Last week, former finance and home minister and senior Congress leader Palaniappan Chidambaram was under attack from one of his own senior colleagues in the Congress party. Former law minister Hans Raj Bharadwaj squarely attacked him for being responsible and the force behind the draconian section 66A of the Information Technology Act which was quashed by the Supreme Court recently??. Bharadwaj's contention was that Chidambaram, as home minister? ?was behind the insertion of ?S?ection 66A into the IT Act and was responsible for propagating the controversial bill. "Chidambaram has been finance and home minister and has the best blessings of the party leadership…P Chidambaram should be asked why he brought in the bill, now he is saying it was bad drafting," Bharadwaj told a news agency ?recently?.
The controversial section in the IT Act provided for arrests of people who sent "offensive" messages through a computer or any other communication device like a mobile phone or a tablet. However, the term "offensive" was not clearly defined and was open to wide interpretations. It was quashed by the Supreme Court recently as vague and unconstitutional. Says lawyer Apar Gupta, "Section 66 failed to pass the substantive test as it authorised the police to arrest anyone for saying anything on the Internet." While it provided for arrests if something said on the Internet was annoying, inconvenient or grossly harmful, there was no legal ingredient as to what constituted these offences. ?"?That is why we saw that arrests were made in an arbitrary manner"?,? he says.
The section brought in issues over fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression. It also started a debate over P. Chidambaram's role in muffling people's voices over the Internet and brought into play the role played by him, as the home minister, in infringing upon people's right to freedom of speech and expression. Overall, it highlighted the illiberal stand that the state took against free speech.
This is not the first time Chidambaram has been in the news for legislation that is not just illiberal but aims at blocking free speech. In 1988, during Rajiv Gandhi's tenure as PM, Chidambaram was the minister of state for home when the controversial Anti Defamation Bill was brought in, which was, once again, a serious attack on the right to freedom of speech and was an instrument to kill free speech. The bill was unanimously opposed to by the media?, which forced the government to withdraw it.? ?At that time, the Bofors issue was unfolding and the media had made one of its most scathing attacks on the establishment and the government had sought to muffle free speech and press freedom. Says senior journalist Inder Malhotra, "They had drafted a bill that made it impossible to report anything on the Bofors issue and wanted to use the law to end the reporting and investigation on the issue. But the entire press had gone up in arms against the government over this and protest marches were held in Delhi and Mumbai against this forcing the government to pull it back."
Similarly, Section 66A came around the time that the UPA government was seeing the first signs of the 2G scam and it flourished when the 2G and Commonwealth Games scams were in full play. ?Says Sarma, "These laws and bills denote the continuing struggle between individual rights versus what a few individuals in the political executive perceive as "societal good". While the issue of regulating individual rights to protect the overall societal interests can be justified as a part of the "reasonable restrictions" on fundamental rights, provided in the Constitution, the question that arises is as to who will decide what is good for the society."
While Section 66A has been misused by many political leaders and parties against people who have dared to express their difference over political following—the arrest of Jadavpur University professor Ambikesh Mahapatra for forwarding cartoons on Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee is an example—what is more interesting is that both Chidambaram and his son Karti have a history ?with ?this section.? ?Following a complaint from Karti, a Puducherry based businessman Ravi Srinivasan was arrested under Section 66A of the IT Act a few years ago for posting messages on Twitter that targeted him and which Karti considered offensive. The twitter messages reportedly talked about Karti's wealth in comparison to Sonia Gandhi's son-in-law Robert Vadra. Srinivasan was later released on bail.