Opinion Towards unfreedom

Defending the controversial Section 66A of the IT Act against PILs challenging its constitutionality before the Supreme Court, Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta articulated many a government’s anxieties over the relatively unfettered freedom of speech on the Net. He argued on Wednesday that because there are no institutional “checks and balances” on the internet, legislative intervention is necessary to frame rules that prevent people from sending “offensive material to millions of people in a nanosecond just with a click of button”. This position cements the BJP-led government’s disappointing U-turn in January, when it went from assuring the court it would examine the provision and propose safeguards to stall its misuse to claiming that the law is necessary to prevent “cyber crime”.

So far, the government has done little to justify its position beyond the usual portrayal of the internet as a dangerous and unlawful outpost. In earlier arguments, Mehta insisted that Section 66A had “no correlation” with “any citizen’s freedom of speech and expression” and was only directed towards curbing cyber crime. But past evidence does not support this claim. As the court has previously acknowledged, the term “grossly offensive” is undefined in the IT Act, and is therefore prone to arbitrary application by the police, who have arrested a cartoonist who made fun of Parliament and two young women who questioned the shutdown of Mumbai after Bal Thackeray’s death on Facebook — hardly instances of “cyber crime”. Nor have the January 2013 guidelines issued by the previous dispensation mandating that only senior police personnel can order arrests under Section 66A prevented its egregious misuse.

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In its zeal to ensure that the standards applied to content published offline are the same as those online, the government wants to uphold a provision that imposes greater restrictions on speech on the internet. Coming after the BJP’s strong criticism of the UPA for invoking Section 66A to suppress political dissent while in opposition — in 2012, Arun Jaitley made a speech in Parliament highlighting how it is prone to abuse while pointing out that the vague wording constrained freedom of expression online more than in print or on TV — its embrace of a retrograde law feels like a betrayal.