A look at sedition cases in India through the years

Data on sedition cases filed across India is remarkably sparse, as the NCRB only started collecting and presenting data on cases under the law from 2014

Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, better known as the sedition law, has reared its ugly head yet again as the law is being invoked against the Rana couple in Maharashtra over chanting Hanuman chalisa outside the private residence of CM Uddhav Thackeray.

The Union government recently told the Supreme Court that it has decided to re-examine and re-consider the sedition law and said the top court need not invest time examining its validity once again. The government agreed that concerns have been expressed about the application of the law and its abuse.

The top court had in the Kedar Nath Singh case (1962) clarified that only those acts, which involved incitement to violence or violence, constituted a seditious act under Section 124 A of the Indian Penal Code.

Introduced in the British Raj in 1860, the law was famously invoked during the freedom struggle, with personalities like Mahatma Gandhi and Lokmanya Tilak imprisoned under it. In Independent India, the law was made a cognisable offence under Indira Gandhi in 1973, making arrests without warrants permissible if the law was invoked.

Interestingly, however, data on sedition cases filed across India is remarkably sparse, as the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) only started collecting and presenting data on cases filed and convicted under the law in 2014, the year the Narendra Modi government was formed.

According to the data, Jharkhand led the country in terms of sedition cases registered in 2014 and 2018, with 18 cases registered in both years. Bihar had the highest registered cases in 2015 with 9 cases, Haryana led in 2016 with 12 cases, Assam in 2017 with 19 cases and Karnataka in 2019 with 22 cases. The highest number of convictions nationally was merely 2 cases in 2018, with a conviction rate of 15.4 per cent according to the NCRB data.

Interestingly, the NCRB data calculates conviction rate as a factor of total convictions against the total number of trials completed under the law, leading to high conviction rates. If factored against just the number of cases registered, the conviction rate plummets to an average of 1.81 per cent across the 6 years, with the highest being 2.85 per cent in 2016 and 2018.