Sedition Law Vague: Minister Kiren Rijiju On Why Kanhaiya Kumar Hasn't Been Charged

NEW DELHI: A year after Delhi Police booked JNU student leaders such as Kanhaiya Kumar and Umar Khalid for sedition over a controversial protest on the campus, the police are yet to file a charge-sheet against them, the first step to putting them on trial.

Delhi Police has responded to suggestions that there probably wasn't enough evidence to prosecute Mr Kumar, the former JNU students' union president who became the face of a campaign against use of the colonial-era sedition law to curtail free speech.

Dependra Pathak, joint commissioner, called it a "sensitive case", said the police will take "appropriate action in time", and insisted that he could not go into the nuances of the case.

But junior home minister Kiren Rijiju - who called the slogans raised in support of Afzal Guru and Kashmiri separatists as the "trigger point" for the sedition case - told NDTV why the cops weren't ready with a charge-sheet despite probing the case for a year.

Mr Kumar was arrested in February 2016 along with two JNU students Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya in this case. He was released on bail a fortnight later.

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"Since police must frame a charge-sheet which must stand before the court of law, they cannot just make frivolous points in the charge-sheet," Mr Rijiju said, suggesting that a problem area was that the sedition law was "so vague".

"The law of sedition is not very clear," the Minister of State for Home Affairs said, adding that it had been interpreted in different ways by the courts.

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In one instance, he said, the court ruled that merely speaking against the country did not amount to sedition but had to be backed by some action which is detrimental to or incites violence.

But in another, Mr Rijiju added, "merely someone spoke against Jawaharlal Nehru government, not against the country, was confirmed as sedition".

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The minister said once sedition was defined "very clearly", it would be easy for the courts to interpret the crime. "Right now, that is not the case," he added.

The minister's emphasis on fixing the sedition law, Section 124A of the penal code, was in line with the home ministry's request for a review of the provision sent to the law ministry way back in October 2012.

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In December 2014, the law commission told the government that it would be taken up as part of a comprehensive review of criminal laws.

Statistics maintained by the National Crime Records Bureau indicate that the government's track record to pursue conviction of sedition cases was at best, patchy.

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Of the four sedition cases where trials were completed in 2015, not one person was found guilty by the trial court. In 2014, courts convicted the accused in only one case. Over the two year period, police had registered nearly 60 sedition cases.