Shocking yet true: Over 1,300 cases filed & people booked under scrapped Sec 66A of IT law

July 5: It has now been six years since Section 66A of the IT Act was struck down by the apex court in the landmark Shreya Singhal judgement, yet the act has been used till now to book people by the police. The Supreme Court on Monday said it was “shocking”, “terrible” and “amazing” that people were being booked under Section 66A of the Information Technology Act that was scrapped by the apex court in 2015. The court has sought a response from the centre in two weeks’ time.

Section 66A of the IT Act was used to punish online communication which is considered “grossly offensive, menacing, or to send communication which the sender “knows to be false to cause annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred or ill will.” The provision was struck down by the Supreme court on 24 March, 2015. The court in its 2015 judgment has noted that the provision was “vague and arbitrary”.

A three-member bench of Justices R Nariman, KM Joseph and BR Gavai was hearing a plea by an NGO – the People Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) – seeking directions to the centre to advise all police stations against registering FIRs under this law. The petitioner also pointed out that in February 2019 the Supreme Court had directed that copies of the judgment scrapping 66A be available to every district court via the concerned High Court.

Appearing for the petitioner, senior advocate Sanjay Parikh told the apex court that prior to the scrapping of Sec 66A there were 229 pending cases. Since then, 1,307 new cases had been registered, of which 570 are still pending. The majority of these were registered in Maharashtra (381), followed by Jharkhand (291), Uttar Pradesh (245) and Rajasthan (192). Other states to register Sec 66A cases after it was struck down are Andhra Pradesh (38), Assam (59), Delhi, (28), Karnataka (14), Telangana (15), Tamil Nadu (7) and Bengal (37).

The Attorney General of India, KK Venugopal on Monday informed the Supreme court that the “statute books” still carry Section 66A of the IT Act, which was struck down as unconstitutional. “If your lordships see the IT Act book, there is only a small asterisk and a footnote that says deleted by order of Supreme court. No one reads the footnote,” said Venugopal.