The arrest of the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students' Union, Kanhaiya Kumar, on charges of sedition - and the scenes of violence that accompanied his presentation in the district court on Monday - raise two important questions. One is legal and the other political. The political question is this: does the Bharatiya Janata Party intend to consolidate its power on university campuses across the country through empowering the most difficult elements within its student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, or ABVP? Certainly, recent behaviour from the ABVP - whether at JNU or Hyderabad Central University or Allahabad University - and the open or tacit support it appears to have received from the human resource development ministry at the Centre means that this is a question that the party leadership should answer. If it is not the case that it approves of such behaviour, then it should take credible steps to control its student wing before the development narrative - which has just recovered from the "intolerance" debate - be once again derailed.
The legal question is deeper. The courts will judge whether the arrest of Mr Kumar for the colonial-era crime of "sedition" is justifiable. But the larger question is this, and it concerns the legislative branch more than the judicial branch of the government: should there be a sedition law on the books at all? As Nobel Prize-winning economist and political philosopher Amartya Sen said in Delhi last week, many provisions in the Indian Penal Code, which was drafted essentially in the colonial period, clash in spirit with the eminently liberal provisions of the freely adopted Constitution. Sedition charges have been used too often by police forces as a method of arresting and charging individuals, whom they want to get for other reasons - most recently, Hardik Patel, leader of the Patidar agitation in Gujarat, was accused of sedition. Many grassroots protestors against such things as nuclear power plants have also been charged with sedition and arrested.
The sedition law has been misused by governments across the political spectrum - this is not a BJP problem. However, the time has come for a comprehensive review of such laws. Aside from sedition, other laws - such as Section 295A, which permits latitude to the police to arrest individuals for hurting group "sentiments" - were essentially drafted by the colonial state as a method of controlling a restive native population. The Indian state, which is of, by and for the people, need have no such law on the books. A cross-party consensus to remove them from the books is necessary - and, hopefully, the courts will admit and examine any challenges to their constitutionality.
