speech on freedom in hindi

अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी पर निबंध (Freedom of Speech Essay in Hindi)

अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी भारत के नागरिकों के मौलिक अधिकारों में से एक है। दुनिया भर के कई देश अपने नागरिकों को उनके विचारों और सोच को साझा करने तथा उन्हें सशक्त बनाने के लिए अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी की अनुमति देते हैं। भारत सरकार और अन्य कई देश अपने नागरिकों को अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी प्रदान करते हैं। ऐसा विशेष रूप से जहाँ-जहाँ लोकतांत्रिक सरकार है उन देशों में है।

अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी पर छोटे तथा बड़े निबंध (Short and Long Essay on Freedom of Speech in Hindi, Abhivyakti ki Azadi par Nibandh Hindi mein)

अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी पर निबंध – 1 (250 – 300 शब्द).

दुनिया भर के अधिकांश देशों के नागरिकों को दिए गए मूल अधिकारों में अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी शामिल है। यह अधिकार उन देशों में रहने वाले लोगों को कानून द्वारा दंडित होने के डर के बिना अपने मन की बात करने के लिए सक्षम बनाता है।

अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी की उत्पत्ति

अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी की अवधारणा बहुत पहले ही उत्पन्न हुई थी। इंग्लैंड के विधेयक अधिकार 1689 ने संवैधानिक अधिकार के रूप में अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी को अपनाया और यह अभी भी प्रभाव में है। 1789 में फ्रेंच क्रांति ने मनुष्य और नागरिकों के अधिकारों की घोषणा को अपनाया। इसके साथ ही एक स्वतंत्र नतीजे के रूप में अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी की पुष्टि हुई। अनुच्छेद 11 में अभिव्यक्ति और अभिव्यक्ति की घोषणा कहती है:

“सोच और विचारों का नि:शुल्क संचार मनुष्य के अधिकारों में सबसे अधिक मूल्यवान है। हर नागरिक तदनुसार स्वतंत्रता के साथ बोल सकता है, लिख सकता है तथा अपने शब्द छाप सकता है लेकिन इस स्वतंत्रता के दुरुपयोग के लिए भी वह उसी तरह जिम्मेदार होगा जैसा कि कानून द्वारा परिभाषित किया गया है”।

मानव अधिकारों की सार्वभौमिक घोषणा 1948 में अपनाई गई थी। इस घोषणा के तहत यह भी बताया गया है कि हर किसी को अपने विचारों और राय को अभिव्यक्त करने की स्वतंत्रता होनी चाहिए। अभिव्यक्ति और अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी अब अंतरराष्ट्रीय और क्षेत्रीय मानवाधिकार कानून का एक हिस्सा बन गया हैं।

अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी – लोकतंत्र का आधार

एक लोकतांत्रिक सरकार अपने देश की सरकार को चुनने के अधिकार सहित अपने लोगों को विभिन्न अधिकार देती है। अभिव्यक्ति और अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी एक लोकतांत्रिक राष्ट्र के आधार के रूप में जानी जाती है।

अगर निर्वाचित सरकार शुरू में स्थापित मानकों के मुताबिक प्रदर्शन नहीं कर रही है और नागरिकों को इससे सम्बंधित मुद्दों पर अपनी राय देने का अधिकार नहीं है तो सरकार का चयन ही फायदेमंद नहीं है। यही कारण है कि लोकतांत्रिक राष्ट्रों में अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी का अधिकार एक जरूरी अधिकार है। यह लोकतंत्र का आधार है।

अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी लोगों को अपने विचारों को साझा करने और समाज में सकारात्मक परिवर्तन लाने की शक्ति प्रदान करती है।

इसे यूट्यूब पर देखें : Abhivyakti ki Azadi par Nibandh

Abhivyakti ki Ajadi par Nibandh – निबंध 2 (400 शब्द)

अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी को मूल अधिकार माना जाता है। हर व्यक्ति को यह हक़ मिलना चाहिए। यह भारतीय संविधान द्वारा भारत के नागरिकों को दिए गए सात मौलिक अधिकारों में से एक है। यह स्वतंत्रता के अधिकार का एक हिस्सा है जिसमें अभिव्यक्ति और अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी, जीवन और स्वतंत्रता के अधिकार, आंदोलन की स्वतंत्रता, निवास की स्वतंत्रता, किसी पेशे का अभ्यास करने का अधिकार, संघ या सहकारी समितियों के गठन की स्वतंत्रता, दोषसिद्धि अपराधों में बचाव का अधिकार और कुछ मामलों में गिरफ्तारी के खिलाफ संरक्षण के लिए।

अभिव्यक्ति की ज़रुरत क्यों है ?

नागरिकों के साथ-साथ राष्ट्र के भी पूरे विकास और प्रगति के लिए अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी आवश्यक है। जो व्यक्ति बोलता है या सुनता है उस पर प्रतिबंध लगाकर किसी व्यक्ति के विकास में बाधा उत्पन्न हो सकती है। इससे परेशानी और असंतोष पैदा हो सकता है जिससे तनाव बढ़ जाता है। असंतोष से भरे लोगों की वजह से कोई भी राष्ट्र सही दिशा में कभी नहीं बढ़ सकता।

अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी चर्चाओं को निमंत्रण देती है जो समाज के विकास के लिए आवश्यक विचारों के आदान-प्रदान में मदद करती है। यह देश की राजनीतिक व्यवस्था के बारे में एक राय व्यक्त करने के लिए आवश्यक है। जब सरकार को यह पता चल जाता है कि उसके क़दमों पर निगरानी रखी जा रही है और इसे द्वारा उठाए जा रहे कदमों को चुनौती दी जा सकती है या आलोचना की जा सकती है तब सरकार और अधिक जिम्मेदारी से कार्य करती है।

अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी – दूसरे अधिकारों से संबंधित

अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी अन्य अधिकारों से निकटता से संबंधित है। यह मुख्य रूप से नागरिकों को दिए गए अन्य अधिकारों की रक्षा के लिए आवश्यक है। यह केवल तब होता है जब लोगों को स्वतंत्र रूप से अपने विचार व्यक्त करने और बोलने का अधिकार होता है तो वे गलत होने वाली किसी भी चीज के खिलाफ अपनी आवाज उठा सकते हैं। यह चुनाव प्रक्रिया में शामिल होने की बजाए लोकतंत्र में सक्रिय भाग लेने के लिए सक्षम बनाती है। इस प्रकार वे दूसरे अधिकारों की रक्षा कर सकते हैं। जैसे बराबरी का अधिकार, धर्म के अधिकार की स्वतंत्रता, शोषण के खिलाफ अधिकार और गोपनीयता का अधिकार सिर्फ तभी जब उनके पास अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी और अभिव्यक्ति का अधिकार है।

यह उचित निर्णय के अधिकार से भी निकटता से संबंधित है। अभिव्यक्ति और अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी एक व्यक्ति को एक मुकदमे के दौरान स्वतंत्र रूप से अपनी बात कहने में सक्षम बनाता है जो अत्यंत आवश्यक है।

अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी किसी भी प्रकार के अन्याय के खिलाफ आवाज उठाने की शक्ति देती है। उन देशों की सरकारों को, जो सूचना का अधिकार और अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी पेश करती हैं, नागरिकों की सोच और विचारों का स्वागत करना तथा बदलाव के लिए तैयार रहना चाहिए।

निबंध 3 (500 शब्द)

अभिव्यक्ति और अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी भारत के नागरिकों की गारंटी के मूल अधिकारों में से एक है। यह स्वतंत्रता के अधिकार के तहत आती है जो भारतीय संविधान में शामिल सात मौलिक अधिकारों में से एक है। अन्य अधिकारों में बराबरी का अधिकार, धर्म की स्वतंत्रता का अधिकार, सांस्कृतिक और शैक्षिक अधिकार, गोपनीयता का अधिकार, शोषण के खिलाफ अधिकार और संवैधानिक उपाय के अधिकार शामिल हैं।

भारत में अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी

भारत का संविधान हर नागरिक को स्वतंत्रता की अभिव्यक्ति प्रदान करता है हालांकि कुछ सीमाओं के साथ। इसका मतलब यह है कि लोग स्वतंत्र रूप से दूसरों के बारे में अपने विचारों को व्यक्त कर सकते हैं साथ ही सरकार, राजनीतिक प्रणाली, नीतियों और नौकरशाही के प्रति भी। हालांकि नैतिक आधार, सुरक्षा और उत्तेजना पर अभिव्यक्ति को प्रतिबंधित किया जा सकता है। भारतीय संविधान में स्वतंत्रता के अधिकार के तहत देश के नागरिकों के पास निम्नलिखित अधिकार हैं:

स्वतंत्रता से बोलने तथा अपनी राय और विचारों को स्वतंत्र रूप से व्यक्त करने की आज़ादी।
किसी भी हथियार और गोला-बारूद के बिना शांति से इकट्ठे होने की स्वतंत्रता।
समूहों, यूनियनों और संघों के लिए स्वतंत्रता।
स्वतंत्र रूप से देश के किसी भी हिस्से में घूमने के लिए।
देश के किसी भी हिस्से में बसने के लिए स्वतंत्रता।
किसी पेशे का अभ्यास करने की स्वतंत्रता।
किसी भी तरह के व्यापार या उद्योग में शामिल होने की स्वतंत्रता बशर्ते वह गैरकानूनी ना हो।

भारत सही अर्थों में एक लोकतांत्रिक देश के रूप में जाना जाता है। यहां के लोगों को सूचना का अधिकार है और सरकार की गतिविधियों पर वे अपनी राय भी दे सकते हैं। अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी मीडिया को उन सभी ख़बरों को साझा करने की शक्ति देती है जो देश में और साथ ही दुनिया भर में चल रही है। यह लोगों को अधिक जागरूक बनाती है और उन्हें दुनिया भर से नवीनतम घटनाओं के साथ जुड़ा हुआ रखती है।

अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी का कमज़ोर पहलू

जहाँ अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी एक व्यक्ति को अपनी राय और विचारों को साझा करने और अपने समाज और साथी नागरिकों की भलाई के लिए योगदान करने का मंच प्रदान करती है वही इसके साथ कई कमज़ोर पहलू भी जुड़े हुए हैं। बहुत से लोग इस स्वतंत्रता का दुरुपयोग करते हैं। वे सिर्फ अपने विचारों को व्यक्त नहीं करते बल्कि दूसरों पर भी उन्हें लागू करते हैं। वे गैरकानूनी गतिविधियां करने के लिए लोगों का समूह बनाते हैं। मीडिया अपने विचारों और राय को व्यक्त करने के लिए भी स्वतंत्र है। कभी-कभी उनके द्वारा साझा की जाने वाली जानकारी आम जनता में आतंक पैदा करती है। अलग-अलग सांप्रदायिक समूहों की गतिविधियों से संबंधित कुछ समाचारों ने भी अतीत में सांप्रदायिक दंगों को जन्म दिया है। इससे समाज की शांति और सद्भाव में बाधा आ गई है।

इंटरनेट ने अभिव्यक्ति और अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी बढ़ा दी है। सोशल मीडिया प्लेटफार्मों के आगमन ने इसे और आगे बढ़ाया है। लोग इन दिनों हर चीज़ पर और सब कुछ पर अपने विचार देने के लिए उत्सुक है चाहे उन्हें इसके बारे में ज्ञान हो या नहीं। वे बिना किसी की भावनाओं की कद्र करते हुए या उनके मान-सम्मान का लिहाज़ करते हुए नफरतपूर्ण टिप्पणियां लिखते हैं। यह निश्चित रूप से इस आजादी का दुरुपयोग कहा जा सकता है और इसे तुरंत बंद होना चाहिए।

प्रत्येक देश को अपने नागरिकों को बोलने और अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी प्रदान करनी चाहिए। हालांकि इसे पहले स्पष्ट रूप से परिभाषित किया जाना चाहिए ताकि यह व्यक्तियों के साथ-साथ समाज में सकारात्मक परिवर्तन लाने में मदद कर सके और यह सामान्य कार्य को बाधित ना करे।

निबंध 4 (600 शब्द)

अधिकांश देश अपने नागरिकों को अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी देते हैं ताकि वे अपने विचारों को साझा कर सकें और अलग-अलग मामलों पर अपनी राय दे सकें। यह एक व्यक्ति के साथ ही समाज के विकास के लिए आवश्यक माना जाता है। जहाँ अधिकतर देशों ने अपने नागरिकों को यह आजादी प्रदान की है वहीँ कई देशों ने इससे दूरी बना रखी है।

कई देश अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी देते हैं

न केवल भारत बल्कि दुनिया के कई देश अपने नागरिकों को अभिव्यक्ति और अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी का अधिकार देते हैं। मानव अधिकारों की संयुक्त राष्ट्र सार्वभौमिक घोषणा वर्ष 1948 में शामिल कथन इस प्रकार है:

“प्रत्येक व्यक्ति को राय और अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी का अधिकार है। इस अधिकार में हस्तक्षेप के बिना अपनी बात रखने की स्वतंत्रता और किसी भी मीडिया के माध्यम से सूचनाओं और विचारों को तलाशने और प्राप्त करने के लिए स्वतंत्रता शामिल है।”

दक्षिण अफ्रीका, सूडान, पाकिस्तान, ट्यूनीशिया, हांगकांग, ईरान, इज़राइल, मलेशिया, जापान, फिलीपींस, दक्षिण कोरिया, सऊदी अरब, संयुक्त अरब अमीरात, थाईलैंड, न्यूजीलैंड, यूरोप, डेनमार्क, फिनलैंड और चीन कुछ ऐसे देशों में से हैं जो अपने नागरिकों को अभिव्यक्ति देने और अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी प्रदान करते हैं।

एक तरफ तो इन देशों ने अपने नागरिकों को अभिव्यक्ति और अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी का अधिकार दिया है वही दूसरी तरफ ये अधिकार किस हद तक जनता और मीडिया को प्रदान किए गए है, यह हर देश के हिसाब से अलग-अलग है।

जिन देशों में अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी नहीं है

ऐसे कई देश हैं जो अपने नागरिकों को पूर्ण नियंत्रण बनाए रखने के लिए अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी का अधिकार नहीं देते हैं। यहां इनमें से कुछ देशों पर एक नजर डाली गई है:

उत्तर कोरिया: यह देश अपने नागरिकों के साथ-साथ अपनी मीडिया को भी अभिव्यक्ति और अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी प्रदान नहीं करता है। इस प्रकार सरकार न केवल लोगों के विचारों और राय को अभिव्यक्त करने की स्वतंत्रता नहीं देती बल्कि इसके नागरिकों की जानकारी भी रखती है।
सीरिया: सीरिया की सरकार अपने आतंकवाद के लिए जानी जाती है। यहां के लोग अपने मूल मानवीय अधिकार, जो स्वतंत्रता व अभिव्यक्ति और अभिव्यक्ति का अधिकार है, से वंचित हैं।
3 . क्यूबा: क्यूबा एक और देश है जो अपने नागरिकों को अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी प्रदान नहीं करता है। क्यूबा के नागरिकों को सरकार या किसी भी राजनीतिक दल की गतिविधियों पर कोई नकारात्मक टिप्पणी देने की अनुमति नहीं है। यहां पर सरकार ने इंटरनेट उपयोग पर भी प्रतिबंध लगा रखा है ताकि लोगों को इसके माध्यम से कुछ भी व्यक्त करने का मौका न मिले।
बेलारूस: यह एक ऐसा देश है जो बोलने और अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी प्रदान नहीं करता है। लोग अपनी राय बता नहीं सकते या सरकार के काम की आलोचना नहीं कर सकते। बेलारूस में सरकार या किसी राजनीतिक मंत्री की आलोचना करना कानूनन अपराध है।
ईरान: ईरान के नागरिकों को यह पता नहीं है कि अपनी राय व्यक्त करने और जनता के बीच अपने विचारों को स्वतंत्र रूप से साझा करना कैसा होता है। कोई भी ईरानी नागरिक सार्वजनिक कानूनों या इस्लामी मानकों के खिलाफ किसी भी तरह का असंतोष व्यक्त नहीं कर सकता।
बर्माः बर्मा की सरकार का मत है कि अभिव्यक्ति और अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी अनावश्यक है। नागरिकों से कहा जाता है कि वे अपने विचार या राय को व्यक्त न करें खासकर यदि वह किसी नेता या राजनीतिक दल के खिलाफ हैं। बर्मा में मीडिया का संचालन सरकार द्वारा किया जाता है।
लीबिया: इस देश के अधिकांश लोग यह नहीं जानते हैं कि अभिव्यक्ति और अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी वास्तव में क्या है। लीबिया की सरकार अपने नागरिकों पर अत्याचार करने के लिए जानी जाती है। इंटरनेट के ज़माने में दुनिया भर के लोग किसी भी मामले पर अपने विचार व्यक्त करने के लिए स्वतंत्र हैं लेकिन इस देश में नहीं। इंटरनेट पर सरकार की आलोचना के लिए लीबिया में कई लोगों को गिरफ्तार किया गया है।

अभिव्यक्ति और अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी एक मूल मानव अधिकार है जो प्रत्येक देश के नागरिकों को दी जानी चाहिए। यह देखना बहुत दुखदाई है कि किस प्रकार कुछ देशों की सरकार अपने नागरिकों को ये आवश्यक मानव अधिकार भी प्रदान नहीं करती है और अपने स्वयं के स्वार्थी उद्देश्यों को पूरा करने के लिए उनका दमन करती है।

मेरी रुचि पर निबंध (My Hobby Essay in Hindi)

धन पर निबंध (Money Essay in Hindi)

समाचार पत्र पर निबंध (Newspaper Essay in Hindi)

मेरा स्कूल पर निबंध (My School Essay in Hindi)

शिक्षा का महत्व पर निबंध (Importance of Education Essay in Hindi)

बाघ पर निबंध (Tiger Essay in Hindi)

फ्रीडम ऑफ स्पीच एंड एक्सप्रेशन अंडर द कंस्टीट्यूशन ऑफ़ इंडिया (वाक् और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता के मुख्य तत्व)

यह लेख इंदौर इंस्टीट्यूट ऑफ लॉ, इंदौर के छात्र Aditya Dubey ने लिखा है। इस लेख में लेखक ने भारत के संविधान के तहत परिभाषित अभिव्यक्ति और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता (फ्रीडम ऑफ एक्सप्रेशन) की अवधारणा के साथ-साथ इसके महत्व और उन आधारों पर चर्चा की है जिन पर भारत सरकार द्वारा इसे प्रतिबंधित किया जा सकता है। इस लेख का अनुवाद Revati Magaonkar ने किया है।

Table of Contents

परिचय (इंट्रोडक्शन)

भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति (फ्रीडम ऑफ स्पीच एंड एक्सप्रेशन) की स्वतंत्रता को भारत के संविधान के अनुच्छेद 19(1)(a) के तहत परिभाषित किया गया है जिसमें कहा गया है कि भारत के सभी नागरिकों को भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता का अधिकार है। इस अनुच्छेद के पीछे का दर्शन भारत के संविधान की प्रस्तावना (प्रिएंबल) में दिया गया है- ‘जहां अपने सभी नागरिकों को उनके विचार और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता को सुरक्षित करने के लिए एक गंभीर संकल्प किया जाता है। हालाँकि, इस अधिकार का प्रयोग भारत के संविधान के अनुच्छेद 19 (2) के तहत लगाए गए कुछ उद्देश्यों के लिए उचित प्रतिबंधों (संक्शन्स) के अधीन है।

भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता के मुख्य तत्व क्या हैं (व्हाट आर द मैन एलीमेंट्स ऑफ़ स्पीच एंड एक्सप्रेशन)

ये वाक्/बोलने और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता के निम्नलिखित आवश्यक तत्व हैं:

यह अधिकार पूरी तरह से भारत के एक नागरिक के लिए उपलब्ध है, न कि अन्य देशों के व्यक्तियों यानी विदेशी नागरिकों के लिए।
अनुच्छेद 19(1)(a) के तहत बोलने की स्वतंत्रता में किसी भी तरह के मुद्दे के बारे में अपने विचार और राय व्यक्त करने का अधिकार शामिल है और इसे किसी भी तरह के माध्यम से किया जा सकता है, जैसे मुंह के शब्दों से, लिखकर, छपाई द्वारा, चित्रांकन (पोर्ट्रेचर) के माध्यम से या किसी फिल्म के माध्यम से किया जा सकता है।
यह अधिकार सम्पूर्ण रूप से नहीं है क्योंकि यह भारत सरकार को ऐसे कानून बनाने की अनुमति देता है जो भारत की संप्रभुता और अखंडता (सोवर्गिनिटी एंड इंटिग्रिटी) या राज्य की सुरक्षा, या विदेशी राष्ट्रों के साथ मैत्रीपूर्ण संबंधों (फ्रैंडली रिलेशन), शालीनता और नैतिकता (डीसेंसी एंड मोरालीटी) और अदालत की अवमानना (कंटेंप्ट ऑफ़ कोर्ट), मानहानि और अपराध के लिए उकसाना यहां तक कि सार्वजनिक व्यवस्था (पब्लिक आर्डर) से जुड़े मामलों में उचित प्रतिबंध लगा सकते हैं।
किसी भी नागरिक की अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता पर इस तरह का प्रतिबंध राज्य की कार्रवाई से उतना ही लगाया जा सकता है जितना कि उसकी निष्क्रियता (इनेक्शन) से लगाया जा सकता है। इस प्रकार, यदि राज्य की ओर से अपने सभी नागरिकों को वाक् और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता के मौलिक अधिकार (फंडामेंटल राइट) की गारंटी देने में विफलता पाई जाती है, तो यह भी अनुच्छेद 19 (1) (a) का उल्लंघन होगा।

अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता कैसे महत्वपूर्ण है (हाउ इज फ्रीडम ऑफ एक्सप्रेशन इज इंपॉर्टेंट)

