New Delhi: The Supreme Court today agreed to examine Subramanian Swamy’s plea to quash certain penal code provisions relating to hate speeches on the ground that they violated the fundamental right of free speech and are often used by authorities to harass individuals.
Swamy had moved the court after an Assam magistrate issued him summons on the basis of some newspaper reports that the BJP leader claimed had carried “garbled motivated versions” of a speech he had given while referring to the Ayodhya row.
The bench of Justices A.K. Sikri and U.U. Lalit told Swamy another bench would examine the matter, as Justice Lalit wanted to recuse himself from the case.
Justice Lalit, as a senior counsel, had earlier appeared in a case relating to a hate speech.
Swamy, in his petition, said the apex court should quash IPC sections 153,153A, 153B, 295A, 298 and 505 – which all deal with offences popularly labelled as “hate speech” – as they were unconstitutional. He pointed out that the court had recently struck down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act that was misused by politicians against citizens who criticised them online.
Over the past few years, the former Union minister said, the provisions had been increasingly used against him particularly, “sometimes (with) malafide (intent) and maliciously”, by various authorities politically inimical to him.
He said these authorities wanted to penalise him for his “clear headed extensive research and his ideological beliefs” to make him “conform to the norms of certain special ideological and religious groups”.
Swamy said FIR/summons had been issued against him from at least five states – Delhi, Maharashtra, Assam, Punjab and Kerala – for presumed “hate speech”. The Karimganj magistrate, he said, had summoned him to appear before the court on June 1 without a proper inquiry into the speech he had delivered on the Ayodhya row on March 15 at Kaziranga University.
Among other things, Swamy said, he had “stated simply that Islam permits such demolition and indeed such demolitions do take place in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan”.
“Apparently garbled motivated versions of this speech were carried in the press, highlighting just this one observation,” Swamy claimed.
The BJP leader said Karimganj, a remote area on the troubled Bangladesh border, has a majority Bengali-speaking population with close ties to Sylhet in Bangladesh.
