A WhatsApp message could get you arrested in India

Across Indian states, citizens are being picked up by the police for unguarded comments on social media, and the arbitrariness of these arrests has created a climate of anxiety.

In most cases to hit the news, those charged have been ordinary people, without the clout to incite mass violence. On November 2 2017, Meerut-based journalist Afghan Soni was charged with defamation and "computer-related offences" (Section 66 of the IT Act) for posting a "derogatory" video of Narendra Modi asking a rally about " achhe din ", and getting his response not from a crowd of people, but a herd of goats.

Social media arrests are not new, and nor are they a uniquely Indian form of repression. The UPA-era Section 66A of the IT Act, scrapped by the Supreme Court in 2015, was broadly worded enough to book you if you caused annoyance, inconvenience, insult or injury online. In 2012 and 2013, a girl from Palghar, Maharashtra was arrested for criticising Bal Thackeray's state funeral on Facebook, another girl for merely "liking" that comment; a professor from Kolkata was arrested for forwarding a cartoon about Mamata Banerjee; as was a man who tweeted about Karthi Chidambaram's disproportionate wealth. But now, even though Section 66A is gone, the muzzling of speech continues unabated.

India, like every other country in the world, places reasonable fetters on free expression. These include a threat to public order, dangerously stirring up religious sensitivities, caste slurs, defamation, child pornography, and so on.
Other sections of the IT Act, including clauses on obscenity and morphing, are being used to arrest people like in the case of morphing of images, which may be a concern when women are misrepresented, but by itself, a morphed image in a political caricature or piece of satire is not an illegal or criminal act.

Similarly, lying and cussing are human activities that also exist online; they do not inherently deserve criminal sanction. Even rumours are not illegal by themselves, the CrPC should kick in only in instances where they might incite violence or have other criminal implications.

WhatsApp is where these tensions are strongest. Given that the technology can be used to make trouble on a wide scale, the police has good reason to keep an eye on the platform. But increasingly, WhatsApp administrators have been booked even for harmless remarks. There's a trend of using Section 144 of the CrPC, which applies to unlawful assemblies, to WhatsApp discussions. Curious are the cases of Indore collector who invoked it to deter any conversation about demonetisation, or the Varanasi DM who said that any false content on a WhatsApp group which were treated grounds for arrest.

These arrests create a chilling effect on speech and the likelihood of someone, somewhere, taking legal action constrains you to watch your words more than necessary. Rather than a lively, democratic public sphere, we could end up with the hushed, wary conversations of a police state.