भारत जैसे लोकतंत्र (डेमोक्रेटिक) में, भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता की अवधारणा (एक्रीडिटेशन) मुद्दों की स्वतंत्र चर्चा के द्वार खोलती है। भाषण की स्वतंत्रता पूरे देश में सामाजिक, आर्थिक और राजनीतिक मामलों पर जनमत के बनाने और प्रदर्शन में बहुत महत्वपूर्ण भूमिका निभाती है। यह अपने दायरे के भीतर, विचारों के प्रसार और आदान-प्रदान से संबंधित स्वतंत्रता, सूचना के प्रसार को सुनिश्चित करता है, जो बाद में, कुछ मुद्दों पर उनके दृष्टिकोण (पॉइंट ऑफ व्यू) के साथ-साथ किसी की राय बनाने में मदद करता है और उन मामलों पर बहस को जन्म देता है जिनमें जनता शामिल होती है। जब तक अभिव्यक्ति राष्ट्रवाद, देशभक्ति और राष्ट्र प्रेम तक सीमित है, तब तक राष्ट्रीय ध्वज का उन भावनाओं की अभिव्यक्ति के रूप में उपयोग एक मौलिक अधिकार होगा।

भारत की स्वतंत्र न्यायपालिका ने माना है और कहा है कि यह एक राय है कि किसी भी जानकारी को प्राप्त करने का अधिकार भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता के अधिकार का एक और हिस्सा है और किसी भी प्रकार के हस्तक्षेप (इंटरफेरेंस) के बिना किसी भी प्रकार की जानकारी को संप्रेषित (ट्रांसमिट) करने और प्राप्त करने का अधिकार एक महत्वपूर्ण है। इस अधिकार का पहलू ऐसा इसलिए है, क्योंकि कोई व्यक्ति पर्याप्त जानकारी प्राप्त किए बिना एक सूचित राय नहीं बना सकता है, या एक सूचित विकल्प (ऑप्शन) नहीं बना सकता है और सामाजिक, राजनीतिक या सांस्कृतिक (कल्चरल) रूप से प्रभावी ढंग से भाग ले सकता है।

देश के किसी भी नागरिक को किसी भी प्रकार की सूचना प्रसारित करने के लिए प्रिंट माध्यम एक शक्तिशाली उपकरण है। इस प्रकार, संविधान के तहत किसी व्यक्ति के भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता के अधिकार की संतुष्टि के लिए मुद्रित सामग्री (प्रिंटेड मटेरियल) तक पहुंचना बहुत महत्वपूर्ण है। यदि राज्य की ओर से वैकल्पिक सुलभ प्रारूपों (अल्टरनेटिव फॉर्मेट) में सामग्री के प्रिंट हानि वाले लोगों तक पहुंच को सक्षम करने के लिए विधायी प्रावधान (लेजिस्लेटिव प्रोविजन) करने में कोई विफलता पाई जाती है, तो यह भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता के अधिकार से वंचित होगा और इस तरह की निष्क्रियता राज्य (इनएक्टिवीटी स्टेट ) संविधान (कंस्टीट्यूशन) के गलत स्थान पर गिर जाएगा। यह सुनिश्चित करना राज्य की ओर से एक दायित्व है कि कानून में पर्याप्त प्रावधान किए गए हैं जो प्रिंट हानि वाले लोगों को सुलभ प्रारूपों में मुद्रित सामग्री तक पहुंचने में सक्षम बनाता है।

अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता के तहत प्रेस की स्वतंत्रता की कोई अलग गारंटी नहीं है क्योंकि यह पहले से ही अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता में शामिल है, जो देश के सभी नागरिकों को दी जाती है।

प्रेस की स्वतंत्रता का क्या अर्थ है (व्हाट इज मींट बाय फ्रीडम ऑफ प्रेस)

भारत के संविधान में कहीं भी प्रेस की स्वतंत्रता का उल्लेख नहीं है। हालाँकि, यह संविधान के अनुच्छेद 19 के तहत निर्धारित भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता (हालांकि सीधे व्यक्त नहीं) के अर्थ के तहत एक अधिकार के रूप में मौजूद है। यदि लोकतंत्र का अर्थ यह है कि सरकार देश की जनता की है, जनता की है और जनता के लिए है, तो यह आवश्यक है कि प्रत्येक नागरिक को राष्ट्र की लोकतांत्रिक प्रक्रिया (डेमोक्रेटिक प्रोसेस) में सक्रिय रूप से भाग लेने का अधिकार हो। स्वतंत्र प्रेस के बिना कुछ मामलों पर मुक्त बहस और खुली चर्चा संभव नहीं है।

प्रेस की स्वतंत्रता में लोकतंत्र का एक स्तंभ शामिल है और वास्तव में यह लोकतांत्रिक संगठन की नींव पर बना हुआ है। भारत के सर्वोच्च न्यायालय द्वारा कई निर्णयों में यह माना गया है कि प्रेस की स्वतंत्रता भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता का एक हिस्सा है और भारत के संविधान के अनुच्छेद 19 (1) (a) के तहत कवर किया गया है, इसका कारण यह है कि प्रेस की स्वतंत्रता और कुछ नहीं बल्कि भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता का एक पहलू है। इसलिए, यह ठीक ही समझा गया है कि प्रेस यह लोगों के विचारों को सभी तक पहुँचाने के लिए एक माध्यम माना जाता है और फिर भी इसे उन सीमाओं से जुड़े रहना पड़ता है जो संविधान द्वारा अनुच्छेद 19 (2) के तहत उन पर थोपी गई हैं।

मामला (केस)

इंडियन एक्सप्रेस न्यूजपेपर्स (बॉम्बे) प्राइवेट लिमिटेड बनाम यूनियन ऑफ इंडिया.

इस मामले में यह देखने के बाद स्थापित किया गया था कि “प्रेस की स्वतंत्रता” शब्द का प्रयोग अनुच्छेद 19 के परिभाषा के तहत नहीं किया गया है, लेकिन यह भारत के संविधान के अनुच्छेद 19 (1) (ए) के भीतर इसके सार के रूप में दिया गया है, और इसलिए, प्रेस की स्वतंत्रता में कोई हस्तक्षेप (इंटर्फियरांस) नहीं हो सकता है जिसमें जनहित और सुरक्षा शामिल है। इसलिए, यह निष्कर्ष निकाला गया कि किसी पत्रिका (मैगज़ीन) के सेंसरशिप को लागू करना या किसी समाचार पत्र को किसी भी मुद्दे के बारे में अपने विचारों को प्रकाशित करने से रोकना जिसमें जनहित शामिल है, ऐसा कृत्य प्रेस की स्वतंत्रता पर प्रतिबंध होगा।

वे कौन से आधार हैं जिन पर इस स्वतंत्रता को प्रतिबंधित किया जा सकता है (व्हाट आर द ग्राउंड्स ऑन व्हिच धिस फ्रीडम कैन बी रेस्ट्रिक्टेड)

ऐसे कई आधार हैं जिन पर राज्य द्वारा कुछ उचित प्रतिबंधों तक भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता को प्रतिबंधित किया जा सकता है। इस तरह के प्रतिबंधों को भारत के संविधान के अनुच्छेद 19 के खंड (क्लॉज) (2) के तहत परिभाषित किया गया है जो निम्नलिखित के तहत स्वतंत्र भाषण पर कुछ प्रतिबंध लगाता है:

राज्य की सुरक्षा
विदेशी राज्यों के साथ मैत्रीपूर्ण संबंध
सार्वजनिक व्यवस्था
शालीनता और नैतिकता
न्यायालय की अवमानना
किसी अपराध के लिए उकसाना, और
भारत की संप्रभुता और अखंडता।

राज्य की सुरक्षा (सिक्युरिटी ऑफ़ स्टेट)

राज्य की सुरक्षा से जुड़े वर्गों में भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता पर कुछ उचित प्रतिबंध (रिस्ट्रिक्शन) लगाए जा सकते हैं। ‘राज्य की सुरक्षा’ शब्द को ‘सार्वजनिक व्यवस्था’ शब्द से अलग करने की आवश्यकता है क्योंकि वे समान हैं लेकिन उनकी तीव्रता (इंटेंसिटी) के मामले कई और भिन्न हैं। इसलिए, राज्य की सुरक्षा सार्वजनिक अव्यवस्था (पब्लिक डिसऑर्डर) के गंभीर रूपों को बताती है, इसका एक उदाहरण विद्रोह (रेबेलियन) हो सकता है, जैसे कि राज्य के खिलाफ युद्ध छेड़ना, भले ही वह राज्य के एक हिस्से के खिलाफ हो, आदि।

केस : पीपुल्स यूनियन फॉर सिविल लिबर्टीज (पीयूसीएल) बनाम यूनियन ऑफ इंडिया (एआईआर 1997 एससी 568)

यह मामला , देश में हो रहे टेलीफोन टैपिंग के लगातार मामलों के खिलाफ पीयूसीएल द्वारा भारत के संविधान के अनुच्छेद 32 के तहत जनहित याचिका (पीआईएल) दायर की गई थी और इस प्रकार भारतीय टेलीग्राफ अधिनियम, 1885 की धारा 5(2) की वैधता को चुनौती दी गई। तब यह देखा गया कि “सार्वजनिक आपातकाल की घटना” और “सार्वजनिक सुरक्षा के हित में” धारा 5(2) के तहत दिए गए प्रावधानों (प्रोविजन) के आवेदन के लिए एक अनिवार्य शर्त है। यदि इन दोनों में से कोई भी शर्त मामले से अनुपस्थित है, तो भारत सरकार को इस धारा के तहत अपनी शक्ति का प्रयोग करने का कोई अधिकार नहीं है। इसलिए, टेलीफोन टैपिंग अनुच्छेद 19(1)(a) का उल्लंघन होगा जब तक कि यह अनुच्छेद 19(2) के तहत उचित प्रतिबंधों के आधार पर नहीं आता है।

विदेशी राज्यों के साथ मैत्रीपूर्ण संबंध (फ्रैंडली रिलेशन विथ फोरेन स्टेटस्)

प्रतिबंध के लिए यह आधार 1951 के संविधान (प्रथम संशोधन) अधिनियम द्वारा जोड़ा गया था। राज्य को बोलने और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता पर उचित प्रतिबंध लगाने का अधिकार है यदि यह अन्य राज्यों के साथ भारत के मैत्रीपूर्ण संबंधों को नकारात्मक (नेगेटिव) रूप से प्रभावित कर रहा है।

सार्वजनिक व्यवस्था (पब्लिक ऑर्डर)

प्रतिबंध के लिए यह आधार संविधान (प्रथम संशोधन) अधिनियम, 1951 द्वारा भी जोड़ा गया था, यह रोमेश थापर बनाम मद्रास राज्य (AIR 1950 SC 124) के मामले में सर्वोच्च न्यायालय के निर्णय से उत्पन्न स्थिति को पूरा करने के लिए किया गया था। भारत के सर्वोच्च न्यायालय के अनुसार, सार्वजनिक व्यवस्था कानून, व्यवस्था और राज्य की सुरक्षा से बहुत अलग है। ‘सार्वजनिक व्यवस्था’ शब्द सार्वजनिक शांति, सार्वजनिक सुरक्षा और शांति की भावना को दर्शाता है। जो कुछ भी सार्वजनिक शांति को भंग करता है, बदले में, जनता को परेशान करता है। लेकिन सिर्फ सरकार की आलोचना (क्रिटिसिजम) से लोक व्यवस्था (पब्लिक ऑर्डर) भंग नहीं हो जाती। एक कानून जो किसी भी वर्ग की धार्मिक भावनाओं को दुखाता है, उसे सार्वजनिक व्यवस्था बनाए रखने के उद्देश्य से वैध (वेलिड) और उचित प्रतिबंध माना गया है।

शालीनता और नैतिकता (डिसेंसी एंड मोरालिटी)

इन्हें भारतीय दंड संहिता 1860 (इंडियन पीनल कोड) की धारा 292 से 294 के तहत परिभाषित किया गया है, जो शालीनता और नैतिकता के आधार पर भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता पर प्रतिबंध के उदाहरण बताता है, और यह अश्लील शब्दों (ऑब्सेंस वर्ड्स) की बिक्री या वितरण या प्रदर्शन (डिलीवरी ऑर डिस्प्ले) को प्रतिबंधित करता है।

न्यायालय की अवमानना (कंटेंप्ट ऑफ़ कोर्ट)

अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता का अधिकार किसी भी तरह से किसी व्यक्ति को अदालतों की अवमानना करने की अनुमति नहीं देता है। अदालत की अवमानना की अभिव्यक्ति को न्यायालय की अवमानना अधिनियम, 1971 की धारा 2 के तहत परिभाषित किया गया है। ‘अदालत की अवमानना’ शब्द अधिनियम के तहत दीवानी अवमानना (सिविल कंटेंप्ट) या आपराधिक अवमानना (क्रिमिनल कंटेंप्ट) से संबंधित है।

मानहानि (डिफेमेशन)

भारत के संविधान के अनुच्छेद 19 का खंड (2) किसी भी व्यक्ति को ऐसा बयान देने से रोकता है जिससे समाज की नजर में दूसरे की प्रतिष्ठा को ठेस पहुंचे। मानहानि भारत में एक गंभीर अपराध है और इसे भारतीय दंड संहिता की धारा 499 और 500 के तहत परिभाषित किया गया है। अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता का अधिकार अनिवार्य (मंडेटरी) रूप से पूर्ण नहीं है। इसका मतलब किसी अन्य व्यक्ति की प्रतिष्ठा को ठेस पहुंचाने की आजादी नहीं है (जो संविधान के अनुच्छेद 21 के तहत संरक्षित है)। हालांकि ‘सत्य’ को मानहानि के खिलाफ बचाव माना जाता है, लेकिन बचाव तभी मदद करेगा जब ‘बयान (स्टेटमेंट) जनता की भलाई के लिए’ दिया गया हो और यह स्वतंत्र न्यायपालिका (इंडिपेंडेंट ज्यूडिशियरी) द्वारा मूल्यांकन (एवालूएशन) किए जाने वाले तथ्य (फैक्ट) का सवाल है।

अपराध के लिए उकसाना (इनसाइटमेंट टू एन ऑफेंस)

यह एक और आधार है जिसे 1951 के संविधान (प्रथम संशोधन) अधिनियम द्वारा भी जोड़ा गया था। संविधान किसी व्यक्ति को ऐसा कोई भी बयान देने से रोकता है जो अन्य लोगों को अपराध करने के लिए उकसाता है या प्रोत्साहित करता है।

भारत की संप्रभुता और अखंडता (सोवर्गीनिटी एंड इंटिग्रिटी ऑफ़ इंडिया)

इस आधार को बाद में 1963 के संविधान (सोलहवां संशोधन) अधिनियम द्वारा जोड़ा गया था। इसका उद्देश्य केवल किसी को भी ऐसे बयान देने से रोकना या प्रतिबंधित करना है जो देश की अखंडता और संप्रभुता को सीधे चुनौती देते हैं।

निष्कर्ष (कंक्लूज़न)

भाषण के माध्यम से किसी की राय व्यक्त करना भारत के संविधान द्वारा गारंटीकृत मूल अधिकारों में से एक है और आधुनिक (मॉडर्न) संदर्भ में, भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता का अधिकार केवल शब्दों के माध्यम से अपने विचारों को व्यक्त करने तक ही सीमित नहीं है बल्कि इसमें लेखन के संदर्भ (रेफरेंस) में, या दृश्य-श्रव्य (ऑडियो विजुअल) के माध्यम से, या संचार (कम्युनिकेशन) के किसी अन्य तरीके के माध्यम से विचार उन लोगों का प्रसार भी शामिल है। इस अधिकार में प्रेस की स्वतंत्रता का अधिकार, सूचना का अधिकार आदि भी शामिल है। इसलिए इस लेख से यह निष्कर्ष निकाला जा सकता है कि एक लोकतांत्रिक राज्य के समुचित कार्य (प्रॉपर फंक्शनिंग) के लिए स्वतंत्रता की अवधारणा बहुत आवश्यक है।

भारत के संविधान के अनुच्छेद 19 के तहत बताए गए “सार्वजनिक व्यवस्था के हित में” और “उचित प्रतिबंध” शब्दों का उपयोग यह इंगित (पॉइंट) करने के लिए किया जाता है कि इस धारा के तहत प्रदान किए गए अधिकार पूर्ण नहीं हैं और उन्हें अन्य लोगों की सुरक्षा राष्ट्र की और सार्वजनिक व्यवस्था और शालीनता बनाए रखने के लिए के लिए प्रतिबंधित किया जा सकता है।

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फॉन्ट साइज चुनने की सुविधा केवल एप पर उपलब्ध है

अमर उजाला एप इंस्टॉल कर रजिस्टर करें और 100 कॉइन्स पाएं, केवल नए रजिस्ट्रेशन पर, अब मिलेगी लेटेस्ट, ट्रेंडिंग और ब्रेकिंग न्यूज आपके व्हाट्सएप पर.

सभी नौकरियों के बारे में जानने के लिए अभी डाउनलोड करें अमर उजाला ऐप

क्षमा करें यह सर्विस उपलब्ध नहीं है कृपया किसी और माध्यम से लॉगिन करने की कोशिश करें

भारत के संविधान का अनुच्छेद-19 (भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता) |Article-19 (Freedom of Speech and Expression)

आज हम लिखित अथवा मौखिक रूप से प्रकट की गयी अभियुक्त की स्वतंत्रता के सम्बन्ध मे सम्पूर्ण जानकारी आपके साथ साझा करेंगे। इसके अलावा किसी व्यक्ति को अपनी बात प्रकट करने की क्या स्वतंत्रता हमारे भारत के संविधान मे दिया गया है, यह भी जानकारी देंगे। भाषण एवंम् अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता (Freedom of Speech and Expression) के बारे मे सम्पूर्ण जानकारी इस लेख के माध्यम जानेंगें। किसी व्यक्ति को अपनी बात लिखित या मौखिक रूप से समाज के समक्ष रखने के कुछ नियम एवंम् सयंम होते है, जिसके तहत वह अपने कथन को समाज के प्रति रखा जा सकता है, जिसे हमारे संविधान मे अनुच्छेद-19 (Article-19) मे परिभाषित किया गया है।

संविधान के भाग 3 में मौलिक अधिकारों का वर्णन किया गया है ये अधिकार प्रत्येक नागरिक के विकास के लिए बेहद जरूरी है, Article-19 , को भी मौलिक अधिकार की श्रेणी में रखा गया है। आज हम इस लेख में अनुच्छेद 19 में वर्णित विभिन्न प्रकार के मौलिक अधिकार के बारे में भी जानेंगे साथ ही, इनका क्या अर्थ होता है, यह स्पष्ट करेंगे। आखिर आर्टिकल 19 क्या है। What is Article 19 (Freedom of Speech and Expression) in Hindi.

