NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court is determined to expeditiously rule on the constitutional validity of the contentious and much-misused sedition provision under Section 124A of the IPC with the CJI D Y Chandrachud on Wednesday saying that he would consider the plea for tasking a seven judge bench to adjudicate on it instead of a five-judge bench carrying out the exercise.
The plea for reference to a 7-judge bench was made by Senior Advocate Sidharth Dave on the ground that a five-judge bench may be coram-wise unsuited to decide the issue as more than five decades ago, a bench of five judges had upheld the validity of Section 124A in the Kedar Nath Singh case.
The CJI said he would soon take a call on the administrative side. The three-judge bench led by the CJI scheduled the hearing on a bunch of petitions questioning the validity of Section 124A in January and asked the parties to complete the pleadings by January 2. On September 12, the CJI-led bench had referred the issue to a 5-judge bench after rejecting the Union government’s plea to pause the judicial scrutiny and await Parliament’s view on the proposed new penal code in Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), which seeks to do away with theprovision.
A bench of Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud and Justices J B Pardiwala and Manoj Misra had backed their decision not to accede to the requests from Attorney General R Venkataramani and Solicitor General Tushar Mehta for deferment of the judicial scrutiny of sedition provision.