The Bombay High Court has ruled that any critical or dissenting views in sensitive matters that stir up emotions of different groups of people must be expressed only after proper analysis of the situation and backed with reasoning. The court refused to quash an FIR against a professor for putting a WhatsApp status on Article 370. A division bench of Justices S B Shukre and M M Sathaye dismissed the petition filed by Javed Ahmed Hajam seeking to quash the FIR registered against him by Hatkanangale police station in Maharashtra’s Kolhapur district under section 153 A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for promoting enmity. Mr Hajam, originally from Baramulla district of Jammu and Kashmir, was a professor at a college in Kolhapur. The allegation against Mr Hajam is that he had put a status on his WhatsApp ‘August 5 Black Day Jammu & Kashmir’ with a message below saying ‘Article 370 was abrogated, we are not happy’ and ’14th August Happy Independence Day Pakistan’.
The court said that the first status message on Article 370 constituted an offence under section 153A of the IPC, but the second status message on Pakistan’s Independence Day did not. ‘The first message which has been posted on WhatsApp by the petitioner (Mr Hajam) is without giving any reason and without making any critical analysis of the step taken by the central government towards abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution,’ the court said in its order. ‘In our view, this message has the tendency to play with emotions of different groups of people in India as there are strong feelings of contrasting nature about the status of Jammu and Kashmir in India and therefore, one has to tread cautiously in such a field.’ The court further added that ‘No doubt, in a democratic country like India where there is a fundamental right in the nature of freedom of speech and expression under Article 19, every word of criticism and every view of dissent is important for maintaining democracy in a good state of health.’
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