आर्टिकल-19 मे प्रत्येक व्यक्ति अपनी लिखित एवंम् मौखिक बात रखने के लिये भारत के संविधान मे अधिकारों को परिभाषित किया गया है। भाषण एवंम् अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता प्रत्येक व्यक्ति का मौलिक अधिकार होता है। यह अधिकार आम नागरिक एवंम् पत्रकारिता/प्रेस के विचारो को प्रकट करने की स्वतंत्रता पर भी आधारित है।

आर्टिकल 19 क्या है ? (What is Article 19 )

भारत के संविधान के अनुच्छेद 19 के तहत लिखित और मौखिक रूप से अपना मत प्रकट करने हेतु अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता के अधिकार का प्रावधान किया गया है, किंतु अभियक्ति की स्वतंत्रता का अधिकार निरपेक्ष नहीं है इस पर युक्तियुक्त निर्बंधन हैं। भारत की एकता, अखंडता एवं संप्रभुता पर खतरे की स्थिति में, वैदेशिक संबंधों पर प्रतिकूल प्रभाव की स्थिति में, न्यायालय की अवमानना की स्थिति में इस अधिकार को बाधित किया जा सकता है। भारत के सभी नागरिकों को विचार करने, भाषण देने और अपने व अन्य व्यक्तियों के विचारों के प्रचार की स्वतंत्रता प्राप्त है। प्रेस/पत्रकारिता भी विचारों के प्रचार का एक साधन ही है इसलिये अनुच्छेद 19 में प्रेस की स्वतंत्रता भी सम्मिलित है।

अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता (freedom of expression) या बोलने की स्वतंत्रता (freedom of speech) किसी व्यक्ति या समुदाय द्वारा अपने मत और विचार को बिना प्रतिशोध, अभिवेचन या दंड के डर के प्रकट कर पाने की स्थिति होती है। इस स्वतंत्रता को सरकारें, जनसंचार कम्पनियाँ, और अन्य संस्थाएँ बाधित कर सकती हैं। इसलिये यह अधिकार प्रत्येक व्यक्ति का मौलिक अधिकार माना गया है। अनुच्छेद 19 में प्रयुक्त ‘अभिव्यक्ति’ शब्द इसके क्षेत्र को बहुत विस्तृत कर देता है। विचारों के व्यक्त करने के जितने भी माध्यम हैं जैसे लिखित अथवा मौखिक वे अभिव्यक्ति, पदावली के अन्तर्गत आ जाते हैं। इस प्रकार अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता में प्रेस की स्वतन्त्रता भी सम्मिलित है। विचारों का स्वतन्त्र प्रसारण ही इस स्वतन्त्रता का मुख्य उद्देश्य है। यह भाषण द्वारा या समाचार-पत्रों द्वारा किया जा सकता है। अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता में किसी व्यक्ति के विचारों को किसी ऐसे माध्यम से अभिव्यक्त करना सम्मिलित है जिससे वह दूसरों तक उन्हे संप्रेषित(Communicate) कर सके। इस प्रकार इनमें संकेतों, अंकों, चिह्नों तथा ऐसी ही अन्य क्रियाओं द्वारा किसी व्यक्ति के विचारों की अभिव्यक्ति सम्मिलित है।

संविधान के अनुच्छेद 19 में 6 तरह की स्वतंत्रताओं का उल्लेख है जो निम्न है – संविधान के अनुच्छेद 19 में 6 तरह की स्वतंत्रताओं के बारे में एक एक करके हम देखने का प्रयास करते हैं।

अनुच्छेद-19 ( Indian Constitution Article 19)

“Protection of certain rights regarding freedom of speech, etc”– All citizens shall have the right- (a) to freedom of speech and expression; (b) to assemble peaceably and without arms; (c) to form associations or unions 2[or co-operative societies]; (d) to move freely throughout the territory of India; (e) to reside and settle in any part of the territory of India; 3[and] (g) to practise any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade or business. “भाषण की स्वतंत्रता आदि के संबंध में कतिपय अधिकारों का संरक्षण”- सभी नागरिकों को अधिकार होगा- (क) भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता के लिए; (ख) शांतिपूर्वक और हथियारों के बिना इकट्ठा होने के लिए; (ग) संघों या यूनियनों 2 [या सहकारी समितियों] बनाने के लिए; (घ) भारत के पूरे क्षेत्र में स्वतंत्र रूप से स्थानांतरित करने के लिए; (ड़) भारत के क्षेत्र के किसी भी हिस्से में रहने और बसने के लिए; 3 [और] (छ) कोई व्यवसाय करना, या कोई उपजीविका, व्यापार या व्यापार करना।

अनुच्छेद-19(A) | बोलने की आजादी (freedom of speech)

भारत के संविधान मे आर्टिकल 19(A) में भारत के सभी नागरिकों को विचार करने, भाषण देने और अपने व अन्य व्यक्तियों के विचारों के प्रचार की स्वतंत्रता (freedom of speech and expression) प्राप्त है। प्रेस भी अपने विचारों के प्रचार का एक साधन होने के कारण Article-19(A) में प्रेस की स्वतंत्रता भी शामिल है लेकिन नागरिकों को विचार और अभिव्यक्ति की यह स्वतंत्रता असीमित रूप से प्राप्त नहीं है ।

भारत के संविधान मे प्रत्येक व्यक्ति को बोलने का अधिकार जन्मजात दिया गया है यदि प्रत्येक व्यक्ति को बोलना बंद कर दिया गया तो हमारी आवाज़ और हमारे विचार सीमित हो जाएंगे। इसलिए भारतीय संविधान के अनुच्छेद 19(A) के अंदर हमें बोलने की स्वतंत्रता दी गई है और इसे लागू भी किया गया है , यह हमारा मौलिक अधिकार है अतः यदि कोई व्यक्ति किसी के बोलने पर पाबंधी अथवा अपनी बात रखने पर एतराज करता है, तो हम न्यायालय भी जा सकते हैं ।

अनुच्छेद-19(B) | सभा की आजादी (freedom of assembly)

भारत के संविधान मे आर्टिकल 19(B) में व्यक्तियों के द्वारा अपने विचारों के प्रचार के लिए शांतिपूर्वक और बिना किन्हीं शस्त्रों के सभा या सम्मलेन करने का अधिकार प्रदान किया गया है और व्यक्तियों द्वारा जुलूस या प्रदर्शन का आयोजन भी किया जा सकता है। यहाँ भी यह स्वतंत्रता (assemble peacefully and without arms) असीमित नहीं है और राज्य के द्वारा सार्वजनिक सुरक्षा के हित में व्यक्ति की इस स्वतंत्रता को सीमित किया जा सकता है।

भारत के संविधान मे प्रत्येक व्यक्ति को सभा बनाने/सभा मे उपस्थित होने की आजादी है, प्रत्येक व्यक्ति को शांतिपूर्वक और बिना किन्हीं शस्त्रों के सभा या सम्मलेन बनाने या उपस्थित होने की आजादी दिया गया है। इसलिए भारतीय संविधान के अनुच्छेद 19(B) के अंदर सभा बनाने या उपस्थित होने की स्वतंत्रता दी गई है और इसे लागू भी किया गया है , यह हमारा मौलिक अधिकार है अतः यदि कोई व्यक्ति किसी को सभा बनाने या उपस्थित होने पर एतराज करता है, तो हम न्यायालय भी जा सकते हैं ।

अनुच्छेद-19(C) | संघ बनाने की आजादी (freedom of association)

भारत के संविधान मे आर्टिकल 19(C) मे सभी नागरिकों को समुदायों और संघों के निर्माण की स्वतंत्रता प्रदान की गई है परन्तु यह स्वतंत्रता भी उन प्रतिबंधों के अधीन है, जिन्हें राज्य साधारण जनता के हितों को ध्यान में रखते हुए लगाता है। इस स्वतंत्रता की आड़ में व्यक्ति ऐसे समुदायों का निर्माण नहीं कर सकता जो षड्यंत्र करें अथवा सार्वजनिक शान्ति और व्यवस्था को भंग करें।

भारत के संविधान मे प्रत्येक व्यक्ति को संघ बनाने या उपस्थित होने की आजादी है, प्रत्येक व्यक्ति को सार्वजनिक शांति और बिना किसी षणयंत्र के अथवा किसी आम नागरिक को कोई परेशानी को ध्यान मे रखते हुये ऐसे संघ बनाने या उपस्थित होने की आजादी दी गयी है। इसलिए भारतीय संविधान के अनुच्छेद 19(C) के अंदर संघ बनाने या उपस्थित होने की स्वतंत्रता दी गई है और इसे लागू भी किया गया है , यह हमारा मौलिक अधिकार है अतः यदि कोई व्यक्ति किसी को संघ बनाने या उपस्थित होने पर एतराज करता है, तो हम न्यायालय भी जा सकते हैं ।

अनुच्छेद-19(D) | पूरे देश मे आने-जाने की आजादी (freedom of movement throughout the country)

भारत के संविधान मे आर्टिकल 19(D) भारत के सभी नागरिक बिना किसी प्रतिबंध या विशेष अधिकार-पत्र के सम्पूर्ण भारतीय क्षेत्र में कही भी घूम सकते हैं।

भारत के संविधान मे प्रत्येक व्यक्ति को पूरे भारत देश मे आने-जाने की आजादी है, प्रत्येक व्यक्ति को किसी गैर-इरादे (भागने के उद्देश्य निहित न हो) अथवा किसी आम नागरिक को किसी परेशानी को ध्यान मे रखते हुये ऐसे भारत के किसी भी राज्य मे घूमने की आजादी दी गयी है। इसलिए भारतीय संविधान के अनुच्छेद 19(D) के अंदर पूरे भारत देश मे घूमने की आजादी की स्वतंत्रता दी गई है और इसे लागू भी किया गया है , यह हमारा मौलिक अधिकार है अतः यदि कोई व्यक्ति किसी को भारत के किसी राज्य मे आने-जाने पर एतराज करता है, तो हम न्यायालय भी जा सकते हैं ।

अनुच्छेद-19(E) | पूरे देश मेँ बसने की/रहने की आजादी (Freedom to settle/reside throughout the country)

भारत के संविधान मे आर्टिकल 19(E) भारत के प्रत्येक नागरिक को भारत में कहीं भी रहने या बस जाने की स्वतंत्रता प्रदान की गई है। भ्रमण और निवास के सम्बन्ध में यह व्यवस्था संविधान द्वारा अपनाई गई इकहरी नागरिकता के अनुरूप है, भ्रमण और निवास की इस स्वतंत्रता पर भी राज्य सामान्य जनता के हित और अनुसूचित जातियों और जनजातियों के हितों में यक्ति-युक्त प्रतिबंध लगा सकता है।

भारत के संविधान मे प्रत्येक व्यक्ति को पूरे भारत देश मे बसने या रहने की आजादी है, प्रत्येक व्यक्ति को किसी गैर-इरादे (भागने के उद्देश्य निहित न हो) अथवा किसी आम नागरिक को किसी परेशानी को ध्यान मे रखते हुये ऐसे भारत के किसी भी राज्य मे बसने या रहने की आजादी दी गयी है। इसलिए भारतीय संविधान के अनुच्छेद 19(E) के अंदर पूरे भारत देश मे बसने या रहने की आजादी की स्वतंत्रता दी गई है और इसे लागू भी किया गया है , यह हमारा मौलिक अधिकार है अतः यदि कोई व्यक्ति किसी को भारत के किसी राज्य मे बसने या रहने पर एतराज करता है, तो हम न्यायालय भी जा सकते हैं ।

अनुच्छेद-19(G) | कोई भी व्यापार एवं जीविका की आजादी (Freedom of any trade and livelihood)

भारत के संविधान मे आर्टिकल 19(G) भारत में सभी नागरिकों को इस बात की स्वतंत्रता है कि वे अपनी आजीविका के लिए कोई भी पेशा, व्यापार या कारोबार कर सकते हैं | राज्य साधारणतया व्यक्ति को न तो कोई विशेष नौकरी, व्यापार या व्यवसाय करने के लिए बाध्य करेगा और न ही उसके इस प्रकार के कार्य में बाधा डालेगा. किन्तु इस सबंध में भी राज्य को यह अधिकार प्राप्त है कि वह कुछ व्यवसायों के सम्बन्ध में आवश्यक योग्यताएं निर्धारित कर सकता है अथवा किसी कारोबार या उद्योग को पूर्ण अथवा आंशिक रूप से अपने हाथ में ले सकता है।

भारत के संविधान मे प्रत्येक व्यक्ति को पूरे भारत देश मे कोई भी नौकरी, व्यापार करके जीविका चलाने की आजादी है, बशर्ते किसी गैर-कानूनी तरीके व्यापार से नही। प्रत्येक व्यक्ति को नौकरी, व्यापार करके जीविका चलाने की आजादी है। इसलिए भारतीय संविधान के अनुच्छेद 19(G) के अंदर पूरे भारत देश मे कोई भी नौकरी, व्यापार एवं किसी प्रकार से जीविका अर्जित करने की स्वतंत्रता दी गई है और इसे लागू भी किया गया है , यह हमारा मौलिक अधिकार है अतः यदि कोई व्यक्ति किसी को भारत के किसी राज्य मे कोई भी नौकरी, व्यापार एवं अन्य कोई जीविका अर्जित करने पर एतराज करता है, तो हम न्यायालय भी जा सकते हैं ।

नोट- भारत के संविधान के भाग 3 मे मौलिक अधिकारो मे अनुच्छेद-19 भी, प्रत्येक व्यक्ति का एक जन्मसिद्ध अधिकार है, लेकिन जो कोई व्यक्ति इस अधिकार का अनुचित लाभ उठाता है जैसे- भारत की एकता, अखंडता एवं संप्रभुता पर खतरा जैसे स्थिति मे, वैदेशिक संबंधों पर प्रतिकूल प्रभाव की स्थिति में, न्यायालय की अवमानना की स्थिति में उपरोक्त अधिकारों को बाधित करता है अथवा अपने शब्दों से किसी को ठेस पहुचाता है, जो गैर-कानूनी होता है, तो ऐसी दशा मे वह व्यक्ति दोषी माना जायेगा।

इसे भी पढ़े–

हमारा प्रयास अनुच्छेद-19 (Article-19) भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता (Freedom of Speech and Expression) की पूर्ण जानकारी, आप तक प्रदान करने का है, उम्मीद है कि उपरोक्त लेख से आपको संतुष्ट जानकारी प्राप्त हुई होगी, फिर भी अगर आपके मन में कोई सवाल हो, तो आप कॉमेंट बॉक्स में कॉमेंट करके पूछ सकते है।

भारत में भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता Freedom of Speech & Expression in India Hindi

आज हम बात करेंगे भारत में भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता Freedom of Speech & Expression in India Hindi

हमारा भारत देश विविधताओं का देश है। यहाँ भांति भांति के लोग पाए जाते हैं और उन्हीं के होने में हैं – अलग-अलग प्रकार के चेहरे, बोलियां, संस्कार, संस्कृति , स्वभाव, जीवन शैली, रहन-सहन, खाना-पीना और भी ना जाने बहुत कुछ।

पर हमारे हिंदुस्तान की खूबसूरती इसी बात में है कि इतनी भिन्नता के साथ भी अनेकता में एकता वाली बात है। यही सुंदरता है भारतीय होने की, पर सबसे मजेदार एवं रोचक बात यह है कि इतने अलग अलग प्रकार के लोगों के साथ जो बात सबसे ज्यादा उभर कर आती है, जो बात सबसे अहम है, वह है सब के विचार।

विचार असल में होते क्या है? विचार दरअसल एक व्यक्ति के चरित्र की पहचान होती है, विचार जिंदा है तो मनुष्य जिंदा है। विचारों के कारण ही एक व्यक्ति की शख्सियत बनती है या बिगड़ती है। अगर विचार अच्छे होंगे शुद्ध होंगे निर्मल निश्चल होंगे तो जीवन भी सुखमय होगा।

सभी आसपास के लोग भी आपसे स्नेह एवं प्रेम रखेंगे, दुनिया सलाम करेगी, कठिन से कठिन परिस्थितियों में, मुश्किलों के हालात में भी अगर एक इंसान जिंदा रह पाता है, तो वह अपनी सकारात्मक सोच के कारण ही रह पाता है।

विचार दरअसल सोच है, सोच जो हमारे दिमाग में चलती रहती है, सोच से ही जीवन बिखरता है और बनता ।है अगर वहीं दूसरी ओर आपके विचार खराब होंगे घुटन और नकारात्मकता से भरे होंगे, तो कितना ही कुछ कर ले फिर भी जीवन में आप का कभी भला नहीं हो पाएगा, आप बस दुखों में ही डूबे रहेंगे।

फिर विचारों से भी ऊपर बात आती है विचारों की अभिव्यक्ति की!! बिल्कुल, जो भी आपके विचार हैं आपको उनकी अभिव्यक्ति करनी आनी चाहिए, मतलब अगर आपके पास अच्छे से अच्छे विचार हैं आपकी सोच अच्छी है पर आप उन शब्दों को बोल नहीं पा रहे हैं तो सब बेकार है। अर्थात आपको आपके विचारों को अभिव्यक्त करना आना चाहिए।

आपको अपनी सोच के बारे में बताना आना चाहिए, आप क्या सोचते हैं आपकी ज़ुबान पर आना चाहिए, तभी बात बनेगी। मतलब सीधे शब्दों में कहें तो दिल की बात जुबान पर आनी चाहिए।

फिर हम आए इस बात पर कि भारत में विचारों की अभिव्यक्ति पर कितनी स्वतंत्रता है, तो जवाब मिला जुला होगा। थोड़ा खट्टा थोड़ा मीठा होगा!! दरअसल सच्ची बात कहें तो हमारे देश में विचारों की अभिव्यक्ति पर कोई जबरन रोक-टोक नहीं है, आपके जो मन की बात है वह आप कह सकते हैं जिससे चाहे उससे कह सकते हैं, किसी पर भी कोई प्रकार की जबरदस्ती नहीं है, पूरा खुलापन है विचारों का।

आप अपने मन की बात बिना रोक-टोक अभिव्यक्त कर सकते हैं पूरी स्वतंत्रता है इस बात की!! परंतु कभी-कभी कुछ लोग इस स्वतंत्रता का गलत फायदा उठाने की कोशिश करते हैं और देश में अशांति फैलाने में जुटे रहते हैं। दरअसल होता क्या है कि विचारों की अभिव्यक्ति करने का भी एक अंदाज होता है एक तरीका होता है, विचारों को सही प्रकार सही ढंग से व्यक्त करना भी एक कला है।

कभी-कभी लोग अच्छी सोच को भी गलत शब्दों में डालकर बोल देते हैं, उनकी सोच या उनकी मंशा गलत नहीं होती है बस उनका अंदाज उनका तरीका और कभी-कभी बस वक्त भी गलत हो जाता है। ऐसे में होता क्या है कि बेचारा व्यक्ति बुरी परिस्थितियों में फंस जाता है और कटाक्ष एवं मजाक का पात्र बन जाता है।

फिर आते हैं वह लोग जो जानबूझकर कड़वी बात करते हैं, जानते हुए भी घटिया हरकतें करते हैं। ऐसे लोग भड़काऊ उत्तेजक बयान बाजी करके नकारात्मकता फैलाने की कोशिश करते हैं, ऐसे में होता यह है कि जो लोग इन सब चीजों से अनजान है मासूम है वह इन सब का आकस्मिक शिकार बन जाते हैं और कभी-कभी अपने आसपास के लोगों से झगड़ा कर बैठते हैं।

कुछ लोगों का तो मकसद ही होता है नकारात्मकता का माहौल पैदा करना और इन मंसूबों में वह कामयाब हो जाते हैं क्योंकि काफी लोग इन खराब लोगों की घटिया दर्जे की राजनीति से अनजान रहते हैं। देश में, मुल्क में तो हमेशा ही मुहब्बत, प्रेम की लहर होनी चाहिए और सकारात्मकता फैलाने के लिए हमारे विचार सबसे बड़ा जरिया होते हैं, तो बस इन्हीं विचारों को ढंग से नाप तोल कर व्यक्त करें तो ही बेहतर होगा।

अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता पर निबंध | Essay On Freedom Of Speech In Hindi

Essay On Freedom Of Speech In Hindi अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता पर निबंध : हमारा भारत एक लोकतांत्रिक देश हैं, हमारा संविधान नागरिकों को कई प्रकार के मौलिक अधिकार देता है जिनमें समानता, स्वतंत्रता, धार्मिक आजादी और अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी मुख्य हैं.

आज के निबंध में हम फ्रीडम ऑफ़ स्पीच क्या है इसके पक्ष विपक्ष में तर्क वितर्क आलोचना आदि बिन्दुओं को जानेगे.

अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता पर निबंध Essay On Freedom Of Speech In Hindi

नवजात शिशु का क्रन्दन बाहरी दुनियां के प्रति उसकी प्रतिक्रिया की अभिव्यक्ति हैं. अभिव्यक्ति की इच्छा किसी व्यक्ति की भावनाओं, कल्पनाओं एवं चिन्तन से प्रेरित हैं और अपनी अपनी क्षमता के अनुरूप होती हैं.

अपनी भावना या मत को अभिव्यक्त करने की आकांक्षा कभी कभी इतनी मजबूत बन जाती हैं कि व्यक्ति अकेला होने पर भी खुद से बात करने लगता हैं, मगर अभिव्यक्ति की निर्दोषता और सदोषता का प्रश्न तभी उठता हैं, जब अभिव्यक्ति बातचीत का रूप लेती हैं व्यक्तियों के बीच या समूहों के बीच.

हमारे मौलिक अधिकारों में अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी का मौलिक अधिकार शामिल किया गया हैं. इसका सरल सा अर्थ यह है कि हम अपने हक हकूक के लिए आवाज उठा सकते हैं.

अपने खिलाफ हो रहे अन्याय का खुलकर प्रतिरोध कर सकते हैं. बोलने की आजादी का दायरा भी सिमित रखा गया हैं, हम केवल मर्यादा में बने रहकर ही आवाज उठा सकते हैं.

अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी की उत्पत्ति

अगर थोड़ा अतीत में झांके तो बोलने की आजादी की सबसे पहले मांग इंग्लैंड में की गई थी, तदोपरांत वहां वर्ष 1689 में मौलिक अधिकार के रूप में अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी को मान्यता मिली.

इस स्वतंत्रता के तहत सभी नागरिकों को अपने विचारों और भावनाओं को बिना शासकीय बंदिश के अभिव्यक्त करने की पूर्णरूपेण आजादी प्रदान की गई हैं.

यह अधिकार उसे लिखित मुद्रित रूप में अपने विचारों को अभिव्यक्त करने की आजादी देता हैं. अन्य मौलिक अधिकारों की भांति इसके उल्लंघन की स्थिति में व्यक्ति कोर्ट जा सकता हैं.

भारतीय संविधान के मूल अधिकारों में अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी के अधिकार को सार्वभौमिक रूप से सर्वसहमति से स्वीकार किया गया था.

बोलने की आजादी की सीमाएं

वैसे तो प्रत्येक संवैधानिक अधिकार के साथ कुछ उपबन्ध बनाए गये हैं जो ये सीमा निर्धारित करते है कि किस हद तक उस अधिकार का उपयोग मर्यादापूर्ण हैं. देश के संविधान का अनुच्छेद 21 अपने नागरिकों को अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी देता हैं मगर कुछ युक्तियुक्त निर्बंधनों के साथ.

वो इस तरह की अगर एक इंसान की अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी का प्रभाव देश की एकता अखंडता और सम्प्रभुता को प्रभावित करने वाला हो तो अथवा सामाजिक सौहार्द, न्यायालय की अवमानना से जुड़ा हो तो उसे प्रतिबंधित किया गया हैं.

बोलने की आजादी के नाम पर किसी को गाली देने अथवा अपमानित करने की वकालत भारतीय संविधान नहीं करता हैं.

अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी जरूरत क्यों है?

मनुष्य अन्य सभी जीवों की तुलना में इसलिए श्रेष्ठ हैं क्योंकि उनके पास विचार करने की शक्ति हैं तथा वह अपने भावों को किसी भाषा के माध्यम से अभिव्यक्त करने में समक्ष हैं. समतामूलक समाज में यह आवश्यक हो जाता हैं कि प्रत्येक नागरिक को अपनी बात कहने का अधिकार हो.

राजशाही में इनकी अवहेलना की जाती थी, अत्याचार के खिलाफ बोलने वालों को डरा धमका कर चुप करा दिया जाता था. मगर आधुनिक लोकतांत्रिक समाज के समुचित विकास के लिए नागरिकों को सर्वांगीण विकास के मौके उपलब्ध कराने में अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी एक बड़ा पहलू हैं जो हर हालत में उपलब्ध होना ही चाहिए.

अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता की बदौलत ही दूसरों के विचारों को समझने उन पर चर्चा और आम सहमति बन सकती हैं, यही लोकतंत्र का बुनियादी आधार हैं.

