slapping around the charge of sedition when faced with a routine law and order situation. The decision of the Siddaramaiah government on Independence Day to book the international human rights NGO Amnesty International India for sedition is suggestive of the fact that the state authorities are seeking to curry favour with mass organisations of the RSS and the BJP.

On Saturday, when the Amnesty was holding a forum called “Broken Families” in Bengaluru, under which three elderly Kashmiri parents were speaking of their missing children and criticising human rights violations by security forces in the Valley, representatives of Kashmiri Pandits, displaced from the Valley in the militancy years of the early 1990s, also demanded to be heard and were permitted to speak. This is as it should be.

It appears some Kashmiri students in Bengaluru barged into the hall and raised “azadi” slogans. In the Kashmir context, this is par for the course, and if raising of such slogans were to attract the charge of sedition, virtually the entire Valley population will have to be locked up. In Kashmir “azadi” or freedom means different things to different people. For most, it would appear, it embodies the desire to lead normal lives away from security bunkers in their midst and routine firings.

The outdated colonial era law of sedition of 1860 is explicit that “sedition” comes into play only when a violent act accompanies an act of illegality challenging the existence of the State and when explicit incitement to violence or its abetment has occurred and this can be proved. Mere sloganeering against the State is not covered under “sedition”.

From all accounts, what drew the police to move against Amnesty was a complaint from the ABVP, the RSS students’ front which at election time dons the BJP’s colours, that the Amnesty was engaged in “anti-national” activities. This was nothing but an allegation of a political nature, and should have been treated as such, but the authorities showed an eagerness to cave in.

It may be recalled that the suicide of the dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula in Hyderabad was triggered by a politically tainted and factually false complaint of the ABVP, an act that triggered a national storm. When JNU students were charged with “sedition” in February, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi visited the university to express solidarity and to oppose the perverse application of the law. His party’s government in Karnataka has belied that spirit.