In a milestone judgment, the Supreme Court of India has termed Section 66A of the IT ACT as draconian, unconstitutional and unsustainable. The court maintained that it was a violation to free speech, a breach of the fundamental right granted to us citizens by the Constitution of India. Section 66 A was added to the Information Technology Act 2000 in 2008 and it imposed punishment for sending offensive messages through electronic communication services or the internet.

While the primary interest was to prevent slandering and abusing online, the Act turned out to be a tool to crush public voice & opinion and even harmless humour by state governments and establish terror and force their superiority amongst the masses.

This has been evident as in the case of the arrest of cartoonist Aseem Trivedi, who was arrested in Mumbai 2011 on charges of sedition for his political cartoons via his anti-corruption movement India Against Corruption at the MMRDA grounds, when his website was suspended by Crime Branch, Mumbai.

Aseem Trivedi

In 2012, in Jadavpur University too, Professor Ambikesh Mahapatra found himself slapped with the draconian Section 66 A for sharing a comic strip which Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, West Bengal did not find amusing. The atrocities followed in 2014 as well, when Devu Chodankar, a young executive was charged under 66A for a Facebook post on Prime Minister-elect Narendra Modi. Most recently, a Class 11 student from Bareilly was remanded in judicial custody for a Facebook post against UP Minister Azam Khan, which the Rampur district police found derogatory.

Prof. Ambikesh Mahapatra

Prof. Ambikesh Mahapatra's cartoon that landed him in jail.

Devu Chodankar

The police show surprising alacrity in implementing Section 66 A against harmless citizens, taking it to a level bordering communal violence. In other words, Section 66 A has been a weapon of the police and state governments to arrest anybody on anything that is subjectively, seemingly annoying to them. It has come to a point when we, as citizens have to compromise our democratic rights of our freedom for speech and expression. 

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