Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by the law.
What mahatma Mohandas KaramchandGandhii said
"Section 124A under which I am happily charged is perhaps the prince among the political sections of the IPC designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen. Affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by the law. If one has no affection for a person, one should be free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection, so long as he does not contemplate, promote or incite to violence. But the section under which Mr Banker and I are charged is one under which mere promotion of disaffection is a crime. I have studied some of the cases tried under it, and I know that some of the most loved of India’s patriots have been convicted under it. I consider it a privilege, therefore, to be charged under that section. I have endeavoured to give in their briefest outline the reasons for my disaffection. I have no personal ill-will against any single administrator, much less can I have any disaffection towards the King’s person. But I hold it a virtue to be disaffected towards a government which in its totality has done more harm to India than previous system. India is less manly under the British rule than she ever was before. Holding such a belief, I consider it to be a sin to have affection for the system. And it has been a precious privilege for me to be able to write what I have in the various articles tendered in as evidence against me (ibid: 235)."
However, sedition laws remained on the statute books post-independence and were used repeatedly by both central and state governments to stifle political dissent (Singh 1998). The first major constitutional challenge to sedition laws arose in 1958 when the constitutional validity of Section 124A of the IPC was challenged in an Allahabad High Court case that involved a challenge to a conviction and punishment of three years imprisonment of one Ram Nandan, for an inflammatory speech given in 1954. In this speech, Ram Nandan criticised the Congress regime for not being able to address extreme poverty in the state and exhorted cultivators and labourers to form an army and overthrow the government if needed. He also accused Nehru of being a traitor for dividing the country into two.13 The court overturned Ram Nandan’s conviction and declared Section 124A to be unconstitutional. Justice Gurtu said, As a result of the conventions as has been remarked of parliamentary government, there is a concentration of control of both legislative and executive functions in the small body of men called the Ministers and these are the men who decide important questions of policy. The most important check on their powers is necessarily the existence of a powerfully organised Parliamentary opposition. But at the top of this there is also the fear that the government may be subject to popular disapproval not merely expressed in the legislative chambers but in the marketplace also which, after all, is the forum where individual citizens ventilate their points of views. If there is a possibility in the working of our democratic system – as I think there is – of criticism of the policy of Ministers and of the execution of their policy, by persons untrained in public speech becoming criticism of the government as such and if such criticism without having any tendency in it to bring about public disorder, can be caught within the mischief of Section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code, then that Section must be invalidated because it restricts freedom of speech in disregard of whether the interest of public order or the security of the State is involved, and is capable of striking at the very root of the Constitution which is free speech (subject of limited control under Article 19(2)).
" The chilling effect of these laws threatens to undermine, and gradually destroy, the legitimate and constitutionally protected right to protest, dissent or criticise the government."
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