The Supreme Court on Friday (August 8, 2025) sought the Centre’s response to a petition claiming that Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), 2023 is “repackaged” the colonial sedition law.

A three-judge Bench headed by Chief Justice of India B.R. Gavai issued notice to the Union government on a petition filed by S.G. Vombatkere, represented by advocate Prasanna S.

The petition said the apex court had ordered court proceedings and criminal prosecutions for sedition under Section 124A of the erstwhile Indian Penal Code (IPC) to be kept in abeyance in an order in May 2022.

However, when BNS replaced the British-era IPC in July 2024, Section 124A was slipped in again into the statute book in the guise of Section 152, the petition submitted.

“The provision, in effect, reintroduces the colonial sedition law previously codified as Section 124A of the IPC, 1860, under a new nomenclature. Though the language is altered, its substantive content—criminalising vague and broad categories of speech and expression such as ‘subversive activity’, ‘encouragement of separatist feelings’, and acts ‘endangering unity or integrity of India’ — remains the same or is even more expansive,” the petition said.

It said Section 152 was violative of fundamental rights under Articles 14 (equality), 19(1)(a) (free speech), and 21 (right to life and personal liberty) of the Constitution.

Section 152 criminalised a wide spectrum of expressive conduct, including those who “purposely or knowingly” use words — spoken, written, electronic, symbolic, or financial — to “excite or attempt to excite” secession, rebellion, or subversive activities.

“Its sweeping language, including phrases like ‘encouraging feelings of separatist activities’, fails the test of constitutional validity due to vagueness, overbreadth, chilling effect, disproportionate punishment, and absence of proximate nexus to public disorder,” the petitioner argued.

The Bench tagged the petition with the pending case against the law of sedition.

The 2022 abeyance order of the top court had acted as a powerful message against the rampant misuse of the sedition law by governments to silence dissent and violate personal liberty. Undertrials booked under Section 124A were at the time free to use the order to seek bail.

The Centre too had acknowledged at the time that Section 124A was not in tune with the current times.