Media Laws and Ethics II: Defamation, Sedition, Contempt of Court, Official Secrets, the Registration of Periodicals, Working Journalists and Wage Boards, Obscenity and its Tests, Indecent Representation of Women, the SC and ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, Parliamentary Privileges, and Famous Cases

Section 124A, inserted into the Indian Penal Code in 1870, punished bringing or attempting to bring into hatred or contempt, or exciting disaffection towards, the government established by law. It was used against the nationalist press: Tilak was convicted for articles in Kesari in 1897 and 1908, and Gandhi in 1922 for articles in Young India, when he called the section the prince among the political sections of the Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen. In Kedar Nath Singh (1962) the Supreme Court upheld it but read it down: it applies only to words that incite violence or have a tendency to create public disorder, and strong criticism of the government is not sedition. Later cases applied that limit, as in Balwant Singh v State of Punjab (1995), where slogans raised casually by two persons, drawing no response from the public, were held not seditious, and in Vinod Dua v Union of India (2021), where a sedition case against a journalist was quashed on the Kedar Nath standard.

In S. G. Vombatkere v Union of India (May 2022) the Supreme Court directed that section 124A be kept in abeyance while the government reconsidered it, and asked governments not to register new cases under it. The Law Commission's 279th Report (2023) recommended retaining the offence with safeguards, but Parliament took the other course: the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita omits sedition altogether. Its section 152, headed as acts endangering the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India, punishes whoever purposely or knowingly, by words, signs, visible representation, electronic communication, financial means or otherwise, excites or attempts to excite secession, armed rebellion or subversive activities, encourages feelings of separatist activities, or endangers the sovereignty or unity and integrity of India, with imprisonment for life or up to seven years, and fine. An explanation excludes comments expressing disapproval of government measures or actions with a view to obtaining their alteration by lawful means. Section 152 is not sedition renumbered: its object is the sovereignty and integrity of the country, not disaffection towards the government. How far the courts will carry the Kedar Nath reasoning over to it is for them to decide.

The Supreme Court (Article 129) and the High Courts (Article 215) are courts of record with power to punish contempt, and the Contempt of Courts Act 1971, based on the H. N. Sanyal Committee's report, regulates it. Civil contempt is wilful disobedience of a court's order or wilful breach of an undertaking. Criminal contempt is a publication or act that scandalises or lowers the authority of a court, prejudices or interferes with judicial proceedings, or obstructs the administration of justice. The Act protects innocent publication and distribution (section 3), fair and accurate reports of judicial proceedings (section 4), and fair criticism of judicial acts (section 5); a 2006 amendment to section 13 allows truth as a defence where it is in the public interest and the request is bona fide. The punishment is simple imprisonment of up to six months, or a fine of up to 2,000 rupees, or both. Journalists and writers have been held in contempt in cases such as E. M. S. Namboodiripad v T. N. Nambiar (1970), In re Arundhati Roy (2002) and In re Prashant Bhushan (2020), where a fine of one rupee was imposed.

The Official Secrets Act 1923 punishes spying (section 3) and the wrongful communication of secret official information (section 5), and section 5 reaches the person who receives such information as well as the one who leaks it, which exposes journalists who publish leaked documents. The Second Administrative Reforms Commission, in its first report, Right to Information: Master Key to Good Governance (2006), recommended that the Act be repealed and replaced by a chapter in the National Security Act. The Act has not been repealed; the Right to Information Act 2005 allows disclosure where public interest outweighs the harm to protected interests.

Parliamentary privileges, under Articles 105 and 194, protect members' freedom of speech in the House and the House's power to punish breaches of privilege and contempt, which include misreporting proceedings, publishing expunged remarks, and casting reflections on members or the House. In M. S. M. Sharma v Sri Krishna Sinha (1959), the Searchlight case, the Supreme Court held that the legislature's privileges prevailed over a newspaper's Article 19(1)(a) right when it published an expunged portion of a speech; the Keshav Singh reference (1965) affirmed that courts can examine the existence and extent of a privilege. Article 361A, inserted in 1978, and the Parliamentary Proceedings (Protection of Publication) Act 1977 protect a substantially true report of legislative proceedings unless it is made with malice.

