Union minister explains why PM Modi decided to reconsider sedition law

Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked to re-examine and reconsider the provision of sedition law, union law minister Kiren Rijiju told news agency ANI on Monday.

The prime minister urged to remove the obsolete sedition law, the minister added. “The government will suitably take into account views of the stakeholders and ensure that the sovereignty and integrity of the nation is preserved, while re-examining and re-considering the law on sedition,” the law minister said.

Rijiju's statement comes hours after the Narendra Modi government told the Supreme Court that it had decided to reconsider and re-examine the sedition law. In its affidavit, the Centre urged the top court to wait for the outcome of the exercise and not proceed with the hearing on the petition.

The government in its affidavit said that Prime Minister Modi had expressed clear and unequivocal views in favour of protecting civil liberties, respect for human rights and believed that outdated colonial laws had no place in the country celebrating its 75th year of independence.

On April 30, PM Modi at a rare joint conference of chief ministers and the chief justices of high courts had urged the CMs to nix the laws that “had become irrelevant for the common citizens”.

“A serious topic is also the intricacies of law for the common man. In 2015, we identified about 1,800 such laws which had become irrelevant. Out of these, among the laws of the centre, we abolished 1,450 such laws. But only 75 laws have been abolished by the states," the prime minister had said.

Last week, the Centre had defended the sedition law in the Supreme Court, stating that the 1962 verdict of the five-judge constitution bench case which had upheld the validity of sedition under Section 124A of the IPC is binding and continues to be a ‘good law and needed no reconsideration'.