The police investigation against Amnesty International India—for slogans raised during an event the global advocacy organised—is the second such sedition complaint registered by the police in Karnataka this year after a complaint from the student wing of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The police charged two students with sedition in the southern town of Tumakuru on March 30, 2016, after the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) accused them of raising pro-Pakistan slogans while distributing pamphlets supporting Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar and Rohith Vemula, a Hyderabad University Dalit scholar who committed suicide. About 80 ABVP activists beat the two students with helmets and sticks, according to this India Today report.
In the Amnesty case, a first-person account of the Broken Families event speaks of a “heated but not threatening” meeting with diverging viewpoints from Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims in the audience. As the audience dispersed, ABVP activists outside stepped in.
“In slapping sedition charges, the police appear to have ceded to pressure from the large group of ABVP activists at the (police) station,” said Chandan Gowda, a sociology professor at Bengaluru’s Azim Premji University.
Sedition crimes recorded for first time in 2014, when BJP came to power
For the first time ever, the National Crime Records Bureau included data on crimes related to the 156-year-old sedition law in 2014, the year the BJP came to power. Sedition is a new category (section 124A of the Indian Penal Code) under a heading called ‘Offences Against the State’.
Karnataka registered no sedition case in 2014, although 47 such cases were filed across nine states that year, according to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data. Jharkhand (18) and Bihar (16) registered the most sedition cases that year.
In June 2016, Karnataka charged two organisers of a protest demanding better working conditions for the police with sedition. Three journalists were arrested and booked for sedition in Karnataka’s Belagavi on December 3, 2015.
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Feature image courtesy az734552.vo.msecnd.net
