While the Supreme Court of In­dia to­day posed spe­cific ques­tions re­lat­ing to the need for the sedi­tion law, even af­ter 75 years of in­de­pen­dence, Sikh po­lit­i­cal body Dal Khalsa has said that while the step of the Supreme Court is ap­pre­cia­ble, there is an im­me­di­ate need to scrap the law, rather than beat around the bush. WSN re­ports.

Per­turbed over the in­dis­crim­i­nate mis­use of sedi­tion law against lawyers, stu­dents, jour­nal­ists, protest­ing farm­ers and rights de­fend­ers, Sikh body Dal Khalsa to­day hailed the Supreme Court for ques­tion­ing the va­lid­ity of the In­dian colo­nial era-sedi­tion law.

In a state­ment re­leased in Am­rit­sar to­day, Dal Khalsa urged the apex In­dian court to go one step fur­ther and ask the In­dian gov­ern­ment to re­move this law from the statute as the Chief Jus­tice said that by ask­ing a rhetor­i­cal ques­tion, “he had in­di­cated what he wanted.”

“Sedi­tion laws have put peo­ples’ free­dom in peril and the state ap­pa­ra­tus has been us­ing these to ha­rass dis­senters in a whole­sale man­ner as the num­bers of de­ten­tions show.”

To­day, in open court, Supreme Court Chief Jus­tice of the SC N.V. Ra­mana has ques­tioned whether the sedi­tion law was “still nec­es­sary af­ter 75 years of In­de­pen­dence”. The court fur­ther ob­served that the law is a se­ri­ous threat to the func­tion­ing of in­sti­tu­tions and holds “enor­mous power” for mis­use with no ac­count­abil­ity for the ex­ec­u­tive.

Party spokesper­son Kan­war Pal Singh in his state­ment said, “the gross mis­use of re­pres­sive laws in­clud­ing sedi­tion and UAPA was go­ing on brazenly.”

“I am scep­ti­cal that the courts and the ex­ec­u­tive will go be­yond mak­ing a big noise about such dra­con­ian laws,” he added.

Speak­ing to WSN, Kan­war Pal Singh said, “Ear­lier too, on sev­eral oc­ca­sions, the Supreme Court of In­dia had held that ‘dis­sent is not sedi­tion’ but it has had no ef­fect, ei­ther on the Union gov­ern­ment or the states who use the law of sedi­tion with im­punity and in to­tal vi­o­la­tion of the guide­lines of the Supreme Court of In­dia.”