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Top court to examine hate-speech clauses

Published On : 03 Jul 2015


New Delhi, July 2 (The Telegraph): The Supreme Court today agreed to examine the constitutional validity of IPC provisions on "hate speech" and stayed for six weeks an Assam court's non-bailable warrants against BJP leader Subramanian Swamy for alleged incendiary remarks over the Ayodhya temple.

Swamy has challenged the warrants - terming them a "total abuse of the process of law" and claiming they were issued without serving him summons - and described the IPC sections as "unconstitutional" and prone to abuse.

He cited the apex court's abrogation of Section 66A of IT Act in March this year on the ground that it stifled freedom of expression and was often misused by the authorities to harass people.

An apex court bench headed by Justice Ranjan Gogoi, while staying the arrest, asked Swamy to approach the "appropriate court" - the sessions court in Karimpur where the case has been filed or Gauhati High Court - if he wanted to have the warrants quashed.

The warrants were issued last month after the speech by Swamy in another part of the country referring to the Ayodhya temple row.

According to him, the IPC provisions had in the past few years been increasingly used against him, "sometimes in a malafide (manner) and maliciously" by various authorities politically inimical to him to penalise him for his "clear-headed extensive research and his ideological beliefs and thereby make him conform to the norms of certain special ideological and religious groups".

Swamy then cited FIRs/summons against him in similar cases in several other states - Delhi, Maharashtra, Punjab and Kerala - over what he described as "presumed hate speeches".

In the present case, Swamy said he could not travel to the court in Karimganj saying he had "apprehensions" about his safety as the Assam pocket on the border of Bangladesh had a "predominance of illegal migrants" of a particular community.


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