Frozen sedition IThe Government must heed the spirit of SC order and help prevent misuse of sedition law n a substantial blow in favour of free speech, the Su­ preme Court has effectively suspended the opera­ tion of the sedition provision in the country’s penal law. “All pending trials, appeals and proceedings with respect to the charge framed under Section 124A be kept in abeyance”, it has said in an order that will bring some welcome relief to those calling for the abrogation of Section 124A of the IPC, which criminalises any speech, writing or representation that “excites disaffec­ tion against the government”. The Court has recorded its hope and expectation that governments at the Centre and the States will refrain from registering any fresh case of sedition under Section 124A of the IPC, or continuing with any investigation or taking any coer­ cive measure under it. The hope and the expectation arise from the Union government’s own submission that it has decided to re­examine and reconsider the provision as part of the Prime Minister’s efforts to scrap outdated laws and compliance burdens. Perhaps, rea­ lising that its order may not be enough to deter thin­ skinned and vindictive governments and politically pliant police officers from invoking it against detractors and dissenters, the Court has given liberty to the people to approach the jurisdiction courts if any fresh case is registered for sedition and cite in their support the pre­ sent order, as well as the Union government’s stand. That the sedition law is being persistently misused has been recognised years ago, and courts have pointed out that the police authorities are not heeding the lim­ itation imposed by a 1962 Constitution Bench of the Su­ preme Court on what constitutes sedition. The Court had upheld the section only by reading it down to mean that it is applicable only to “acts involving intention or tendency to create disorder, or disturbance of law and order, or incitement to violence”. In practice, the police have been using the broad definition of sedition to book anyone who criticised the Government in strong and strident language. The question now before the Court is whether it ought to overrule a decision rendered by a five­judge Bench 60 years ago. If it chooses to do so, and strikes down Section 124A as an unconstitutional res­ triction on free speech, it may help the larger cause of preventing misuse of provisions relating to speech­ based offences. However, the Government may choose to prevent such a situation by amending it so that the of­ fence is narrowly defined to cover only acts that affect the sovereignty, integrity and security of the state, as reportedly recommended by a panel of experts. When the Government submitted that it was revisiting the provision on its own, it was expecting only an indefinite postponement of the hearing on the constitutional va­ lidity of Section 124A, but it must now heed the spirit of the order and take effective steps to prevent its misuse Engage, not dismiss Excess deaths measures are a robust way to estimate pandemic impact T he release of a report by WHO that estimates ex­ cess deaths during the COVID­19 pandemic to be nearly 10 times the reported COVID­19 death toll of 4.8 lakh in India between January 2020 and Decem­ ber 2021, the highest for any country, is not surprising. The pandemic did not just contribute to a surge in dis­ ease­related mortality, especially of the aged and the in­ firm, but also disrupted health systems that could have resulted in many other avoidable deaths. A robust esti­ mation of the excess deaths was necessary to under­ stand the pandemic effect in India where death regis­ tration after occurrence is not universal across States and medical certification of deaths is quite low in num­ ber. The Government has strongly denied the numbers and dismissed the methodology by saying that the WHO approach is based on modelled estimates and not actual data. It countered it by finally releasing the Civil Registration System report for 2020 (two days prior to the release of the WHO report) and saying that the cum­ ulative increase in the number of deaths in 2020 was only 4.74 lakh, lower than the corresponding number for 2019. While most deaths — close to two thirds — oc­ curred during the second wave in India from March to June 2021 (and later in some States such as Kerala), and therefore the late release of the CRS 2020 report does not entirely negate the WHO estimates that are based on registered deaths data available from “sub­national” units, there is indeed a discrepancy for 2020 data. The WHO estimates for States were based on CRS re­ gistration data obtained by news organisations — the bulk of them by The Hindu. For 2020, cumulatively, the excess deaths estimations (close to 5.5 lakh for 12 States) for most such States for which data were obtained, match the CRS 2020 calculations (5.3 lakh). Discrepan­ cies are quite high for those States where CRS data were only partially or not available earlier. A case in point is Uttar Pradesh where death (8.73 lakh in 2020 vs 9.45 lakh in 2019) and birth registrations (48.5 in 2020 vs 51.3 lakh in 2019) fell significantly and therefore skewed the overall country­wide excess deaths numbers. But without the release of the Sample Registration System data, it is difficult to believe that in States such as U.P., there has been an increase in registration levels even while there is a decrease in actual birth and death regis­ tration. The NFHS­5 2021 interviews show that death re­ gistration in 2020 was lower than previous years as op­ posed to the Government’s claims based on CRS 2020. The Government must not dismiss the WHO estimates and should instead look at undertaking its own exercise on excess deaths based on registration data in the CRS/ SRS. After all, other methods, including surveys, have corroborated the fact that there was a high under­re­ porting of COVID­19 deaths during the pandemic.