Sedition and the Judicial Discourse in Postcolonial India

It traces the discourse on freedom of expression in postcolonial idea, the security imperatives of the state, the political history of the law of sedition post-Independence and its journey within the courts. Through this, an attempt at conceptualizing public order, security of state and other grounds along which the act of sedition is penalized, is made. This chapter begins with debates on sedition within the Constituent Assembly and systematically takes these debates to the higher courts in India employing legal hermeneutics to read into the judgements and deduce a theory of sedition coming from the judiciary. The chapter treats the judicial pronouncements as contributing to the study of sedition as a speech act to identify what emerges as the crime of sedition within the legal-juridical regime in India.