राजनैतिक पार्टी हो या समाज जहाँ विभिन्नताएं है स्वभाविक हैं विचारों में भी अलग अलग राय हो सकती हैं अतः सभी को अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी के अधिकार दिए बिना समाज व देश की तरक्की नहीं की जा सकती.

अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता के दुरुपयोग

अन्य संवैधानिक अधिकारों की तरह अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता के अधिकार के भी दुरूपयोग की पर्याप्त सम्भावनाएं रहती हैं. इसकी बड़ी वजह यह हैं कि बोलने की आजादी की सीमाएं न तो स्पष्ट परिभाषित है न इनके दुरूपयोग को रोकने के न कोई विशिष्ट प्रबंध हैं.

भारत में फ्रीडम ऑफ़ स्पीच और एक्सप्रेशन के नाम पर आए दिन देश द्रोही बाते आम हैं. हर दिन देश को तोड़ने वाली वाली बाते बड़े बड़े मंचों से केवल फ्रीडम के नाम से कही जाती हैं.

देश की सेना, प्रधानमंत्री, हिन्दू धर्म के बारे में आए दिन वैसे विवादित ब्यान दिए जाते हैं जिन्हें अधिकारों की चादर ओढकर छिपाने का छद्म व्यापार सभी के सामने हैं.

किसी भी समाज में नागरिकों के विचारों का दमन करना ठीक नहीं हैं. विचारों का खुला प्रवाह विकास की राह खोलता हैं. साथ ही किसी नागरिक को किस हद तक जाकर बोलने की आजादी होनी चाहिए, इन पर कठोर कानून बनाकर समुचित व्यवस्था बनाएं जाने की जरूरत हैं.

आज सोशल मिडिया अभिव्यक्ति का एक बड़ा माध्यम हैं. जहाँ पर अच्छे विचारों के साथ ही देश की एकता और सौहार्द को बिगाड़ने वाले भड़कीले भाषण भी देखने मिलते हैं.

समय आ गया हैं राष्ट्र को तोड़ने की नियत से कहे जाने वाले विचारों का दमन आवश्यक हैं साथ ही आम आदमी को राष्ट्रीय एकता, सुरक्षा, सम्प्रभुता के विषयों को छोडकर अन्य पर बोलने अपने विचार रखने की स्वतंत्रता की रक्षा की जानी चाहिए.

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हम उम्मीद करते है “ अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता पर निबंध Essay On Freedom Of Speech In Hindi ” में दी गई जानकारी आपको उपयोगी लगी होगी, फ्रीडम ऑफ़ स्पीच के बारे में आपके विचार हमारे साथ अवश्य शेयर करें.

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अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता पर निबंध

अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता पर निबंध अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता पर निबंध भारत में अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता Freedom Of Expression अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी पर बड़े निबंध Essay on Freedom of Speech in Hindi essay on freedom of speech in hindi देखा जाए तो अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी एक मूल मानव अधिकार है|

भारत में अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी

अभिव्यक्ति की ज़रुरत क्यों है , अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी का कमजोर कमजोर पक्ष , अन्याय के खिलाफ़ आवाज.

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देश की आज़ादी के लिए कुर्बान वे नायक, जिनके बारे में शायद ही सुना हो आपने

देश 75वां स्वतंत्रता दिवस मना रहा है। देश की आज़ादी हमें कई लोगों के बलिदान, साहस और त्याग से मिली है। लेकिन ऐसे कई हीरोज़ हैं, जिनके साहस की कहानियां इतिहास के पन्नों पर धुमिल हो गई हैं।

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2. गुमनाम फ्रीडम फाइटर्स में एक नाम निकुंजा सेन

3. उदय प्रसाद ‘उदय’

4. मींधू कुम्हार , गुमनाम फ्रीडम फाइटर्स में से एक

5. कैप्टन राम सिंह ठाकुर

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भारत के इन चटक अचारों का स्वाद , एक बार चखा तो हमेशा रहेगा याद

गर्मियों में इस तरह करें अपने तुलसी के पौधे की देखभाल

xr:d:DAGCE0_GcFQ:3,j:3256527025030387534,t:24041103

सौंधी सुगंध शाही Taste भारत की ये बिरयानी हैं सबसे Best

xr:d:DAGBaCQHcso:2,j:7441496244814348305,t:24040400

गर्मियां जाएंगे भूल, ये देसी समर ड्रिंक्स रखेंगे आपको कूल

राजस्थान की भीषण गर्मी में भी इनके घर में रहती है ठंडक

इन जगहों पर जाएं और खो जाएं सितारों की दुनिया में

रंगीले भारत के रंगीन शहर

भारत का गौरव बढ़ाने वाली वो कलाएं जिन्हें मिला है GI टैग

गर्मियां शुरू होने से पहले ही उगा ले ये सब्जियां

भारत को ऑस्कर दिलाने वाले अनमोल भारतीय

समाज की बेड़‍ियां तोड़ने वाली शक्तिशाली महिलाओं के विचार

Constitution of India

Home / constitution of india, constitutional law, freedom of speech & expression, 20-nov-2023.

Constitution of India, 1950 (COI)

Introduction

Freedom of speech and expression is contained in Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India, 1950 (COI).
The essence of free speech is the ability to think and speak freely and to obtain information from others through publications and public discourse without fear of retribution, restrictions or repression by the Government.

Article 19(1)(a), COI

The philosophy behind this Article lies in the Preamble of the Constitution, where a solemn resolve is made to secure to all its citizen, liberty of thought and expression.
Freedom of Press
Freedom of Commercial Speech
Right to Broadcast
Right to Information
Right to Criticize
Right to expression beyond national boundaries
Right not to speak or right to silence

Essential Elements of Article 19(1)(a), COI

This right is available only to a citizen of India and not to foreign nationals.
It includes the right to express one’s views and opinions at any issue through any medium, e.g. by words of mouth, writing, printing, picture, film, movie etc.
This right is, however, not absolute and it allows Government to frame laws to impose reasonable restrictions.

Article 19(2), COI

The exercise of this right is, however, subject to reasonable restrictions for certain purposes imposed under Article 19(2) .
The Article 19 (2) states that nothing in sub clause (a) of clause (1) shall affect the operation of any existing law, or prevent the State from making any law, in so far as such law imposes reasonable restrictions on the exercise of the right conferred by the said sub clause in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.

Significance of Article 19 (1)(a), COI

Societal good : Liberty to express opinions and ideas without hindrance, and especially without fear of punishment plays a significant role in the development of a particular society.
Self-development : Free speech is an integral aspect of each individual’s right to self-development and fulfilment. Restrictions inhibit our personality and its growth.
Democratic value : Freedom of speech is the bulwark of democratic Government. This freedom is essential for the proper functioning of the democratic process as it allows people to criticize the government in a democracy, freedom of speech and expression open up channels of free discussion of issues.
Ensure pluralism : Freedom of Speech reflects and reinforces pluralism, ensuring that diversity is validated and promotes the self-esteem of those who follow a particular lifestyle.
In Romesh Thappar v. State of Madras (1950) : The Supreme Court (SC) observed that freedom of the press lays at the foundation of all democratic organizations.
In Abbas v. Union of India (1970) : The SC made it clear that censorship of films including pre-censorship was constitutionally valid in India as it was a reasonable restriction imposed on Article 19(1)(a) of the COI.
In Bennett Coleman and Co. v. Union of India (1972): The SC struck down the validity of the Newsprint Control Order, which fixed the maximum number of pages, holding it to be violative of provision of Article 19(1)(a) and not to be reasonable restriction under Article 19(2) of the COI.
In Maneka Gandhi vs Union of India (1978) : The SC held that the freedom of speech and expression is not confined to National boundarie s.
In Indian Express v. Union of India (1985) : The SC held that the Press plays a very significant role in the democratic machinery. The courts have a duty to uphold the freedom of press and invalidate all laws and administrative actions that abridge that freedom .
In Bijoe Emmanuel v. State of Kerala (1986) : The SC held that the right to speak includes the right to be silent or to utter no words .
In Union of India v. Assn. for Democratic Reforms (2002) : The SC held that one-sided information, disinformation, misinformation and noninformation, all equally create an uninformed citizenry which makes democracy a farce. Freedom of speech and expression includes the right to impart and receive information which includes freedom to hold opinions.

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Article 19: Mapping the Free Speech Debate in India

The Freedom of Speech and Expression is a fundamental right guaranteed to all citizens under the Constitution of India. However, the Constitution does not guarantee an absolute individual right to freedom of expression. Instead, it envisages reasonable restrictions that may be placed on this right by law.

Many laws that restrict free speech such as the laws punishing sedition, hate speech or defamation, derive their legitimacy from Article 19(2). Inspection of movies, books, paintings, etc, is also possible by way of this clause. Scholars note that censorship in India was, and still is, historically rooted in the discourse of protecting Indian values from outside forces and building and maintaining strong national unity post independence. Scholars conclude that any misuse of the law could be detrimental to arts and ideas.

The freedom to criticise and dissent are part of one’s broader freedom of speech, which is seen as fundamental to the functioning of a democracy. If a state’s citizenry is not free to express themselves, then their other civil and political rights are also under threat.

The freedom of expression, however, is paramount to the working of a democracy and it includes the right to offend. For a little over half a decade, questions of whether “hate speech” can be excused under the right to freedom of speech, have been raised by various quarters of society—their stance often varying from one case to the other.

The freedom of press is also crucial to the functioning of participative democracy. In the absence of a free press, citizens lose their ability to make informed decisions in a free and fair electoral process. In conclusion,

“Intolerance of dissent from the orthodoxy of the day has been the bane of Indian society for centuries. But it is precisely in the ready acceptance of the right to dissent, as distinct from its mere tolerance, that a free society distinguishes itself.” —A G Noorani, 1999

In this resource kit, we have collated over 200 articles from the EPW archive and built a repository of articles that cover these debates.

Scroll over the redacted text of Article 19 (1) (a) and Article (19) (2) below to explore more.

All citizens shall have the right to freedom of speech and expression …

Nothing in sub clause (a) of clause (1) shall affect the operation of any existing law, or prevent the State from making any law, in so far as such law imposes reasonable restrictions on the exercise of the right conferred by the said sub clause in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State , friendly relations with foreign States, public order , decency or morality or in relation to contempt of court , defamation or incitement to an offence.

Freedom of Speech and Public Order

Laws maintaining public order seek to restrict and punish the harassment of individuals, hate speech and public nuisance. Any speech or publication considered prejudicial to these interests is subject to censorship. Restrictions on freedom of speech can also be invoked to curb the spread of misinformation and disinformation since these are likely to be inimical to public order.

While there are laws that punish offensive speech that may hurt the religious or cultural sentiments of sections of society, conservative groups have, on occasion, themselves posed a threat to public order in order to create a justification for restricting speech that may be critical of specific cultural or religious norms.

Articles in this section outline several such cases—the 1989 Supreme Court ruling to insert a disclaimer before a television serial on Tipu Sultan’s life claiming it depicts his life truly; the assassination of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar in 2013; the 2014 speech by Hindu Rashtra Sena leaders in Pune, that lead to communal violence and the death of Mohsin Sheikh; and the 2014 uproar against Perumal Murugan’s book, Madhorubhagan. Some articles also describe how right-wing groups across the country feel empowered to dictate what the people should read and watch.

It must be noted that while the intent of the speeches that have led to communal disharmony and violence can and must be questioned, at the same time, the use of the politics of “hurt religious sentiments” to organise violence must also be questioned. This leads to legal ambiguity. How can a distinction be drawn between individuals giving deliberate malicious speeches aimed at outraging religious sentiments and spreading enmity on the one hand and exercising their freedom of speech on the other?

Freedom of Speech in Universities | A G Noorani, 1991
Blasphemy and Religious Criticism | Nasim Ansari, 1992
Hate Speech and Free Speech | A G Noorani, 1992
Politics of Religious Hate-Beyond the Bills | Anil Nauriya, 1993
Police as Film Censors | A G Noorani, 1995
Hate Propaganda in Gujarat Press and Bardoli Riots | Ghanshyam Shah, 1998
Art in the Time of Cholera | Sumanta Banerjee, 2000
From Coercion to Power Relations | Someswar Bhowmik, 2003
Habib Tanvir under Attack | Sudhanva Deshpande, 2003
Cartoon Protests: Religion and Freedom | EPW Editorial, 2006
Ban on Films: Break the Silence | EPW Editorial, 2007
Taslima Case: Accountability of Elected Representatives | K G Kannabiran and Kalpana Kannabiran, 2007
Free Speech - Hate Speech: The Taslima Nasreen Case | Iqbal A Ansari, 2008
Films and Free Speech | A G Noorani, 2008
Free Speech and Religion | A G Noorani, 2009
Religion, Freedom of Speech and Imaging the Prophet | Sudha Sitharaman, 2010
Cartoons, Caste and Politics | Manjit Singh, 2012
Ambedkar Cartoon Controversy | EPW Editorial, 2012
Cartoons, Textbooks and Politics of Pedagogy | G Arunima, 2012
The Constitution, Cartoons and Controversies | Kumkum Roy, 2012
Through the Lens of a Constitutional Republic | Peter Ronald deSouza, 2012
Symbolic Injury as a Site of Protest | Sheba Tejani, 2012
Ashis Nandy's Critics and India's Thriving Democracy | Indrajit Roy, 2013
The Dilemmas and Challenges faced by the Rationalist Indian | T V Venkateswaran, 2013
The Age of Hurt Sentiments | Kannan Sundaram, 2015
Intolerance of Dissent | Megha Bahl and Sharmila Purkayastha, 2015
The Tyranny of 'Hurt' Feelings | Ambrose Pinto, 2015
Unofficial Censors | EPW Editorial, 2015
'Hurt': Old Sentiment, New Claims | Manash Bhattacharjee, 2015
Instigators of Murderous Mobs | Prashant Singh, 2016
The Republic of Reasons | Alok Rai, 2016
Hate Speech, Hurt Sentiment, and the (Im)Possibility of Free Speech | Siddharth Narrain, 2016
Harmful Speech and the Politics of Hurt Sentiments | Philipp Sperner, 2016
Republic of Hurt Sentiments | Vikram Raghavan and Iqra Zainul Abedin, 2017
The Game of Hurt Sentiments | EPW Editorial, 2017
Sexual Harassment and the Limits of Speech | Rukmini Sen, 2017
Dangerous Speech in Real Time: Social Media, Policing, and Communal Violence | Siddharth Narrain, 2017
Social Media Accountability | Alok Prasanna Kumar, 2018
A Blasphemy Law is Antithetical to India's Secular Ethos | Surbhi Karwa and Shubham Kumar, 2019
India Needs a Fresh Strategy to Tackle Online Extreme Speech | Sahana Udupa, 2019
Muzzling Artistic Liberty and Protesting Anti-conversion Bill in Jharkhand | Sujit Kumar, 2019
Speech as Action | Richa Shukla and Dalorina Nath, 2020
Do Indian Courts Face A Dilemma in Interpreting Hate Speech? | Neha Gupta and Kavya Gupta, 2020

Freedom of Speech and Reasonable Restrictions

“Freedom of expression is a privilege for some and denied to others while those strangling free expression continue to unabashedly sing the mantra of freedom and democracy’’ (EPW editorial, 16 September 2017). This quote captures the manner in which this freedom can be manipulated. For the functioning of any democracy, it is of importance that its citizens are guaranteed the freedom of speech with reasonable restrictions. The state has to ensure that its citizens can exercise this fundamental right without any threat to their personal liberty.

The implementation of this right in the context of book bans, censoring films and plays has often been contested in courts and judgments have taken a progressive stance. This freedom of expression applies not only to easily agreeable ideas but also to “ideas that offend, shock or disturb” the audience. The censor board has often overstepped its role as a certification body and outrageously demanded cuts in films and sometimes even a change in the narrative. The courts have rescued many films such as the Hindi film Udta Punjab, the Tamil film Ore Oru Gramathile and many others, from the subjective ruling of the censor board. In recent times, content put out on social media and the role of fake news in spreading disruptive misinformation has also become a subject of discussion in light of the manner in which restrictions can be placed. Scholars have discussed whether social media users or the platforms themselves should be held responsible for communications that promote hateful speech and intolerance. Discussions are geared towards the likely consequences of online censorship.

Articles in this section discuss the basis of “reasonable restrictions” to the freedom of speech in India on the grounds of “public interest.” The debates regarding what constitutes a “reasonable” restriction are also covered here.

Censorship: Scope and Limitations | EPW Legal Correspondent, 1976
Film Censorship | A G Noorani, 1983
TV Films and Censorship | A G Noorani, 1990
Film Censorship and Freedom | A G Noorani, 1994
Who Draws the Line-Feminist Reflections on Speech and Censorship | Ratna Kapur, 1996
Politics of Film Censorship | Someswar Bhowmik, 2002
Mutilated Liberty and the Constitution | Nirmalendu Bikash Rakshit, 2003
Book Banning | A G Noorani, 2007
The Constitution and Censorship of Plays | A G Noorani, 2008
Turning the Spotlight on the Media | EPW Editorial, 2011
Censoring the Internet: The New Intermediary Guidelines | Rishab Bailey, 2012
Does Censorship Ever Work? | Geeta Seshu, 2012
We Do Not 'Like' | EPW Editorial, 2012
Two Films, Two Opinions | EPW Editorial, 2015
Certify, Not Censor | EPW Editorial, 2016
The Persuasions of Intolerance | Janaki Srinivasan, 2016
First Amendment to Constitution of India | C K Mathew, 2016
Flight of Common Sense | EPW Editorial, 2016
Taking Free Speech Seriously | Vikram Raghavan, 2016
A Twisted Freedom | EPW Editorial, 2017
Censorship through the Ages | Suhrith Parthasarathy, 2018
The Real and the Fake in Democracy | Gopal Guru, 2019
Proscribing the ‘Inconvenient’ | Dhaval Kulkarni, 2020
Safeguarding Fundamental Rights | Madan Bhimrao Lokur, 2020
Predicament of the Social Media Ordinance | EPW Editorial, 2020

Freedom of Speech and Morality

When it comes to maintaining decency and morality, the fundamental right to free speech can be restricted. This controversial ground of restriction has been the subject of much discussion and debate, especially in the context of censorship of art and literature, with most of the censoring having been sought to protect the public from depictions of obscenity. However, as was the case with maintaining public order, courts have not always applied the law consistently and are rooted in what has been referred to as a “colonial hangover of the moral police.”

The arts are particularly susceptible to judgments on morality and decency—cinema even more so. Several articles in this section deal with India’s film censor board, questioning its lack of clarity, purpose, people and qualifications. The censor board has been criticised for adhering to a “Victorian legacy” and clinging to India’s colonial past. Censorship legislation was introduced in 1918 when cinema needed to serve colonial interests. Films back then were politically manipulated, withdrawn or promoted depending on their material, something that seems to have been followed to varying degrees even post-independence. In 1998, the screening of Deepa Mehta’s film, Fire, was stopped by Shiv Sainiks and referred back to the censor board. Since then, there have been several instances of the Hindu right attempting to capture India’s cultural spaces and redefine “mainstream morality” in line with its idea of Indian society. Their actions, legal and otherwise, have been a major point of debate and discussion in the papers included in this section. The articles in this section cover issues from banning plays, revising books, controlling the media, in addition to censoring films.

Courts have sought to remove the arbitrariness in the characterisation of what constitutes public morality by devising various tests of acceptable standards of public speech. But these tests have changed and evolved over time. In this context, several articles raise the pertinent question of how morality should be defined and who has the authority to do so.

From Obscenity to Gherao | Nireekshak, 1967
Policemen and Obscenity | A G Noorani, 1981
Women Films and Censorship | S Sujatha, 1982
Bogey of the Bawdy-Changing Concept of Obscenity in 19th Century Bengali Culture | Sumanta Banerjee, 1987
Police and Porn | A G Noorani, 1995
Set This House on Fire | Carol Upadhya, 1998
Mirror Politics: ‘Fire’, Hindutva and Indian Culture | Mary E John and Tejaswini Niranjana, 1999
Cultural Politics of Fire | Ratna Kapur, 1999
Conferring 'Moral Rights' on Actors | Vinay Ganesh Sitapati, 2003
Entangled Histories | Anjali Arondekar, 2006
Dance Bar Girls and the Feminist's Dilemma | Nalini Rajan, 2007
The Item Number: Cinesexuality in Bollywood and Social Life | Rita Brara, 2010
Cheerleaders in the Indian Premier League | Ashwini Tambe and Shruti Tambe, 2010
'Gaylords' of Bollywood: Politics of Desire in Hindi Cinema | Rama Srinivasan, 2011
Yours Censoriously | Ashish Rajadhyaksha, 2014
No Offence Taken | Avishek Parui, 2014
Banning Child Pornography | Anant Kumar, 2016
Colonial Hangover of the Moral Police | EPW Editorial, 2016

Freedom of Speech and Contempt of Court

Codified under the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971, the judiciary has the power to punish both civil and criminal contempt—civil contempt is the willful disobedience to a judgment and criminal contempt is when an act lowers the authority of the court, interferes with or obstructs the administration of justice. However, contempt of court sometimes conflicts with the fundamental right to freedom of speech. And while fair criticism of judicial pronouncements is not within the definition of contempt, the interpretation of contempt is in the hands of the courts themselves and can lead to arbitrary legal action against dissenters.

Articles in this section have discussed widening the ambit of contempt of court over the years and its failure to strike a balance between freedom of speech and the administration of justice.

The 1967 E M S Namboodiripad v T N Nambiar case, where Namboodiripad was convicted for contempt of court by the Kerala High Court; the 1999 Narmada Bachao Andolan v Union of India case where the Supreme Court contemplated contempt proceedings against Arundhati Roy; the 2001 proceedings against Delhi-based Wah India Magazine for “rating” judges; the 2016 Govindaswamy v State of Kerala case, where the Supreme Court issued a contempt notice to Justice Markandey Katju for criticising its judgment; the 2017 contempt proceedings against Justice C S Karnan, a sitting judge of the Calcutta High Court for levelling allegations of corruption against several judges without evidence, the 2020 contempt proceedings against advocate, Prashant Bhushan for two tweets about the conduct of the Chief Justice of India; against stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra and cartoonist Rachita Taneja for tweeting about the Supreme Court granting journalist Arnab Goswami interim bail—the articles in this section cover several such cases and highlight the underlying systemic issues and general institutional decline of the judiciary.

