How a WhatsApp message can get you arrested
- Indiscriminate social media arrests are cramping speech and debate, even though the controversial Section 66A is long dead.
- The UPA-era Section 66A of the IT Act, scrapped by the Supreme Court in 2015, was broadly worded enough to book you if you caused annoyance, inconvenience, insult or injury online.
Eighteen-year-old Zakir Ali Tyagi was just kidding when he asked, on Facebook, exactly how the river Ganga was a "living entity". He also went on to discuss the BJP's Ram Mandir plans. For these random comments on Facebook, the Muzaffarnagar teen was made to spend 42 days in jail, paying bribes even to use the toilet.
The UPA-era
Section 66A of the IT Act, scrapped by the
Supreme Court in 2015, was broadly worded enough to book you if you caused annoyance, inconvenience, insult or injury online. In 2012 and 2013, a girl from Palghar, Maharashtra was arrested for criticising Bal Thackeray's state funeral on Facebook, another girl for merely "liking" that comment; a professor from Kolkata was arrested for forwarding a cartoon about Mamata Banerjee; as was a man who tweeted about Karthi Chidambaram's disproportionate wealth. But now, even though Section 66A is gone, the muzzling of speech continues unabated. And perhaps more than political dispensation, this is about the misplaced zeal of the criminal justice system, its general disregard for free speech, and its hypersensitivity to speech that irritates the political establishment.
"There's a trend of using Section 144 of the CrPC, which applies to unlawful assemblies, to WhatsApp discussions," says Gupta. Recall the Indore collector who invoked it to deter any conversation about demonetisation, or the Varanasi DM who said that any false content on a WhatsApp group was grounds for arrest. "This is a threat, rather than a fair legal warning," says Gupta.
How a WhatsApp message can get you arrested - Times of India