The Press and Registration of Books Act 1867 regulated printing presses and newspapers: every printed item had to carry the names of its printer and publisher and the place of printing, a newspaper's keeper had to make a declaration before a magistrate, and newspapers were registered with the Registrar of Newspapers for India, an office created in 1956 on the First Press Commission's recommendation. The 1867 Act has been repealed and replaced by the Press and Registration of Periodicals Act 2023, in force from 1 March 2024, an Act concerned with periodicals. It provides for the registration of periodicals through the Press Registrar General of India. This course makes no claim about how the registration of books is now handled.

The Working Journalists and other Newspaper Employees (Conditions of Service) and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 1955, passed on the First Press Commission's recommendation, gave journalists and newspaper employees statutory protection: rules on retrenchment and notice, gratuity, hours of work and leave, and wage boards to fix wages. Its validity was upheld in Express Newspapers v Union of India (1958), though that wage board's decision was set aside. Successive wage boards followed, among them the Palekar, Bachawat, Manisana Singh and Majithia boards; the Supreme Court upheld the Majithia Wage Board's recommendations in ABP Pvt Ltd v Union of India (2014). The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code 2020, one of the four labour codes passed in 2019 and 2020, subsumes the 1955 Act among the central labour laws it consolidates. The four codes were brought into force with effect from 21 November 2025, and the 1955 Act was repealed from that date, subject to the Code's savings and transitional provisions; for current employment questions the Code is the governing text, and rule-level detail under it should be checked against the current notification.

The obscenity sections of the Indian Penal Code are carried into the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita as sections 294, 295 and 296. Section 294 of the BNS, replacing IPC 292, punishes selling, distributing, publicly exhibiting or circulating obscene books, pamphlets, drawings, paintings and other objects, and now expressly includes the display of any content in electronic form; it keeps the exception for works justified as being for the public good in the interest of science, literature, art or learning, and for religious and heritage uses. Section 295, replacing IPC 293, punishes selling such objects to a child. Section 296, replacing IPC 294, punishes obscene acts, songs and words in or near a public place to the annoyance of others. Electronic obscenity is also covered by sections 67 and 67A of the Information Technology Act.

Between these, Samaresh Bose v Amal Mitra (1985), on a Bengali novel, asked the judge to see the work through the eyes of the author and of the ordinary reader, and Bobby Art International v Om Pal Singh Hoon (1996), on the film Bandit Queen, held that a scene of nudity serving the film's theme of sexual violence was not obscene. The movement in Indian law is thus from Hicklin's most vulnerable reader, judged by isolated passages, to the contemporary standards of the community, judged by the work as a whole, which is also the direction of Miller and of the earlier American case Roth v United States (1957).

The Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act 1986 defines indecent representation as the depiction of the figure of a woman, her form or body or any part of it, in a way that is indecent, derogatory or denigrating to women, or likely to deprave, corrupt or injure public morality or morals. It prohibits advertisements containing such representation and the production, sale, distribution or circulation of books, pamphlets, papers, slides, films, writings, drawings, paintings, photographs, representations or figures that contain it, with exceptions for works justified for the public good or kept for religious purposes. It matters to advertisers and publishers because it targets the depiction itself, not only obscenity.

The Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989 defines atrocities against members of those communities and makes them offences, among them intentionally insulting or intimidating a member with intent to humiliate in any place within public view, and abusing a member by caste name in public view. For the media, this means that words spoken on air or posted online, in a place within public view, can attract the Act, and that reporting of atrocities must avoid further humiliating victims. The Act was strengthened by amendments in 2015 and 2018; the 2018 amendment responded to the Supreme Court's decision in Subhash Kashinath Mahajan (2018) by restoring the bar on anticipatory bail.

• Tilak (1897, 1908) and Gandhi (1922): sedition prosecutions for newspaper articles.
• Romesh Thappar and Brij Bhushan (1950), Sakal (1962), Bennett Coleman (1972), Indian Express (1985): press freedom and press economics (Chapter 12).
• M. S. M. Sharma (1959): the Searchlight case on privileges.
• R. Rajagopal (1994): the publication of a condemned prisoner's autobiography, privacy and the defamation of officials.
• Aveek Sarkar (2014): the community-standards test of obscenity.
• Shreya Singhal (2015), Subramanian Swamy (2016), Vinod Dua (2021) and Vombatkere (2022): online speech, criminal defamation and sedition.