While some proceedings are perhaps warranted, scholars argue that the contempt jurisdiction was not meant to be used in this spirit. As India’s laws are based on English laws, it has also been pointed out that the contempt law is obsolete in England. Articles in this section suggest that a solution needs to be found, such that the implementation of this law protects the freedom of speech as well as permits the administration of justice in a fair manner.

Freedom of Speech and Contempt of Court | S P Sathe, 1970
Public Discussion and Contempt of Court | A G Noorani, 1984
On Contempt, Contemners and Courts | Vinod Vyasulu, 1995
NBA Contempt of Court Case | S P Sathe, 2001
Contempt of Court and Free Speech | A G Noorani, 2001
Judging the Judges | Sumanta Banerjee, 2002
Accountability of the Supreme Court | S P Sathe, 2002
Accountability of Supreme Court | P Chandrasekhar, 2002
Ayodhya Issue and Freedom of Expression | P Radhakrishnan, 2002
Truth on Its Way to Half a Victory | Sukumar Mukhopadhyay, 2006
Judicial Accountability or Illusion? | Prashant Bhushan, 2006
Judicial Pronouncements and Caste | Rakesh Shukla, 2006
Uses and Abuses of the Potent Power of Contempt | Rahul Donde, 2007
The Contempt of Evidence | Madhu Bhaduri, 2007
Lawless Lawyers | A G Noorani, 2008
Judicial Accountability: Asset Disclosures and Beyond | Prashant Bhushan, 2009
The Insulation of India's Constitutional Judiciary | Abhinav Chandrachud, 2010
Media Follies and Supreme Infallibility | Sukumar Muralidharan, 2012
A Judicial Doctrine of Postponement and the Demands of Open Justice | Sukumar Muralidharan, 2012
Supreme Court's Decision on Reporting of Proceedings | Raghav Shankar, 2012
Defend Freedom of Expression | Kumari Jayawardena et al, 2014
Debating Contempt of Court | Alok Prasanna Kumar, 2016
The Curious Case of Justice Karnan | Smita Chakraburtty, 2017
The Crisis in the Judiciary | Alok Prasanna Kumar, 2017
Supreme No More | EPW Editorial, 2017
A Decade of Decay | Alok Prasanna Kumar, 2020
The Supreme Court: Then and Now | Justice A P Shah, 2020
Contempt of Court: Does Criticism Lower the Authority of the Judiciary? | EPW Engage, 2021

Freedom of Speech and Defamation

Restrictions concerning defamation seek to protect an individual’s right to reputation and dignity against another’s right to free speech and information. Similar to other reasonable restrictions to free speech, the defamation law cuts both ways. As the individual’s right to reputation and dignity stems from the right to privacy and the right to life and liberty, it seeks to protect individuals from false and frivolous claims about their private lives that can harm their public image. On the other hand, defamation laws have been misused to harass the media and deter it from accurate reporting, and in more malicious cases such as those of sexual assault, they have been deployed against survivors forcing them to defend themselves. Articles in this section highlight the fact that defamation laws have been used to pursue SLAPPs (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) which accentuate pre-existing gendered power imbalances.

The 2021 criminal defamation case against Priya Ramani by M J Akbar is a classic example of a powerful man with greater resources, using the high cost of litigation to intimidate a sexual harassment survivor. A few other cases that have been featured are related to the press. Typically, the press is free to comment on any public figure and is not guilty of defamation unless the defendant proves otherwise. The 2008 defamation case by Justice P B Sawant against the television news channel Times Now; the 2005 defamation case against Mediaah and the 2011 case against The Hoot by the Times group itself, are a few of the cases that articles in this section comment on. While criminal defamation laws have been challenged in court, they have also been upheld as being constitutionally valid. Articles in this section have called for a debate on the defamation law, and an interrogation into the interests of “big business and big media and the state.”

Defamation Bill: High Political Status | A Correspondent, 1988
Retrogression and Defamation-The Cost of the Pending Bills | Anil Nauriya, 1988
Local Bodies Cannot Sue for Libel | A G Noorani, 1992
Law of Libel in Pakistan | A G Noorani, 2002
Defamation and Public Advocacy | S P Sathe, 2003
Judicial Meanderings in Patriarchal Thickets: Litigating Sex Discrimination in India | Kalpana Kannabiran, 2009
Defamation and Its Real Dangers | EPW Editorial, 2011
Browbeating Free Speech | Saurav Datta, 2013
Legalising Defamation of Delinquent Borrowers | Shamba Dey, 2014
Diminishing Values | Abir Dasgupta, 2017
The Kejriwal Conundrum | EPW Editorial, 2018
Centring Women’s Experience | Sneha Visakha, 2021

Freedom of Speech and National Security

Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) which defines sedition, was first introduced by the British to suppress dissent and was used to punish speech that incited “disaffection” against the colonial state. Since this law has been repealed in Britain, its existence in India has been a subject of inquiry for many scholars. The existence of this law gives the state an upper hand in determining, often arbitrarily, the answer to the question of what constitutes a threat to the security of the state. Such laws have also been used to criminalise dissent and criticism against the state and have been invoked indiscriminately against activists, journalists and other public figures.

Even students have not been spared. Institutions of higher education are spaces for critical thinking and questioning the current establishment. The manner in which students from Jawaharlal Nehru University, University of Hyderabad and other institutions were dealt with for holding views different from the popular right-wing understanding, has set an undesirable precedent. Considerable restrictions were placed on the Kashmiri media after the abrogation of Article 370 in 2020, and it was argued that these restrictions were in “national interest.” Even though the rationale of these laws is to protect the sovereignty, integrity, and security of the state, these laws can restrict citizens from expressing their dissent with the ruling government. The existence and scope of sedition laws have been a subject of debate. Thus, articles in this section explore the notion of a university, nationhood, freedom of speech, targeted attack on dissent and the recent clampdown on media in Kashmir.

Maps and Freedom of Speech | A G Noorani, 1989
Censoring Behind the Barricade | A G Noorani, 1993
Silencing Dissenting Voices | Harish Dhawan and Nagraj Adve, 2008
Contempt of Justice | EPW Editorial, 2011
'Disaffection' and the Law: The Chilling Effect of Sedition Laws in India | Siddharth Narrain, 2011
How Democracy 'Uses' a Colonial Law | Moushumi Basu and Deepika Tandon, 2016
Where is this Self-Proclaimed Nationalism Coming From? | Kanhaiya Kumar, 2016
Targeting Institutions of Higher Education | Romila Thapar, 2016
There Are No Wholesale Answers | Adfer Rashid Shah, 2016
Freedom of Speech in the University | Partha Chatterjee, 2016
The University and Its Outside | Udaya Kumar, 2016
University and the Nation | Manash Bhattacharjee, 2016
The Court Fails the Citizen | EPW Editorials, 2016
University as Battleground | EPW Editorial, 2017
'Seditious' Struggle for Rights? | Deba Ranjan, 2017
Free Speech, Nationalism & Sedition | A P Shah, 2017
Sedition Cross-examined | Ankita Pandey, 2019
Silence in the Valley: Kashmiri Media After the Abrogation of Article 370 | Laxmi Murthy and Geeta Seshu, 2019
Kashmir Media Policy: Accentuating the Curbs on the Freedom of Press | Geeta Seshu, 2020
Sedition in India: Colonial Legacy, Misuse and Effect on Free Speech | EPW Engage, 2021

Freedom of Speech and Right to Information

Under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, information previously inaccessible such as government records and data is made available to the public. With some exceptions, the RTI Act aims to facilitate not only the dissemination of information to the public but also encourage transparency and accountability in governance. Only an informed citizenry can meaningfully exercise its rights of voting and organising. Thus, the right to free speech goes hand in hand with the right to information.

The Supreme Court has held that the right to information is an integral part of freedom of expression. This right was codified in 2005 after a hard-fought grassroots battle for nine years, but attempts have been made to dilute it. Further, RTI activists in states including Gujarat have been exposed to violence due to inadequate protection. These violent attacks not only increase the cost of information but also hinder the effective functioning of the RTI Act. In recent years, the Right to Information (Amendment) Bill of 2019 has been critiqued by various scholars for undermining the authority of the chief information commissioner and information commissioners.

The articles under this section focus on how this law came into being from the bill on freedom of information, the purview of the act, the revolutionary access to information it provided, the threat it faces from various amendments, and the challenges in implementation.

The Press Council s Bill on Right to Information | A G Noorani, 1996
Right to Information | Madhav Godbole, 2000
Goa: Perils of Knowing | Frederick Noronha, 2001
Right to Information on Candidates | Samuel Paul, 2002
Maharashtra: Quiet Burial of Right to Information | S S Wagle, 2003
Right to Information: Slow Progress | EPW Editorials, 2004
Right to Information and the Road to Heaven | Oulac Niranjan, 2005
Power to the People | EPW Editorials, 2005
Right to Information Act: Loopholes and Road Ahead | O P Kejriwal, 2006
Right to Information: An Amendment Too Soon | EPW Editorials, 2006
Public Authority and the RTI | Prabodh Saxena, 2009
Efficacy of RTI Act | Prem Singh Dahiya, 2009
Murder of RTI Activist | Ajit Bhattacharjea et al, 2010
Death of RTI Activist | NCPRI and UFRTI, 2010
The Right to Know | EPW Editorials, 2009
High Cost of Information | EPW Editorial, 2010
WikiLeaks, the New Information Cultures and Digital Parrhesia | Pramod K Nayar, 2010
Running Down a Positive Law | EPW Editorial, 2012
Investigating Compliance of the RTI Act | Pankaj K P Shreyaskar, 2013
Attempts to Erode RTI Mechanism | N Sai Vinod, 2014
Known Unknowns of RTI | Pankaj K P Shreyaskar, 2014
Death by Neglect | EPW Editorial, 2015
Revisiting 11 Years of RTI | Rajvir S Dhaka, 2016
One Decade of the RTI Act | Alok Prasanna Kumar, 2017
Right to Privacy and RTI Act | Madabhushi Sridhar, 2017
Contestations of the RTI Act | Pankaj K P Shreyaskar, 2017
The Struggle of RTI Activists in Gujarat | Christophe Jaffrelot and Basim-U-Nissa, 2018
Downgrading the Status of Chief Information Commissioner | M Sridhar Acharyulu, 2018
Despite Free and Fair Elections, Our Idea of the Republic Is at Risk | Vidya Venkat, 2019
Amended RTI vs Participatory Democracy | EPW Editorial, 2019
Amendment to the RTI | Satark Nagrik Sangathan, 2019
The True Dangers of the RTI (Amendment) Bill | Alok Prasanna Kumar, 2019

Freedom of Speech and Press Freedom

The right to freedom of speech and expression is considered indispensable for nearly every other form of freedom. There is no specific provision in the Constitution guaranteeing press freedom because freedom of the press is included under the wider purview of freedom of speech and expression, which are a part of Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution. However, restrictions on this freedom are often a way for the ruling establishment to suppress dissent.

Articles also discuss the importance of freedom of speech and the need for a free press in India. The murder of Gauri Lankesh at her home in broad daylight exposed the consequences of dissent that journalists face even today. Violent physical assault, as well as the murder of journalists investigating contentious issues, a need to protect reporter’s privilege and source confidentiality under the freedom of press, the employment conditions of journalists and free speech in a digital world, are some of the themes that articles in this section explore. The precarious contractual employment of journalists inhibits them from reporting against the official stand of the management of the media house. Thus, challenges to freedom of press by non-state actors such as media conglomerates, the ownership patterns of media companies and the information that is circulated are also discussed. The issue of “paid news” and how to place regulatory checks on such news has also been discussed in the pages of EPW.

Liberating the Press | Nireekshak, 1971
Will the Press Be Free | Nireekshak, 1971
Freeing the Free Press | Pran Chopra, 1971
Towards a Free Press | Pran Chopra, 1979
Power of Expunction and Press Censorship | A G Noorani, 1981
Assaults on Journalists and Powers of Magistrates | A G Noorani, 1986
Censorship through Guns | 1988
Press Freedom and Legal Remedies | A G Noorani, 1990
Freedom of Press as an Institution | A G Noorani, 1991
Can a Source Sue a Journalist | A G Noorani, 1992
Journalists Rights | A G Noorani, 1997
Beyond the Market, Freedom Matters | K G Kumar, 2001
Narendra Modi's Directive to the Press | A G Noorani, 2002
Opening a Window, Just | Krishna Kumar, 2002
The Constitution and Journalists? Sources | A G Noorani, 2006
Manufacturing 'News' | Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, 2011
Stung by the Sting | EPW Editorial, 2012
Free Speech in the Digital World under Threat? | Kirsty Hughes, 2012
Quashing Dissent: Where National Security and Commercial Media Converge | Sukumar Muralidharan, 2013
Curbing Media Monopolies | Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, 2013
Who Does the Media Serve in Odisha? | Sudhir Pattnaik, 2014
What Future for the Media in India? | Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, 2014
Killing the Messengers | EPW Editorial, 2015
Questions on the Technologies of Fascism | Santhosh S, 2016
Concentration of Media Ownership and the Imagination of Free Speech | Smarika Kumar, 2016
Media and Modi | Kingshuk Nag, 2016
‘Malicious and Unjust’ — Powerful Media Houses vs Journalists | Samrat, 2017
Gauri Lankesh’s murder was not the first: To make it the last, the time to turn fearless is now | Nandana Reddy, 2017
Why Gauri Lives On | EPW Editorial, 2017
Mapping the Power of Major Media Companies in India | Anuradha Bhattacharjee and Anushi Agrawal, 2018
Newsgatherers’ Privilege to Source Protection | Sohini Chatterjee, 2018
Selling the Fourth Estate: How Free is Indian Media? | EPW Engage, 2018
Media in the Time of COVID-19 | Bhupen Singh, 2020
TRPs or Truth? | Ahmed Raza, 2020
Free Speech and Media Freedom in Corporate India | Arani Basu, 2020

Curated by Anandita Chandra and Vasuprada Tatavarty

With inputs from Alok Prasanna Kumar and Shruti Sundar Ray

In light of the triple talaq judgment that has now criminalised the practice among the Muslim community, there is a need to examine the politics that guide the practice and reformation of personal....

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The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution

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45 Free Speech and Expression

Lawrence Liang is a former member and co-founder, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore.

Published: 06 February 2017
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This chapter examines the place of the right to freedom of speech and expression within Indian constitutionalism. After reviewing the classical normative arguments for free speech, it considers how the domain of speech is related to colonial continuity, sedition, and public order. It discusses the scope of Article19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution with respect to free speech, as well as the Indian Supreme Court’s successes and failures in its efforts to expand the domain of speech. It explores the democracy argument as the primary justification used by the courts in free speech cases, and its consequences. Finally, it looks at the standards for determining reasonableness, hate speech, and obscenity, and argues that the idea of a deliberative democracy must be supplemented with the concept of agonistic politics to enrich and strengthen the free speech tradition that has evolved in the past six decades.

I. Introduction

The legal history of freedom of speech and expression is a fertile site from which we can explore the relationship between constitutionalism and the imagination of a democratic public sphere. Given the public nature of censorship controversies, debates on the content and scope of the freedom of speech and expression in Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution, as well as the ‘reasonable restrictions’ in Article 19(2), have animated public imagination and fuelled contestations over the nature of democracy in India. 1 A number of Supreme Court decisions have been quick to distinguish the free speech tradition in India from other jurisdictions. An illustrative instance is the Court’s observations in Life Insurance Corporation v Manubhai D Shah , 2 which, unlike the First Amendment in the United States, Article 19(1)(a), is not an absolute right and must be exercised in a way that does not jeopardise the rights of another or clash with ‘the paramount interest of the State or the community at large’. 3 This observation summarises the key dilemmas that have characterised the history of free speech in India. While these themes are not unique to India, there is nonetheless a sense of an Indian exceptionalism that runs through discussions of Article 19(1)(a) and Article 19(2).

This chapter begins with the classical normative arguments for free speech. I argue that the democracy argument has been the primary justification used by the judiciary in free speech cases, and examine its consequences. I then investigate a recurring assertion about the colonial character of speech-restrictive laws and consider what exactly it is about the colonial history of the regulation of speech that informs our understanding of the constitutional design of Articles 19(1)(a) and 19(2). I suggest that a constitutive split between the universal speaking subject and the infantilised native subject in the colonial period transforms itself in the post-colonial period into a problem of the ‘social’ and examine what this means for free speech. I then look at the substantive scope of Article 19(1)(a), its expansion in particular domains, and the standards for determining reasonableness. The chapter then traces the doctrinal history of seditious speech, before moving to a brief analysis of hate speech and obscenity. I conclude with thoughts about the necessity of supplementing the idea of a deliberative democracy with an idea of agonistic politics if we are to enrich and strengthen the free speech tradition that has evolved over the past sixty years.

II. Justifying Free Speech

There are a number of competing theories that provide a normative justification for free speech. Scholars typically base free speech either on instrumental theories (which are aimed towards securing or promoting other values such as democracy) or intrinsic value theories (where speech is valued in and of itself). 4 Familiar versions of instrumental theories are the ‘marketplace of ideas’, ‘speech promoting democracy’, ‘watchdog theory’, or ‘speech promoting the truth’. Non-instrumental theories, on the other hand, posit that speech and expression are essential to the development of the autonomy of an individual regardless of their social utility and this is a desirable end in and of itself. The Indian experience has a well-developed jurisprudence of the instrumental theory of speech, but a much weaker tradition of promoting the intrinsic value of speech. Similarly while many cases focus on the question of freedom of speech, very few actually address the scope of ‘expression’ in Article 19. Consider the example of someone who refuses to stand when the national anthem is played, claiming his right to do so under Article 19(1)(a). Does he automatically become an anti-nationalist? In 1987, in a significant free speech case, three students who belonged to the religious group ‘Jehovah’s Witnesses’ were suspended from their school in Kerala for refusing to sing the national anthem in school. The Supreme Court overturned their suspension on the grounds that the right to freedom of speech and expression included the right to remain silent. 5 It held that while the students did not join in the singing of the anthem, they had not shown any disrespect, since they stood up along with the other students. Does this mean that the refusal to stand up would automatically qualify the act as being a disrespectful one and one which falls outside of the scope of protectable speech and expression under Article 19(1)(a)? This question hinges on how we understand the phrase ‘expression’. Debates on free speech often focus on the speech element but ignore the expression element. If the right to free speech includes the right to remain silent, then would free expression include a non-action? As per Section 3 of the Prevention of Insults to National Honours Act 1971, ‘Whoever intentionally prevents the singing of the Indian National Anthem or causes disturbances to any assembly engaged in such singing shall be punished with imprisonment for a term, which may extend to three years, or with fine, or with both.’ It is clear that the law requires an active act of disturbance to constitute an offence but does it include a quiet refusal to stand for the national anthem? 6

Normative theories of free speech are not mutually exclusive and courts can use a particular justification in one case while relying upon a different justification in another. One way of thinking about the choice of the normative theory in free speech cases is to think of it as a framing device—an outer shell determining the basic shape that free speech disputes take, with a significant impact on the outcome of free speech cases. 7 Consider, for instance, the contrasting approach of the US and Indian courts to the marketplace of ideas theory. The theory originated in Wendell Holmes J’s opinion in Abrams v United States : ‘the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out’. 8

The analogy of the marketplace is rooted in economic theories and draws on underlying free market assumptions about liberty and competition being the best form of governance. 9 Indian courts have adopted a more sceptical approach towards the marketplace of ideas. In the Cricket Association of Bengal case, 10 the Supreme Court implicitly rejects the free-marketplace-of-ideas theory, preferring a balance of public interest approach in deciding whether the State could have a monopoly on airwaves. Even as it was uncomfortable with the idea of an absolute State monopoly, the Court, citing critiques of the marketplace theory, leaned towards independent regulation in the public interest and recommended the setting up of an independent regulatory body to oversee the use of airwaves. The outcome was clearly informed by the choice of the outer frame. In S Rangarajan v P Jagjivan Ram , 11 the Court similarly refused to extend the free marketplace metaphor to broadcast media, distinguishing between different media forms and concluding that while the metaphor could be used for newspapers, it could not be extended to films.

Of the various free speech theories, the Supreme Court has relied primarily on the relationship between free speech and the promotion of democracy. In its very first case on free speech, the Court held that the freedom of speech and of the press lay at the foundation of all democratic societies. 12 Under this account, free speech does not just promote democracy but is one of the defining ingredients of democracy itself. 13 In Rangarajan , the Court argued that:

Democracy is Government by the people via open discussion. The democratic form of government itself demands [from] its citizens an active and intelligent participation … public discussion with people’s participation is a basic feature and a rational process of democracy which distinguishes it from all other forms of Government. 14 14 S Rangarajan v P Jagjivan Ram (1989) 2 SCC 574 [36].

The Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi in the 1970s is seen as one of the darkest periods of Indian democracy, with the suspension of fundamental rights, the gagging of the press, and the suppression of all dissent. 15 It is arguably in light of the Emergency that we see the Supreme Court making its sharpest observations on free speech: ‘Freedom to air one’s views is the lifeline of any democratic institution and any attempt to stifle, suffocate or gag this right would sound a death-knell to democracy and would help usher in autocracy or dictatorship.’ 16 Yet one question which remains unaddressed, and to which I shall return, is the question of what conception of democracy the Court holds. One consequence of the democratic theory justification is an inclination towards speech that, in its view, advances the cause of democracy, 17 and in the event that there is a conflict between free speech and other values the Court has held in favour of free speech. 18

The Court has also carved out new rights from Article 19(1)(a) based on the democracy argument. In State of Uttar Pradesh v Raj Narain , 19 the Court recognised a right to know from the freedom of speech. One can infer from its reasoning that the link between the right to speech and the right to know is built on the basis of transparency of governance. If free speech enables citizens to participate in political processes, this includes the right to demand accountability from those who govern. If democracy and free speech are understood to have a constitutive relation to each other, it is consistent to ground the right to know within the right to freedom of speech and expression. Yet one of the drawbacks of relying solely on the democracy argument is that it has almost been reduced to a normative cliché, with the Supreme Court simply recycling it in almost all free speech cases, rather than using each case as an opportunity to confirm, clarify, and create new political vocabularies for speech and democracy. If we turn, for instance, to a non-instrumental theory of speech such as the autonomy conception, which advocates the development of individual autonomy through speech, we find it to be on a much weaker footing in India. 20 An example of this is the silence in the Delhi High Court decision in the Naz Foundation case on the speech rights of sexual minorities. 21 While the Court discussed the relationship between equality, dignity, and privacy via Articles 14, 15, and 21, it did not address the question of the relationship between free speech and the expression of personal identity, despite it being raised by the petitioners. This reluctance, I would argue, stems from the absence of a tradition that links speech to a philosophy of expressive identity.

III. Colonial Continuity, Sedition, and Public Order

A number of laws that curtail free speech have colonial origins. 22 A recurring theme that emerges in evaluations of free speech in India is the assertion that the continued existence of such laws and their use testifies to the fact that in the domain of speech we face a problem of colonial continuity. 23 What is it about the colonial construction of the public sphere and the speaking subject that continues to influence the State and the judiciary’s response to free speech? The Constituent Assembly debates reveal that India’s founders were acutely aware of the political misuse of penal laws such as sedition to suppress free speech, and their motivation to recognise a strong free speech right stemmed partly from their desire to distinguish the democratic republic from colonial rule. At the same time we encounter a paradox, which began with the making of the Constitution and continues to date, as we encounter a reluctance to recognise an absolute right of free speech on the ground that the Indian polity is not ready for it, thereby recycling some assumptions that had informed the logic of colonial rule. The logic of colonial rule creates a split at its very origin between a universal rational subject (the enlightened European as a bearer of rights) and the native subject (marked by a hypersensitive excess) and this foundational split reappears in the post-colonial context in terms of class, gender, and literacy. In other words, the realm of the political is circumscribed by an excessive social sphere, which is unable to shed its positivity to emerge as the properly constituted public sphere. 24 If one were to map this out onto the terrain of the Constitution one can see a mirroring of this split in the distinction between Article 19(1)(a), which imagines the citizen as a rational speaking and listening subject, and Article 19(2), which circumscribes the possibilities of such speech through the incorporation of regulatory measures that have in mind an affective public sphere susceptible to outrage and provocation. 25

Asad Ali Ahmed, outlining the evolution of hate speech laws in colonial India, has shown that colonial subjects were portrayed by lawmakers like Macaulay and others as highly excitable subjects who were easily prone to taking offence and responding violently to such offence. 26 These racially essentialist accounts created the context for the emergence of the colonial State as a rational and neutral arbiter of emotionally excitable subjects prone to emotional injury and physical violence. Arun Thiruvengadam characterises the different historical periods of free speech as encompassing a universalist nature (dominant during the anti-colonial struggle) which were subsequently replaced (during the Constituent Assembly debates) by particularistic concerns which led them to permit several grounds of restrictions of rights in response to such conditions. 27 One might add to this argument by suggesting that the paradox of free speech in India might be thought of in the following terms: while the right to free speech is one that is granted to all citizens, the question of who can occupy the space of the properly constituted citizen is far more tenuous. If the founding constitutional vision is seen against the backdrop of Partition and its impact on citizenship, Article 19(1)(a) can be understood as trying to create a space of deliberative democracy. It is at best a partial project where the deliberative nature of the reason underlying it is also accompanied by a sense of a nervous public sphere exemplified in Article 19(2), where the full citizen and the infantilised citizen occupy the same sphere.

IV. The Scope of Article 19(1)(a)

1. the domain of free speech.

Freedom of speech would mean very little if it were not able to respond to political, social, and technological changes. The Supreme Court has confirmed this in its assertion in Manubhai Shah that a constitutional provision is ‘never static, it is ever-evolving and ever-changing and, therefore, does not admit of a narrow, pedantic or syllogistic approach’. 28 This case is an instance of a dynamic approach to speech. The Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) had responded in its in-house magazine to critiques levelled against it, but denied the petitioner the right to respond in the magazine, claiming that it was an in-house publication. The Court held this to be in violation of free speech and characterised LIC’s refusal as ‘unfair and unreasonable’. 29 Fairness demanded that both views be placed before the readers to enable them to draw their own conclusions, and there was no logic or proper justification for refusing publication. Both reasons are premised on the right to communicate but also involve access to means of communication. By introducing the idea of fairness, the Court effectively expands the scope of Article 19(1)(a), since the fairness factor clarifies the substantive scope of Article 19(1)(a) along with reading a need for procedural fairness as a test for Article 19(2).

There are two ways in which judicial interpretations of free speech extend democratic space. One is through clarifying the scope of the right to speech and circumscribing restrictions strictly, and the other is by extending the boundaries of what amounts to protectable speech. The question of commercial speech and the right to broadcasting are examples of the latter. In Hamdard Dawakhana , the Supreme Court refused to grant commercial speech the same level of protection that it afforded other forms of speech, arguing that it does not have the same value as political or creative expression. 30 It reversed its position in Tata Press Ltd v Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd , clarifying that commercial speech per se was not outside the domain of Article 19(1)(a) and Hamdard was applicable only to commercial speech that was deceptive and misleading. 31 The crucial question is how courts restrict or widen democratic spaces and possibilities when they choose to either contract or expand the domain of protectable expression. UR Rai, in his reading of the judgment, suggests that the Court would have done better to have treated commercial speech within the ambit of Article 19(1)(g) rather than Article 19(1)(a), on the ground that the relational nexus it has to traditional free speech concerns is far less than its proximity with trade. 32 While Rai’s reasoning seems to offer a pragmatic solution to the question of commercial speech, I would suggest that the significance of according commercial speech protection as a speech right has two important consequences. First, an expansion of the domain of protectable speech expands the possibilities of democratic space by widening the net of public participation and legally recognised expressive forms. Secondly, it renders commercial speech susceptible to free speech claims. In recent times this has become all the more important as the lines between commercial expression and free speech concerns get blurred in the overlap between trademark, copyright, and free speech. 33

The freedom of the press was read into Article 19(1)(a) in Sakal Papers , 34 Bennett Coleman , 35 and Indian Express , 36 despite not being formally recognised in Article 19(1)(a). In contrast, the right to broadcasting has had a harder time finding recognition. 37 Inheriting its doctrinal legacy from cases about film censorship, where the courts distinguished between different mediums to justify a differential treatment of cinema, there was an initial reluctance to afford a speech right to broadcasting. 38 In Odyssey Communications , the Court equated the right to express oneself on television with the right to use traditional media and held that the right to exhibit films was protected in Article 19(1)(a), thereby redeeming the hitherto low status accorded to film. 39 This judgment has been hailed for inaugurating a right to broadcast. 40 The Court then extended this further in the Manubhai Shah case, where it held that ‘the words “freedom of speech and expression” must be broadly construed to include the freedom to circulate one’s views by words of mouth or in writing or through audio-visual instrumentalities’. 41 The right to broadcast culminated in the Cricket Association of Bengal , 42 which unlike the previous cases did not involve a content-based restriction but a restriction based on State monopoly over airwaves. The judges effectively recognised a right to broadcasting under Article 19(1)(a) subject to the management of scarce resources in the interests of the public. The coming together of two forms of creative expression—namely film and cricket, which remain the largest mode of mobilising the public in India—along with a new public sphere created by television, allowed the Court to significantly expand the scope of freedom of speech and expression. 43 One way of thinking about how the scope of free speech expands is by evoking the media analogy ‘incremental amplification’ to understand how free speech metaphors that begin with the image of an individual speaker in a street corner begin to incorporate technologies from the microphone to newspapers to television, and finally the Internet. A spatial understanding of speech creates two innovative developments in the understanding of free speech jurisprudence. First, it incorporates an understanding of the ecology of speech which includes recognition of infrastructure and access to infrastructures of communication; and, secondly, given the nature of broadcasting as a mass medium, it locates the right to broadcast not only within the logic of a speaking subject but also from the perspective of spectatorial rights.

2. The Test of Reasonableness

What tests and standards has the Supreme Court evolved in its interpretation of ‘reasonableness’ under Article 19(2)? It has applied multiple standards to determine reasonableness, including proximity, arbitrariness, and proportionality. Any law that overreaches in its attempt at curtailing free speech runs the risk of being declared unreasonable. An illustrative instance of this is Section 66A of the Information Technology Act 2000, which penalises speech on the grounds of information being ‘grossly offensive’, possessing ‘menacing character’, ‘causing annoyance’, etc. Would these restrictions stand the test of reasonableness under Article 19(2)? In March 2015, the Supreme Court answered this question. 44 Such grounds were declared to be vague and undefined, and the provision was struck down as unconstitutional.

The first major test with regard to Article 19(2) is that of proximity. In Ram Manohar Lohia , the Court emphasised that for a restriction to be reasonable, it must have a reasonable relation to the object the legislation has in view and must not go beyond it. 45 Here the Court was closely following the standards laid down in State of Madras v VG Row , which held that it is difficult to lay down an abstract test of reasonableness and what the judiciary needs to closely examine are ‘the underlying purpose of the restrictions imposed, the extent and urgency of the evil sought to be remedied thereby, the disproportion of the imposition, [and] the prevailing conditions at the time’. 46

This introduces a second element, namely the test of proportionality, in deciding the reasonableness of a restriction. The proportionality test looks not just at proximity but also whether a legal restriction is excessive in nature. While courts have elaborated the proximity test, they have paid relatively less attention to the proportionality test. In Virendra Ojha v State of Uttar Pradesh , the Allahabad High Court observed that in administrative action affecting fundamental freedoms, proportionality has always been applied in India even though the word ‘proportionality’ has not been specifically used. 47 We find evidence of this in the Court’s reasoning in Ram Manohar Lohia when it says that a restriction becomes unreasonable if it is excessive. The proportionality test, which is more developed in administrative law, serves as an important test for determining whether the scope of restrictions sought to be imposed balance a legal right and a prohibition. Chintaman Rao v State of Madhya Pradesh, 48 though not a free speech case, nevertheless established the proportionality test which can be usefully extended to free speech cases. Here the Court found that:

The phrase ‘reasonable restriction’ connotes that the ‘limitation imposed on a person in enjoyment of the right should not be arbitrary or of an excessive nature, beyond what is required in the interests of the public’. The word ‘reasonable’ implies intelligent care and deliberation, that is, the choice of a course which reason dictates. Legislation which arbitrarily or excessively invades the right cannot be said to contain the quality of reasonableness. 49 49 Chintaman Rao (n 48 ) [6].

This opinion was affirmed in Sahara India Real Estate Corporation Ltd v Securities and Exchange Board of India , in which the Court had to balance the right to free speech with the postponement of the publication of news. 50 Reading Chintaman Rao along with developments in European jurisprudence, the Court held that in passing orders of postponement, ‘courts have to keep in mind the principle of proportionality and the test of necessity’. 51 The ‘necessity to pass such orders’ has to be evaluated ‘not only in the context of administration of justice but also in the context of the rights of the individuals to be protected from prejudicial publicity or misinformation’. 52 Thus, we notice that when a law clearly violates Article 19(1)(a) by virtue of it not deriving its authority from Article 19(2), then it is not difficult for the judiciary to strike it down. However, in most instances, it is not that the constitutive offence which is missing (say, public order), but rather that the nature of the restriction sought to be imposed is either vague or overreaches. In such cases, the test to determine its reasonableness becomes the only mode to protect speech. The reasonableness test is therefore the crucial pivot that hinges a substantive commitment to free speech to procedural safeguards.

3. A Notable Failure

While the preceding sections have outlined the positive role of the Supreme Court in expanding the domain of speech, it would be incomplete without highlighting some of its monumental failures. An important recent example is Baragur Ramchandrappa v State of Karnataka , 53 in which an author appealed a Karnataka High Court decision upholding an order of forfeiture of his historical novel Dharmakaarana based on the life of Basavanna. The novel, which fictionalised the life of Basavanna, contained a section that speculated on the unclear parentage of the saint. Despite the fact that this is indeed an issue on which there has been no agreement between scholars and the assertion by the author that it was a historical novel, the Supreme Court upheld the order to ban the book. This judgment suffers from numerous conceptual problems but it is worth highlighting three.

First, Section 95 of the Code of Criminal Procedure 1973 empowers the government to issue an order forfeiture against any book when the book ‘appears to the State Government to contain any matter the publication of which is punishable under Section 124A or Section 153A or Section 153B or Section 292 or Section 293 or Section 295-A of the Indian Penal Code (45 of 1860)’. Section 95 provides the government preventive powers and hence has to be strictly interpreted. It was alleged by the petitioner that any opinion under Section 95 had to establish a prima facie case that it violated the substantive provisions cited and therefore a case had to be made that it was ‘malicious and intended to outrage the feelings of a group or class of citizens and in the absence of either of these ingredients, no order under Section 95 of the Code could be justified’. 54 The Supreme Court rejected the claim that the onus fell on the government to prove these ingredients and relying on generic observations made on public order in Lalai Singh Yadav , 55 the Court concluded that the word ‘appears’ does not:

[R]equire that it should be ‘proved’ to the satisfaction of the State Government that all requirements of the punishing sections including mens rea were fully established … all that Section 95(1) therefore required was that the ingredients of the offence(s) should ‘appear’ to the government to be present. 56 56 Baragur Ramchandrappa (n 53 ) [17].

This shifts the burden to the applicant challenging the order of forfeiture. Rather than holding the executive accountable through public reason for its actions, the Court presumes the validity of such actions even without any reason provided. It also paves the way for the executive to respond to inchoate claims of hurt sentiment without regard to substantive principles that have emerged in judicial decisions that narrow the scope of vaguely worded laws.

Secondly, the Court cited a number of its own judgments, including Rangarajan , in which the test for determining whether someone was affected by a speech act was held to be that of an ‘ordinary man of common sense and prudence and not that of an out of the ordinary or hypersensitive man’. 57 It also reiterated the fact that the allegedly offending sections of a work had to be read in the context of the whole work and not in isolation, but then proceeded to ignore these principles by privileging the claims of a few members of a community and their interpretation of the work.

Finally, the Court arrogated for itself the role of literary-cum-historical interpreter of disputed claims of fact. Thus if any author writes a speculative work of fiction on a historical topic and is unable to prove the ‘facts’, and this speculation offends a small class of persons, the Court in Baragur Ramchandrappa effectively presumes that such work can be deemed to be ‘deliberately designed to be hurtful’. 58 The Court concluded that ‘We also have no hesitation in observing that the novel with its complimentary passages in favour of Basaveshwara is merely a camouflage to spin and introduce a particularly sordid and puerile story in Chapter 12.’ 59 And it is precisely this kind of certitude without reason that undoes the reputation of the Supreme Court as a defender of free speech.

V. Subversive Speech: Public Order and Sedition

The law of sedition was introduced by Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) 1860, in 1870 as a draconian measure to counter anti-colonial sentiments. Several major leaders of the independence movement, including Gandhi and Tilak, were tried under this provision. Gandhi famously described Section 124A as the ‘prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen’. 60 When the Constituent Assembly deliberated the scope and extent of restrictions that could be placed on free speech, the prominent exclusion from what eventually became Article 19(2) was the word ‘sedition’. 61 In the original draft that was up for discussion the word ‘sedition’ had been included as one of the grounds for the restriction on speech. A number of the Constituent Assembly members took objection to this, highlighting the misuse of sedition laws during colonial rule. 62 The first battles over free speech in post-colonial India involved the troubling legacy of sedition. Granville Austin describes the Indian Constitution as one that encompassed three strands: ‘building a strong state, establishing the institutions and spirit of democracy, and fostering a social revolution’. 63 Together, they formed the ‘seamless web’ of the Constitution, but within the very first year this web began to unravel, with conflicts between the democratic thread (free speech claims) and the sovereignty thread. Given Partition, Nehru’s government was worried about two political impulses that he saw as being divisive: the extreme Left on one side and the religious right on the other. While Nehru constantly cautioned against India becoming a police state, he simultaneously mistrusted the inflammatory potential of many regional newspapers.

Two decisions of the Supreme Court triggered the first constitutional crisis in independent India. In its original form Article 19(2) used the words ‘undermines the security of the State or tends to overthrow the State’. In Romesh Thappar v State of Madras , 64 the Government of Madras imposed a ban upon the entry and circulation of a magazine, Crossroads . Romesh Thappar approached the Supreme Court, arguing that the ban was a violation of his freedom of speech and expression. 65 The question was whether a law which allowed for the banning of books ‘for the purpose of securing the public safety or the maintenance of public order’ violated Article 19(2), since the latter did not contain the phrase ‘public safety’ or ‘public order’, and whether it fell within a ‘law relating to any matter which undermines the security of or tends to overthrow the State’. The Court held that the phrase ‘public safety’ had a much wider connotation than ‘security of the State’, as the former included a number of trivial matters not necessarily as serious as the issue of the security of the State and concluded that:

[U]nless a law restricting freedom of speech and expression is directed solely against the undermining of the security of the State or the overthrow of it, such law cannot fall within the reservation under clause (2) of Article 19, although the restrictions which it seeks to impose may have been conceived generally in the interests of public order. 66 66 Romesh Thappar (n 12 ) [10].

The Court alluded to the specific exclusion of the word ‘sedition’ in Article 19(2), suggesting that the intent had been to define a very narrow sphere of restriction. 67

The Supreme Court arrived at a similar decision in Brij Bhushan . 68 The key factor in both decisions was the absence of the phrase ‘public order’ in Article 19(2) and the Court interpreted restrictions on freedom of speech and expression as being legitimate only if they pertained to ‘undermining the security of the state or overthrowing of it’. 69 Mere criticism of the government could not be considered as speech that could be restricted for the purposes of Article 19(2). Fazl Ali J delivered a dissenting decision in both cases, and argued that the various phrases ‘sedition’, ‘public safety’, ‘public order’, and ‘undermining the security’ were fungible and any act that threatens public order had the tendency to overthrow the State as well. 70 From the Supreme Court’s decisions in Romesh Thappar and Brij Bhushan , we can conclude that the judiciary did not share the same apprehensions and fears that the government had about the imminent implosion of the country. The government saw the two judgments as an erosion of the sovereignty of the State and introduced the First Amendment to the Constitution within a year of its inception. This amendment has had wide consequences for the development of free speech jurisprudence and the two salient features of the Amendment include the introduction of ‘public order’ as one of the grounds for restricting speech, but also a qualification through the addition of the word ‘reasonable’ before the word ‘restrictions’.

The question of how much criticism a government can tolerate is indicative of the self-confidence of a democracy. On that count India presents a mixed picture where, on the one hand, we regularly see the use of sedition laws to curtail political criticism even as we find legal precedents that provide a wide ambit to political expression. At the heart of the debate on subversive speech is the question of how the law imagines the relationship between speech and action. JL Austin once distinguished between illocutionary speech acts and perlocutionary speech acts. 71 While for the former there is no temporal gap between an utterance and its effect, in the latter there is a temporal disjuncture between utterance and effect. In thinking of the scope of free speech in relation to public order in Article 19(2) and sedition in Section 124A of the IPC, a key question has been how courts conceptualise the relationship between speech and effect. Is someone who advocates the use of violence to overthrow the government entitled to protection under Article 19(1)(a)? Does a harsh criticism of the government amount to an act that undermines the security of the State or a disruption of public order?

In understanding the relationship between free speech and subversive speech, Indian courts have explicitly rejected the American ‘clear and present danger’ test on the ground that fundamental rights guaranteed under Article 19(1) of the Indian Constitution are not absolute rights and are subject to the restrictions placed in the subsequent clauses of Article 19. 72 The rejection of American standards by itself does not solve the problem of where the line between speech and action while interpreting Article 19(2) is drawn. Unlike the relatively straight line that can be drawn to trace the doctrinal development of subversive speech and action in the US, in India it emerges more as a criss-crossing set of lines that move between different standards and across different forms of speech. If, in American constitutionalism, the ‘bad tendency’ test established a loose nexus between speech and effect and the ‘clear and present danger’ test demanded a closer proximity between speech and consequence, in India we find a slightly different spectrum, which runs between ‘bad feelings’, ‘bad tendency’, and the standards of ‘clear and present danger’. The interpretation of sedition during the colonial era tended towards a narrower space for any subversive speech and, in that sense, Romesh Thappar and Brij Bhushan were remarkable for their ability to distinguish between different levels of threat and impact in assessing speech in a post-colonial context.

The first major significant case after the First Amendment was Ramji Lal Modi v State of Uttar Pradesh. 73 While not being a sedition case, it was the first to examine the scope of the words ‘in the interest of’ and ‘public disorder’ in Article 19(2). The question in this case was whether Section 295A of the IPC was protected by Article 19(2). The petitioners argued that Section 295A sought to punish any speech which insulted a religion or the religious beliefs of a community, but not all insults necessarily lead to public disorder. Since the provision covers speech that does not create public disorder, it should be held to be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court disagreed with this interpretation and held that the phrase ‘in the interests of’ has a much wider connotation than ‘for the maintenance of’ public order. 74 Thus, ‘If … certain activities have a tendency to cause public disorder, a law penalizing such activities as an offence cannot but be held to be a law imposing reasonable restriction “in the interests of public order” although in some cases those activities may not actually lead to a breach of public order.’ 75 The Court also held that Section 295A did not penalise every act of insult, but only those which were perpetrated with the ‘deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of [a] … class’. 76 It introduced two tests: ‘aggravated form’, which defines the criteria for what counts as an insult, and the ‘calculated tendency’ of the insult to disrupt the public order. 77 This is a confusing standard since while interpreting ‘in the interest of’ it comes close to the ‘bad tendency’ test with no requirement of any actual proximity between speech and consequence, at the same time it qualifies the ‘bad tendency’ test with ‘calculated tendency’.

