It’s surprising that some laws or sections of laws continue to live even after they are dead, and are used by law enforcement agencies for various proposes, mainly to harass citizens. One such law that refuses to die is Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, which the Supreme Court had struck down in 2015. The Section had made it a punishable offence for any person to send offensive, inconvenient, annoying or misleading information using a computer or any other electronic device. The court, in a landmark judgement, struck it down, calling it a violation of the right to free speech. But the court has now been told that even after seven years, the police forces continue to register cases under the provision and subordinate judiciary continues to conduct trials under it. It is a strange and absurd situation in which people are tried under a law that does not exist. But it is not a farce, it has real consequences for those found guilty -- a jail term of up to three years.
A bench led by Chief Justice U U Lalit was told that over 1,000 cases had been registered under Section 66A after it was quashed and as many as 169 cases were in the trial stage. The matter was brought to the court’s attention for the third time recently, after it was raised in January 2019 and July 2021. The court had said that it was a “shocking state of affairs”. The People’s Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL) which raised the matter before the Supreme Court has said that it was the central government’s responsibility to ensure implementation of the court’s orders, but the government has said that it was for the state governments to create the necessary local regulations for the police.
The court has ruled that all existing cases under the Section “shall stand deleted” and no more cases should be registered under it. It has told the government to provide information to the public about its order. It is difficult to imagine that police officers across the country were ignorant of the invalidation of the law. It is more likely that it was used as a tool of harassment. It is still more difficult to imagine that some cases have even reached the trial stage. The court took on record a suggestion that disciplinary proceedings should be initiated against officials who invoked the defunct Section against people. The government has taken credit for removing hundreds of outdated laws from the statute book. It should make sure that provisos like Section 66A are not used and people are not pushed into such Kafkaesque situations in their lives.