- Sunday, February 23, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE Narendra Modi government on Wednesday (14) asked all states and Union Territories (UTs) to direct all police stations under their jurisdiction not to register cases under the repealed section of the Information Technology Act. The direction came from the ministry of home affairs little over a week after the country’s Supreme Court called the continued use of Section 66A of the 2000 act as “a shocking state of affairs”.
The ministry also said that cases lodged in the states and UTs under the section should be immediately withdrawn.
The apex court had in March 2015 struck down the controversial Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, that made posting “offensive” comments online a crime punishable by jail, following a long campaign by defenders of free speech. The court made the move in the Shreya Singhal vs Union of India case.
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The section empowered police to make arrests over what cops, in terms of their subjective discretion, could construe as “offensive” or for causing annoyance, inconvenience, etc. The section prescribed a punishment for sending messages through a computer or any other device like a mobile phone or tablet and a conviction could lead to three years in jail.
The Supreme Court had struck down the section accepting that the provision was “very widely drafted” and gave arbitrary powers to police officers.
Last week, the Supreme Court condemned the continued use of the repealed section by the law-enforcement agencies in various states despite it being struck down more than six years ago. It also sought a response from the Centre on the matter.
Attorney general K K Venugopal told the court on the occasion that Section 66A remains in the Act even though it was struck down by the division bench.
“When police has to register a case, the section is still there and there is only a footnote that the Supreme Court has struck it down,” he had said, adding, “there has to be a bracket in 66A with the words struck down.”
“You file a counter as it is a shocking state of affairs,” Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman had replied. The AG sought two weeks to file a reply and the court granted the request.
The top court was hearing a plea filed by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, a human rights body which said that “in spite of the judgment, it became clear from the newspaper reports that the said provision continued to be invoked by the State’s investigative machinery as well as the judiciary, probably under the impression that Section 66A remained on the statute books”.