The next major case was Superintendent, Central Prison v Dr Ram Manohar Lohia . 78 Here, the Court discussed the idea of public order and observed that under Article 19(2) the wide concept of ‘public order’ is ‘split up under different heads’ (security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, etc) and argued that ‘while all the grounds mentioned … can be brought under the general head “public order” in its most comprehensive sense’, it was important that ‘public order’ be ‘demarcated from the others’. 79 In its understanding, ‘public order’ was ‘synonymous with public peace, safety, and tranquility’. 80 In its discussion of Ramji Lal Modi , the Court observed that the distinction between ‘in the interest of’ and ‘for the maintenance of’ ‘does not ignore the necessity for [an] intimate connection between the Act and the public order sought to be maintained by the Act’. 81 It added that after the word ‘reasonable’ had been added to Article 19(2), it was imperative that restrictions have a reasonable relation to the object that the legislation seeks to achieve, that is, the public order. 82 If the restriction has no proximate relationship to the achievement of public order, it fails the reasonableness test. The Court cited, with approval, the Federal Court decision in Rex v Basudeva , 83 which established the proximity test where a restriction has to have a proximate connection or nexus with public order. Ram Manohar Lohia therefore introduced a double test—proximity and proportionality. 84

The Supreme Court had the opportunity to clarify the scope of public order in Kedar Nath Singh v State of Bihar , a case which challenged the constitutional validity of Section 124A. 85 The Court in Kedar Nath Singh , after examining the conflict in standards in the colonial decisions (between ‘bad feelings’ and ‘bad tendency’), observed that since sedition was not included in Article 19(2) it implied that a more liberal understanding was needed in the context of a democracy. The Court made a distinction between a strong criticism of the government and those words that excite with the inclination to cause public disorder and violence. It also distinguished between ‘the Government established by law’ and ‘persons for the time being engaged in carrying on the administration’. 86 The Court further held that:

[S]trong words used to express disapprobation of the measures of Government with a view to their improvement or alteration by lawful means would not come within the section. Similarly, comments, however strongly worded, expressing disapprobation of actions of the Government, without exciting those feelings which generate the inclination to cause public disorder by acts of violence, would not be penal. 87 87 Kedar Nath Singh (n 85 ) [24].

The Court concluded that what is forbidden are ‘words, written or spoken, etc. which have the pernicious tendency or intention of creating public disorder or disturbance of law and order’. 88 So if Ramji Lal Modi introduced the idea of ‘calculated tendency’, Kedar Nath Singh provided us with the phrase ‘pernicious tendency’. Does this effectively reintroduce the ‘bad tendency’ test? It appears that part of the confusion in Kedar Nath Singh emerges from the eagerness of the Court to save Section 124A from being invalidated. Towards this end, it wants to acknowledge that if sedition were interpreted to mean disaffection in the sense of creating bad feelings alone, it would be invalid on the basis of exceeding Article 19(2). It is only by drawing a nexus between speech and consequence in a manner consistent with Article 19(2) that the provision is saved. While Kedar Nath cited Ramji Lal Modi , it completely ignored Ram Manohar Lohia , which had reinterpreted Ramji Lal Modi to develop a strict test of proximity.

One of the most significant tests that have emerged after Lohia and Kedarnath is the analogy of ‘spark in a powder keg’ in the Rangarajan case. 89 In a crucial paragraph in Rangarajan , the Supreme Court explicitly held that while there has to be a balance between free speech and restrictions for special interest, the two cannot be balanced as though they were of equal weight. One can infer that the Court was making it clear that exceptions have to be construed precisely as deviations from the norm that free speech should prevail except in exceptional circumstances. But what counts as an exceptional circumstance?

Our commitment of freedom of expression demands that it cannot be suppressed unless the situations created by allowing the freedom are pressing and the community interest is endangered. The anticipated danger should not be remote, conjectural or far-fetched. It should have proximate and direct nexus with the expression. The expression of thought should be intrinsically dangerous to the public interest. In other words, the expression should be inseparably locked up with the action contemplated like the equivalent of a ‘spark in a powder keg’. 90 90 S Rangarajan (n 14 ) [45].

The Court in this paragraph clearly lays down the standard that has to be met in alleging a relation between speech and effect. The analogy of a spark in a powder keg brings in a temporal dimension of immediacy where the speech should be immediately dangerous to public interest. In other words, it must have the force of a perlocutionary speech act in which there is no temporal disjuncture between word and effect. A cumulative reading of the cases on public order and sedition suggests that as far as subversive speech targeted at the State is concerned, one can infer that even if there is no absolute consistency on the doctrinal tests, there is a consistency in the outer frame, namely that democracy demands the satisfaction of high standards of speech and effect if speech is to be curtailed. 91

VI. Hate Speech and Obscenity

While we do not have the space to enter into a detailed discussion of hate speech, I would like to raise one question about how we think of the two spheres (vertical speech relations and horizontal speech relations) and their intersection in hate speech doctrines. We have already seen that the law has a complex negotiation between the speech and consequences in our discussion of illocutionary and perlocutionary speech. Following Judith Butler, I will characterise the force that underlies an individual’s speech act and its possible consequences as the sovereign force of words. 92 When the words of a speaker have the possibility of effecting immediate consequences (for instance, urging a crowd to demolish a structure) there is a sovereign force that propels the speech into action. On the other hand, a person could urge the violent overthrow of the State with no consequences. As a principle this comes close to what Joel Feinberg would characterise as the harm principle, whereas the regulation of speech amongst communities, at least in statutes, seems to rely less on the harm principle than on an offence principle, namely hurt sentiment. 93 We have seen, however, that the Supreme Court, in adjudicating claims of hurt sentiment, has attempted to classify the nature of speech on a hierarchical scale requiring both a degree of intention (‘calculated tendency’) and magnitude (‘aggravated insult’) for it to fall foul of Section 295A. 94 Even if it is not made explicit, there seems to be an implied recognition of the fact that sometimes speech acts fail and do not achieve their intended goals (provoking action or hatred). This failure of the sovereign force of words should serve as a way to distinguish between vertical speech relations and horizontal speech relations. The difference between the two is characterised by the relative power relations that exist between the speaker and the listener. If, for instance, the speaker is a powerful figure (for instance, a politician or a religious leader) with knowledge that his speech has the capacity of instigating people to act upon such speech, then it is clear that his speech has a much higher sovereign force. On the other hand, an individual with relatively little capacity to influence others by virtue of his speech shares a horizontal speech relation to his listeners. One of the problems posed by hate speech legislation, which needs conceptual clarification by the courts, is the flattening out of the difference between these two relations.

VII. Doctrinal Confusion and Obscenity Standards

The standards to determine obscenity are an instance of the confusing development of doctrinal principles in free speech jurisprudence in India. I will briefly highlight two moments separated by almost fifty years but united by doctrinal confusion.

The first case, Ranjit D Udeshi v State of Maharashtra , 95 applied and affirmed the Hicklin 96 test in 1965, while deciding whether DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a book that could be considered obscene for the purposes of Section 292 of the IPC. 97 The appellants highlighted the redundancy of the archaic Hicklin test, arguing that the Hicklin test had given way to a more contemporary standard, the Roth test. 98 The Roth test moved obscenity away from a vulnerable populations test to a contemporary community standards test and also required that the material be without social value. The Roth test was eventually replaced by the Miller test, 99 where the necessity of ‘utterly without redeeming social value’ was rejected. In choosing to retain the Hicklin test, the Court rejected the contention that the Hicklin test chose to foreground the allegedly obscene sections of a work rather than looking at it as a whole. Hidayatullah J emphasised that Cockburn J’s words that ‘the matter charged’ must have ‘a tendency to deprave and corrupt’ and this ‘[did] not suggest that even a stray word or an insignificant passage would suffice’. 100 While it appeared that the Court was qualifying the Hicklin test by insisting that a work had to be considered in its entirety, Hidayatullah J went on to observe that:

An overall view of the obscene matter in the setting of the whole work would, of course, be necessary, but the obscene matter must be considered by itself and separately to find out whether it is so gross and its obscenity so decided that it is likely to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to influences of this sort and into whose hands the book is likely to fall. In this connection the interests of our contemporary society and particularly the influence of the book etc. on it must not be overlooked. 101 101 Ranjit D Udeshi (n 95 ) [21].

Through this move the Court strangely affirmed the Hicklin test, even while adding a layer of the Roth test to it. It then added a further dimension, the ‘artistic redemption’ test, and observed that ‘where obscenity and art are mixed, art must be so preponderating as to throw the obscenity into a shadow or the obscenity so trivial and insignificant that it can have no effect and may be overlooked’. 102 It concluded that the sexual portions of the book did not pass the permissible standards, and that there was no social gain from the book. The Court included the social value component from the Roth test into its last observation, thereby creating a confusing mutation of the Hicklin and Roth standards.

Ranjit Udeshi was the decision of a constitutional bench and a number of obscenity cases subsequently—all of which cite the case as prevailing law—moved significantly away from the Hicklin test without ever explicitly rejecting it. This could be because of their inability to overrule Ranjit Udeshi by virtue of being lower courts or smaller benches. 103 If we turn now to the most recent judgment of the Supreme Court in Aveek Sarkar v State of West Bengal (incidentally a two-judge bench), the Court, for the first time, explicitly rejected the Hicklin test in favour of the Roth test. 104 Citing a number of cases holding that morality standards change over time and obscenity should be judged according to contemporary community standards, Aveek Sarkar adopted the community standards test from Roth . But while Roth had laid down a three-pronged test, including the necessity of the material to be ‘patently offensive’ and of no ‘redeeming social value’, the second and third parts of the test are conspicuously absent from the Court’s judgment. In essence, it seems to be saying that if, on applying community standards, a particular work ‘has the tendency to arouse the feeling of or revealing an overt sexual desire’, it can be criminalised as obscene. 105 What we are left with in the area of obscenity is an entangled labyrinth of doctrinal opacity. The only reasonable route left to the courts would either be to clarify, if they are borrowing an existing test, which particular one they are adopting, or if they are seeking to create an amalgam of standards, to address what they consider the moral standards in India, than to develop a lucid test around such standards.

VIII. Conclusion: Speech, Democracy, and the Value of an Agonistic Public Sphere

The philosophical foundation of free speech in India lies primarily in the role that deliberative and communicative rationality plays in the promotion of democracy. Yet, the promise of free speech also runs the risk of being undone by the strong restrictions imposed on it. How do we reimagine a more robust sphere of speech that keeps in mind the complexities of India even as it refuses to be fated towards a perpetual infantilising of the public sphere? Further, what may be the role of constitutional interpretation towards the construction of a robust public sphere? Deliberative democracies rest on the principle of consensus building and on deliberation as the means towards the creation of consensus. They require, in other words, an agreement on the criteria through which we settle fundamental questions including questions about identity, belief, liberty, and so forth. But, given India’s profound diversity, can it ever be the case that we will arrive at a consensus on these fundamental questions? And can we ever insist on the absoluteness of such agreement as a precondition to our democratic participation? If a set of shared principles is not the end but the starting point of democratic participation is there a way of thinking of rethinking the relationship between speech and democracy in a way that speaks to the realities of collective life in India?

We have seen that one way of imagining the reality of India has been to treat speech rather nervously, seeing it as a potential ally but also often as the greatest threat to democracy itself. This has resulted in the fundamental split between the confident aspirations of Article 19(1)(a) and the nervous apprehensions of ‘social realities’ of Article 19(2). But what if we were to take our differences as the starting point of our democracy and concede that a certain amount of conflict is not just inevitable but perhaps desirable in our imagination of Indian democracy? In recent times, political philosophers have alerted us to the need for thinking of an agonistic public sphere—one which privileges the idea of agonistic politics or a politics of conflict over a politics of resolution—and claims that democratic conflict and contestation are better suited for shaping policies, institutions, and practices in a heterogeneous democracy. Andrew Schapp suggests that the law plays a key role in shaping a healthy agonistic public sphere. 106 Rather than locating legitimacy in an external principle (a presumed ‘we the people’), the law can play a key role in permitting conflicts to take an ‘agonistic’ form, where opponents are not enemies but adversaries among whom exists a conflictual consensus. 107 William Connolly places the idea of ‘agonistic respect’ at the heart of a project that does not deny but accepts conflict as the basis of democracy. Agonistic respect, for Connolly, can be understood as a necessary ethos or sensibility which individuals and communities cultivate to reconcile with the ‘comparative contestability’ of their beliefs. Connolly conceptualises ‘agonistic respect’ as a democratic principle of social order in which a plurality of pursuits of identity adopt generous relations towards the differences that they require for their constitution.

The Supreme Court has had an admirable if inconsistent record on the protection and expansion of freedom of speech and expression, but it also remains beholden to a particular idea of democracy and consensus building. If the regulatory imagination of Article 19(2) and various speech-regulating laws is premised upon the idea of consensus through control, then this is a model that is clearly failing us, with the rise in the misuse of sedition and hate speech laws. Such regulating legislation has now entrenched itself within a political system where political parties, religious communities, and the moral police play the game of profitable provocation very effectively. If we are to preserve the erosion of freedom of speech and expression, it might well be the responsibility of the judiciary to reimagine a democratic politics of speech which is not shy of asserting its fundamental relationship with agonistic politics and dissent and articulating a jurisprudence of Article 19(1)(a) which creates a safe ecology for such forms of speech.

As we look to the future, one reason for hope is the Supreme Court’s decision in March 2015 in Shreya Singhal . 108 Here the Court struck down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act 2000 as being violative of Article 19(1)(a). Section 66A, which punished online communication causing ‘annoyance’ and was subject to extraordinary abuse, was declared unconstitutional for its vagueness, overreach, and chilling effects on speech. The Court distinguished between three forms of speech—discussion, advocacy, and incitement—and held that mere discussion or even advocacy of a particular cause, howsoever unpopular, is at the heart of Article 19(1)(a). It is only when such discussion or advocacy reaches the level of incitement that Article 19(2) might apply. As we have seen in this chapter, the relationship between speech and consequences is defined with regard to where the line between free speech and justified censorship lies. I have argued that the Supreme Court has often vacillated between two different standards: the ‘bad tendency test’ in Ramji Lal Modi and Kedarnath , on the one hand, and the ‘proximity and proportionality’ and ‘clear and present danger test’ in Ram Manohar Lohia and Rangarajan on the other. In Shreya Singhal , the judges weigh heavily in favour of the latter to conclude that Section 66A does not simply interfere with the right of the public to receive and disseminate information; it also fails to distinguish between discussion, advocacy, and incitement. The proximity between speech and consequences demanded in the judgment is one that requires both an incitement to action and a nexus between such incitement and consequences.

It is also important to note that the judges clarified the scope of ‘reasonable restrictions’ by highlighting that the restrictions can be justified only on the grounds explicitly laid down in Article 19(2). Arguments for the validity of speech-restricting laws often appeal to ‘public interest’, something seen in even landmark decisions like Udeshi . The judgment in Shreya Singhal adopts what may be considered the equivalent of a ‘strict scrutiny’ standard in determining the validity of speech restrictions. It also establishes a clear nexus between vagueness and overreach as the basis for invalidating a speech restrictive law. In other words, a law must make a clear distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of speech. In criminalising speech that could cause ‘annoyance’ or is ‘grossly offensive’, the Court found that Section 66A also takes within its sweep protected speech.

Shreya Singhal is the first judgment in decades in which the Supreme Court has struck down a legal provision for violating freedom of speech. Through a careful use of precedent and doctrine, it simultaneously builds upon a rich body of free speech cases in India, as well as paves the way for a jurisprudence of free speech for an era of the Internet and social media. It explicitly acknowledges that the Internet has radically democratised communication, and this space for participation must be safeguarded from arbitrary laws. The real legacy of Shreya Singhal will, however, lie in whether it can reshape free speech law in areas such as sedition, hate speech, and defamation. The judgment reminds us that the role of the judiciary in upholding democracy lies as much in redefining the agonistic threshold as in preserving the status quo.

See Rajeev Dhavan , Only the Good News (Manohar Publishers 1987) ; Sita Bhatia , Freedom of Press: Politico-Legal Aspects of Press Legislation in India (Rawat Publications 1997) .

(1992) 3 SCC 637.

Life Insurance Corporation (n 2 ) [23].

See Eric Barendt , Freedom of Speech (2nd edn, Oxford University Press 2007) .

Bijoe Emmanuel v State of Kerala (1986) 3 SCC 615.

Another interesting case which missed the opportunity to examine the scope of ‘expression’ is Acharya Jagdishwaranand Avadhuta v Commissioner Of Police (1983) 4 SCC 522 in which Anandmargis had to rely on religious freedom to claim a right to dance on the streets of Calcutta with a human skull, dagger, and trishul.

On frame mobilisation and the law, see Amy Kapczynski , ‘The Access to Knowledge Mobilization and the New Politics of Intellectual Property’ (2008) 117 Yale Law Journal 804 .

250 US 616 (1919) 630. See also Geoffrey Stone , Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (WW Norton 2005) .

Matthew D Bunker , Critiquing Free Speech: First Amendment Theory and the Challenge of Interdisciplinarity (Routledge 2014) .

Ministry of Information and Broadcasting v Cricket Association of Bengal (1995) 2 SCC 161.

(1989) 2 SCC 574.

Romesh Thappar v State of Madras AIR 1950 SC 124.

Superintendent, Central Prison v Dr Ram Manohar Lohia AIR 1960 SC 633.

Government of India, White Paper on Misuse of Mass Media during the Internal Emergency (Government of India 1977) . See also Soli J Sorabjee , The Emergency, Censorship and the Press in India 1975–77 (Writers and Scholars Educational Trust 1977) .

Life Insurance Corporation (n 2 ) [8].

R Rajgopal v State of Tamil Nadu (1994) 6 SCC 632.

(1975) 4 SCC 428.

Bijoe Emmanuel (n 5 ).

Naz Foundation v Govt of NCT of Delhi (2009) 160 DLT 277.

An important example is the Indian Penal Code 1860, s 295A. On the origins of the provision, see Neeti Nair , ‘Beyond the “Communal” 1920s: The Problem of Intention, Legislative Pragmatism, and the Making of Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code’ (2013) 50 Indian Economic Social History Review 317 .

Vivek Dhareshwar and R Srivatsan , ‘ “Rowdy-Sheeters”: An Essay on Subalternity and Politics’ in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty (eds) Subaltern Studies IX (Oxford University Press 1996) 201–31 .

See Rajeev Dhavan , ‘Harassing Husain: Uses and Abuses of the Law of Hate Speech’ (2007) 35 Social Scientist 16 .

Asad Ali Ahmed , ‘Specters of Macaulay: Blasphemy, the Indian Penal Code, and Pakistan’s Postcolonial Predicament’ in Raminder Kaur and William Mazzarella (eds) Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction (Indiana University Press 2009) 172–205 .

Life Insurance Corporation (n 2 ) [6].

Life Insurance Corporation (n 2 ) [12].

Hamdard Dawakhana v Union of India AIR 1960 SC 554.

(1995) 5 SCC 139.

Udai Raj Rai , Fundamental Rights and Their Enforcement (PHI Learning Pvt Ltd 2011) 40–41 .

See Tata Sons Limited v Greenpeace International (2011) 178 DLT 705, in which the Delhi High Court held the parody of a trademark to be protected by principles of free speech.

Sakal Papers (P) Ltd v Union of India AIR 1962 SC 305.

Bennett Coleman & Co v Union of India (1972) 2 SCC 788.

Indian Express Newspapers v Union of India (1985) 1 SCC 641. See also MSM Sharma v Sri Krishna Sinha AIR 1959 SC 395; Re Arundhati Roy (2002) 3 SCC 343. See also Rajeev Dhavan , Publish and Be Damned: Censorship and Intolerance in India (Tulika Books 2008).

It is not as though the courts were not presented with challenges to the monopoly of the State over broadcasting, but in such cases, the monopoly of the State was upheld. See Prakash Vir Shastri v Union of India AIR 1974 Del 1; AB Shorawal v LK Advani AIR 1977 All 426; PL Lakhanpal v Union of India AIR 1982 Del 167.

KA Abbas v Union of India (1970) 2 SCC 780.

Odyssey Communications Pvt Ltd v Lokvidayan Sanghatana (1988) 3 SCC 410.

See Vikram Raghavan , ‘Reflections on Free Speech and Broadcasting in India’ in C Raj Kumar and D Chockalingam (eds) Human Rights, Justice and Constitutional Empowerment (2nd edn, Oxford University Press 2011) .

Cricket Association of Bengal (n 10 ).

See Monroe E Price and Stefaan G Verhulst (eds), Broadcasting Reform in India: Media Law from a Global Perspective (Oxford University Press 1998) .

Shreya Singhal v Union of India (2015) 5 SCC 1.

Ram Manohar Lohia (n 13 ).

State of Madras v VG Row AIR 1952 SC 196 [15].

AIR 2003 All 102.

AIR 1951 SC 118.

(2012) 10 SCC 603.

Sahara India Real Estate Corporation Ltd (n 50 ) [34].

(2007) 5 SCC 11.

Baragur Ramchandrappa (n 53 ) [14].

State of Uttar Pradesh v Lalai Singh Yadav (1976) 4 SCC 213.

S Rangarajan (n 14 ) [21].

Baragur Ramchandrappa (n 53 ) [24].

See AG Noorani , Indian Political Trials 1775–1947 (Oxford University Press 2008) .

Article 13 in the Constituent Assembly Debates. These can be found in the debates on 1–2 December 1948, 16 October 1949, and 17 October 1949.

See eg, Constituent Assembly Debates , vol 7 (Lok Sabha Secretariat 1986) 750–52, 2 December 1948 (Seth Govind Das) . See also Constituent Assembly Debates , vol 7 (Lok Sabha Secretariat 1986) 385–86, 30 April 1947 (Somnath Lahiri) ; Constituent Assembly Debates , vol 7 (Lok Sabha Secretariat 1986) 712–13, 1 December 1948 (Damodar Swarup) .

Granville Austin , The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (Oxford University Press 1966) .

Romesh Thappar (n 12 ).

For an early evaluation of free speech, see PK Tripathi , ‘Free Speech in the Indian Constitution: Background and Prospect’ (1958) 67 Yale Law Journal 394 .

Romesh Thappar (n 12 ) [9].

Brij Bhushan v State of Delhi AIR 1950 SC 129.

Romesh Thappar (n 12 ) [8].

Brij Bhushan (n 68 ) [21].

John L Austin , How to Do Things With Words , eds JO Urmson and Marina Sbisa (2nd edn, Clarendon Press 1975) .

Babulal Parate v State of Maharashtra AIR 1961 SC 884.

AIR 1957 SC 620.

Ramji Lal Modi (n 73 ) [7].

Ramji Lal Modi (n 73 ) [9].

Ram Manohar Lohia (n 13 ) [11].

Ram Manohar Lohia (n 13 ) [12].

Ram Manohar Lohia (n 13 ) [13].

AIR 1950 FC 67.

AIR 1962 SC 955.

Kedar Nath Singh (n 85 ) [24].

Kedar Nath Singh (n 85 ) [26].

S Rangarajan (n 14 ) [36].

Balwant Singh v State of Punjab (1995) 3 SCC 214. ‘Khalistan Zindabad’, shifting from what the words say (or, the message they communicate) to their proximate relationship with public disorder is Brandenburg reasoning.

Judith Butler , Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (Routledge 1997) .

Joel Feinberg , Harm to Others (Oxford University Press 1987) .

Girja Kumar , The Book on Trial: Fundamentalism and Censorship in India , (Har-Anand Publications 1997) .

AIR 1965 SC 881.

[1868] LR 3 QB 360.

The Hicklin test:

Whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall . . . it is quite certain that it would suggest to the minds of the young of either sex, or even to persons of more advanced years, thoughts of a most impure and libidinous character.

Roth v United States 354 US 476 (1957).

Miller v California 413 US 15 (1973).

Ranjit D Udeshi (n 95 ) [20].

Ranjit D Udeshi (n 95 ) [21].

For a representative list, see Samaresh Bose v Amal Mitra (1985) 4 SCC 289; Bobby Art International v Om Pal Singh Hoon (1996) 4 SCC 1; Ajay Goswami v Union of India (2007) 1 SCC 143; S Khushboo v Kanniammal (2010) 5 SCC 600.

(2014) 4 SCC 257 [23].

Aveek Sarkar (n 104 ) [23].

Andrew Schaap, Law and Agonistic Politics (Ashgate 2009).

Chantal Mouffe , Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (Verso 2013) .

Shreya Singhal (n 44 ).

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Bal Gangadhar Tilak: 'Freedom is my birthright', 1st anniversary Home Rule League - 1917

April 1917,Nashik, India

I am young in spirit though old in body. I do not wish to lose this privilege of youth. To deny the growing capacity to my thinking power is to admit that I have no right to speak on this resolution. Whatever I am going to speak today is eternally young. The body might grow old, decrepit and it might perish, but the soul is immortal. Similarly, if there might be an apparent lull in our Home Rule activities, the freedom of the spirit behind it is eternal and indestructible, and it will secure liberty for us.

The Soul means Parameshwar and the mind will not get peace till it gets identified with Him. If one body is worn out the soul will take another: so assures the Gita. This philosophy is quite old. Freedom is my birthright. So long as it is awake within me, I am not old. No weapon can cut this spirit, no fire can burn it, no water can wet it, no wind can dry it. I say further that no CID can burn it. I declare the same principle to the Superintendent of Police who is sitting before me, to the Collector who had been invited to attend this meeting and to the Government shorthand writer who is busy taking down notes of our speeches.

This principle will not disappear even if it seems to be killed. We ask for Home Rule and we must get it. The Science which ends in Home Rule is the Science of Politics and not the one which ends in slavery. The Science of Politics is the "Vedas" of the country. You have a soul and I only want to wake it up. I want to tear off the blind that has been let down by ignorant, designing and selfish people. The Science of Politics consists of two parts. The first is Divine and the second is Demonic. The slavery of a Nation comes into the latter part. There cannot be a moral justification for the Demonic part of the Science of Politics. A Nation which might justify this is guilty of sin in the sight of God. Some people have the courage to declare what is harmful to them and some have not that courage. The political and religious teaching consists in giving the knowledge of this principle. Religious and political teachings are not separate, though they appear to be so on account of foreign rule. All philosophies are included in the Science of Politics.

Who does not know the meaning of Home Rule? Who does not want it? Would you like it, if I enter your house and take possession of your cooking department? I must have the right to manage the affairs in my own house. It is only lunatics and children who do not know how to manage their own affairs.

The cardinal creed of the conferences is that a member must be above 21 years of age; do you not, therefore, think that you want your own rights? Not being lunatics or children you uuderstand your own business, your own rights and, therefore, you know Home Rule. We are told we are not fit for Home Rule. A century has passed away and the British Rule has not made us fit for Home Rule; now we will make our own efforts and fit ourselves for it.

To offer irrelevant excuses, to hold out any temptation and to make other offers will be putting a stigma on the English policy. England is trying to protect the small state of Belgium with the help of India; how can it then say that we should not have Home Rule? Those who find fault with us are avaricious people. But there are people who find fault even with the All-Merciful God. We must work hard to save the soul of our Nation without caring for anything. The good of our country consists in guarding this - our birthright. The Congress has passed this Home Rule resolution. The Provincial Conference is only a child of the Congress, which submits to mandates of its father. We will follow Shri Ramachandra in obeying the order of our father the Congress. We are determined to make efforts to get this resolution enforced even if the effort leads us to the desert, compels us to live incognito, makes us suffer any hardship and even if it finally brings us to death. Shri Ramachandra did it. Do not pass this resolution by merely clapping your hands but by taking a solemn vow that you will work for it. We will work for it by every possible constitutional and law-abiding method to get Home Rule.

Through the grace of God, England has changed its mind towards us. We feel our efforts will not be without success. England proudly thought that a tiny nation might be able to protect the Empire by itself. This pride has gone down. England has now begun to feel that it must make changes in the constitution of the Empire. Lloyd George has openly confessed that England cannot go on without the help of India. All notions about a Nation of a thousand years old have to be changed. The English people have discovered that the wisdom of all their parties is not sufficient. The Indian soldiers have saved the lives of the British soldiers on the French battlefield and have showed their bravery. Those who once considered us as slaves have begun now to call us brothers. God has brought about all these changes. We must push our demands while the notion of this brotherhood is existing in the minds of the English. We must inform them that we, thirty crores of the Indian people, are ready to lay down our lives for the Empire; and that while we are with them none shall dare cast an evil glance at the Empire.

Source: http://www.youthaffairz.in/historyjuly2012.html

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World Press Freedom Day: विश्व प्रेस स्वतंत्रता दिवस पर प्रेस का महत्व बताते प्रेरक कथन!

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विश्व प्रेस स्वतंत्रता दिवस के अवसर पर प्रेस पर प्रेरक विचार आपको प्रेस का महत्व समझाएंगे। हर वर्ष 3 मई को विश्व प्रेस स्वतंत्रता दिवस मनाया जाता है, जिसका उद्देश्य प्रेस स्वतंत्रता के महत्व के बारे में समाज में जागरूकता बढ़ाना है। विद्यार्थी जीवन में विद्यार्थियों का परिचय पत्रकारों की पत्रकारिता और इसके महत्व से परिचित होना चाहिए ताकि लोकतंत्र में प्रेस की भूमिका को समझा जा सके। प्रेस की स्वतंत्रता के महत्व को समझकर विद्यार्थियों को World Press Freedom Day Quotes in Hindi जरूर पढ़ने चाहिए, जो इस ब्लॉग में दिए गए हैं।

This Blog Includes:

बेस्ट वर्ल्ड प्रेस फ्रीडम कोट्स – best world press freedom day quotes in hindi, प्रेस पर प्रेरक विचार, टॉप 10 वर्ल्ड प्रेस फ्रीडम कोट्स इन हिन्दी – top 10 world press freedom day quotes in hindi, पत्रकारिता पर अनमोल वचन, अंग्रेजी में वर्ल्ड प्रेस कोट्स – world press freedom day in english.

बेस्ट वर्ल्ड प्रेस फ्रीडम कोट्स (Best World Press Freedom Day Quotes in Hindi) नीचे दिए गए हैं-

पत्रकारिता का अर्थ है समाज के समक्ष, समाज की पीड़ाओं की आवाज बनना।
पत्रकारों की सुरक्षा को सुनिश्चित करने से ही लोकतंत्र का संरक्षण हो पाता है।
ईमानदारी से की गई पत्रकारिता ने सदैव ही समाज की चेतना को जगाए रखने का कार्य किया है।
पत्रकारिता का अर्थ है निष्पक्षता के साथ सत्ता के अच्छे निर्णयों पर सत्ता की पीठ थपथपाना और सत्ता के गलत करने पर उसके विरोध में प्रखरता से आवाज उठाना।
कलम की इतनी शक्ति होती है कि ये समाज को शिक्षित बनाकर प्रेस को मजबूती देने का काम करती है।

यह भी पढ़ें : 1 मई को ही क्यों मनाया जाता है अंतर्राष्ट्रीय मजदूर दिवस? जानें इसका इतिहास और महत्व

प्रेस पर प्रेरक विचार नीचे दिए गए हैं-

प्रेस को ही लोकतंत्र का चौथा स्तम्भ कहा जाता है।
प्रेस पर समाज की पीड़ाओं का गहरा बोझ उठाने और उन पीड़ाओं की चर्चा के लिए समाज की चेतना को जगाने की जिम्मेदारी होती है।
प्रेस का उद्देश्य केवल खबरों को लिखना या छापना नहीं होता, इसका प्रमुख उद्देश्य समाज का सामना सत्य से करवाना होता है।
प्रेस को स्वतंत्रता देने से समाज की व्यवस्थाओं को संरक्षण मिलता है।
प्रेस ही समाज की चेतना को जगाए रखने का निरंतर प्रयास करती है।

यह भी पढ़ें : छात्रों और बच्चों के लिए मजदूर दिवस पर निबंध

Top 10 World Press Freedom Day Quotes in Hindi को पढ़कर आप प्रेस के महत्व और इसे स्वतंत्र रखने के संकल्प को प्रेस फ्रीडम कोट्स अपने अपनों के साथ संदेशों के रूप में साझा कर सकते हैं-

समाज में सभी के समान अधिकारों की पैरवी करने के लिए प्रेस ही आगे आता है।
प्रेस ही सामाजिक न्याय की दलीलें देकर समाज को सशक्त बनाता है।
प्रेस के माध्यम से ही समाज, वर्तमान और भविष्य की समस्याओं का समाधान खोज पाता है।
प्रेस के प्रयासों से ही दुनिया ने लोकतंत्र के दौर को अपनाया है।
प्रेस स्वतंत्रता का महत्व जानें और प्रेस स्वतंत्रता के प्रति समाज को जागरूक करना सीखें।
प्रेस का कार्य समाज के अंतिम छोर पर खड़े हर उस व्यक्ति की आवाज बनना है, जिसकी आवाज को समाज अनसुना कर जाता है।
प्रेस की स्वतंत्रता से ही युवाओं को विश्व में चल रहे हर महत्वपूर्ण विषय की जानकारी होती है।
प्रेस का उद्देश्य समाज में विचारों का आदान-प्रदान करना है, ताकि मानव की सोच में व्यापकता आए।
प्रेस स्वतंत्रता ही सही मायनों में एक स्वस्थ और जीवंत समाज के लिए बेहद आवश्यक है।
प्रेस में जीवन समर्पित करने वाले हर पत्रकार का सम्मान, समृद्धशाली राष्ट्र का सम्मान है।

यह भी पढ़ें : Women Empowerment Quotes in Hindi

पत्रकारिता पर अनमोल वचन नीचे दिए गए हैं –

पत्रकारिता ही किसी भी राष्ट्र के सिंहासन का दर्पण होता है, जो सिंहासन के समक्ष प्रजा का पक्ष रखती है।
बेहतर पत्रकारिता के बल पर ही युवाओं को जनहित के लिए प्रेरित किया जा सकता है।
पत्रकारिता ही युवाओं के सपनों को नया स्वरुप दे सकती है, जिससे वो सफलता के शीर्ष पर पहुँच सकें।
पत्रकारिता के मंच से युवाओं का मार्गदर्शन किया जा सकता है, साथ ही उनके विश्वास में मजबूती प्रदान की जा सकती है।
पत्रकारिता केवल पैसा कमाने का एक पेशा नहीं, बल्कि यह तो एक ऐसा पेशा है जो समाज की चेतना जगाने का काम करता है।
पत्रकारिता का चौथा स्तंभ होना कोई विशेषाधिकार नहीं है, बल्कि यह एक जिम्मेदारी है।
पत्रकारिता एक ऐसा हथियार है, जो समाज में व्याप्त हर कुरीति का बड़ी प्रखरता से प्रहार करता है।

यह भी पढ़ें : प्रेम के प्रतीक राधा-कृष्णा पर आधारित इंट्रस्टिंग कोट्स

विश्व प्रेस स्वतंत्रता दिवस के अवसर पर आपको World Press Freedom Day in English नीचे दिए गए हैं-

“Freedom of the press is not just important to democracy, it is democracy.”
“Freedom of the press is a precious privilege that no country can forego.”
“The freedom of the human mind is recognized in the right to free speech and free press.”
“Journalism is not about finding what people want to hear, but about telling people what they need to know.”
“Without freedom of the press, society becomes a silent mass.”
“A free press is essential for a free people.”
“The only security of all is in a free press.”

संबंधित आर्टिकल

आशा है कि इस ब्लॉग में आपको World Press Freedom Day Quotes in Hindi पढ़ने का अवसर प्राप्त हुआ होगा, जिनके माध्यम से आपको प्रेस के महत्व को जानने की प्रेरणा मिली होगी। आशा है कि यह ब्लॉग आपको जानकारी से भरपूर लगा होगा, इसी प्रकार के कोट्स पढ़ने के लिए हमारी वेबसाइट Leverage Edu के साथ बने रहें।

मयंक विश्नोई

जन्मभूमि: देवभूमि उत्तराखंड। पहचान: भारतीय लेखक । प्रकाश परिवर्तन का, संस्कार समर्पण का। -✍🏻मयंक विश्नोई

प्रातिक्रिया दे जवाब रद्द करें

अगली बार जब मैं टिप्पणी करूँ, तो इस ब्राउज़र में मेरा नाम, ईमेल और वेबसाइट सहेजें।

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Freedom of speech cannot be freedom to support separatism in foreign country: Jaishankar on Canada

E xternal Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar on Thursday said freedom of speech cannot be freedom to support separatism and terrorism in a foreign country, alleging that people who supported terror activities against India have been given refuge in Canada.

Targeting the Justin Trudeau government for giving refuge to pro-Khalistani elements, Dr Jaishankar said further deterioration in bilateral ties would eventually result in a big loss for Canada.

“Freedom of speech cannot be freedom to advocate violence, freedom of speech cannot be freedom to support separatism and terrorism in a foreign country. It cannot be… A group of Khalistanis have been misusing Canada’s freedom laws for years. But when the Canadian government has any political compulsions, they accommodate these people who are also their vote bank,” the EAM said during ‘Vishwabandhu Bharat’ interaction in Nashik, Maharashtra.

As pro-Khalistani elements continue to indulge in anti-India activities, New Delhi has conveyed to Ottawa on several occasions that democratic countries which respect the rule of law, should not allow intimidation by radical elements in the name of freedom of expression.

“Our relations have been spoiled today because of the activities of these people who are even threatening our Ambassador and various diplomats posted in the country. They threw smoke bombs inside the High Commission and, at one time, our diplomats were facing great difficulty to get out of the building. People who supported terror activities against India have been given refuge in Canada. The government there should have a relook at the entire situation,” Dr Jaishankar asserted.

Earlier this month, India reacted strongly to pro-Khalistani elements taking centrestage, shouting anti-India slogans and displaying objectionable posters against Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a ‘Nagar Kirtan’ parade organised in Canada’s Malton.

Urging the Canadian government led by Trudeau to stop providing criminal and secessionist elements a safe haven and political space in the country, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) had stated that celebration and glorification of violence should not be a part of any civilised society.

“We have tried to make them understand this many times that deterioration in bilateral ties will also be a big loss for them. These people who have been given refuge in Canada, are criminals who have also taken their gang warfare to the country now. They should understand it well by now as some people are taking full advantage of it,” the minister said in Nashik.

Freedom of speech cannot be freedom to support separatism in foreign country: Jaishankar on Canada

Rest of World News
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151+ Best Freedom Quotes in Hindi
15 August Poem On Freedom Fighters In Hindi
Happy Independence day Shayari, Quotes
Poem On Freedom Fighters In Hindi
Happy Independence day Shayari, Quotes
Poems For Freedom Fighter In Hindi

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Freedom
स्वतंत्रता दिवस पर भाषण || speech on independence day in hindi |15 august bhashan|15 अगस्त पर भाषण|
Freedom Fighter Essay In Hindi/10 Lines Essay on Freedom fighter In Hindi/Essay on Freedom fighter
15 August par bhasan . Independence day speech in hindi. 15 अगस्त पर भाषण। 15 August par speech
स्वतंत्रता दिवस पर 10 लाइन निबंध
15 August Independence Day Speech in Hindi स्वतंत्रता दिवस पर दमदार भाषण For All Classes 2023

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Constitution Article Article 19 in Constitution of India 19. Protection of certain rights regarding freedom of speech, etc. All citizens shall have the right-to freedom of speech and expression; [Editorial comment-The Constitution (First Amendment) Act, 1951, made several changes to the Fundamental Rights Part of the Indian constitution where it amended Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian ...
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अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी पर निबंध (Freedom of Speech Essay in Hindi)

अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी पर छोटे तथा बड़े निबंध (Short and Long Essay on Freedom of Speech in Hindi, Abhivyakti ki Azadi par Nibandh Hindi mein)

Abhivyakti ki Ajadi par Nibandh – निबंध 2 (400 शब्द)

निबंध 3 (500 शब्द)

निबंध 4 (600 शब्द)

संबंधित पोस्ट

मेरी रुचि पर निबंध (My Hobby Essay in Hindi)

धन पर निबंध (Money Essay in Hindi)

समाचार पत्र पर निबंध (Newspaper Essay in Hindi)

मेरा स्कूल पर निबंध (My School Essay in Hindi)

शिक्षा का महत्व पर निबंध (Importance of Education Essay in Hindi)

बाघ पर निबंध (Tiger Essay in Hindi)

फ्रीडम ऑफ स्पीच एंड एक्सप्रेशन अंडर द कंस्टीट्यूशन ऑफ़ इंडिया (वाक् और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता के मुख्य तत्व)

परिचय (इंट्रोडक्शन)

भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता के मुख्य तत्व क्या हैं (व्हाट आर द मैन एलीमेंट्स ऑफ़ स्पीच एंड एक्सप्रेशन)

अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता कैसे महत्वपूर्ण है (हाउ इज फ्रीडम ऑफ एक्सप्रेशन इज इंपॉर्टेंट)

प्रेस की स्वतंत्रता का क्या अर्थ है (व्हाट इज मींट बाय फ्रीडम ऑफ प्रेस)

मामला (केस)

राज्य की सुरक्षा (सिक्युरिटी ऑफ़ स्टेट)

केस : पीपुल्स यूनियन फॉर सिविल लिबर्टीज (पीयूसीएल) बनाम यूनियन ऑफ इंडिया (एआईआर 1997 एससी 568)

विदेशी राज्यों के साथ मैत्रीपूर्ण संबंध (फ्रैंडली रिलेशन विथ फोरेन स्टेटस्)

सार्वजनिक व्यवस्था (पब्लिक ऑर्डर)

शालीनता और नैतिकता (डिसेंसी एंड मोरालिटी)

न्यायालय की अवमानना (कंटेंप्ट ऑफ़ कोर्ट)

मानहानि (डिफेमेशन)

अपराध के लिए उकसाना (इनसाइटमेंट टू एन ऑफेंस)

भारत की संप्रभुता और अखंडता (सोवर्गीनिटी एंड इंटिग्रिटी ऑफ़ इंडिया)

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5 Famous Speeches: सुभाष के तुम मुझे खून दो… से गांधी के करो या मरो तक, स्वतंत्रता संग्राम के पांच यादगार भाषण

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फॉन्ट साइज चुनने की सुविधा केवल एप पर उपलब्ध है

सभी नौकरियों के बारे में जानने के लिए अभी डाउनलोड करें अमर उजाला ऐप

क्षमा करें यह सर्विस उपलब्ध नहीं है कृपया किसी और माध्यम से लॉगिन करने की कोशिश करें

भारत के संविधान का अनुच्छेद-19 (भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता) |Article-19 (Freedom of Speech and Expression)

आर्टिकल 19 क्या है ? (What is Article 19 )

अनुच्छेद-19 ( Indian Constitution Article 19)

अनुच्छेद-19(A) | बोलने की आजादी (freedom of speech)

अनुच्छेद-19(B) | सभा की आजादी (freedom of assembly)

अनुच्छेद-19(C) | संघ बनाने की आजादी (freedom of association)

अनुच्छेद-19(D) | पूरे देश मे आने-जाने की आजादी (freedom of movement throughout the country)

अनुच्छेद-19(E) | पूरे देश मेँ बसने की/रहने की आजादी (Freedom to settle/reside throughout the country)

अनुच्छेद-19(G) | कोई भी व्यापार एवं जीविका की आजादी (Freedom of any trade and livelihood)

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भारत में भाषण और अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता Freedom of Speech & Expression in India Hindi

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अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता पर निबंध | Essay On Freedom Of Speech In Hindi

अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता पर निबंध Essay On Freedom Of Speech In Hindi

अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी की उत्पत्ति

बोलने की आजादी की सीमाएं

अभिव्यक्ति की आजादी जरूरत क्यों है?

अभिव्यक्ति की स्वतंत्रता के दुरुपयोग

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