By Tanya Arora
On January 20, the Supreme Court of India reserved orders on a batch of writ petitions concerning hate speech, signalling what may be the end of a prolonged and unusually intensive phase of judicial engagement with hate speech as a constitutional problem.
A Bench of Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Sandeep Mehta indicated that all matters in the batch would be closed, while explicitly preserving the liberty of parties to pursue other remedies under law. One case alone—Kazeem Ahmad Sherwani v. State of Uttar Pradesh and Ors.—was kept pending, limited to monitoring the progress of trial and allied proceedings arising out of a 2021 alleged hate crime against a Muslim cleric in Noida.
The January 20 hearing was not merely procedural. It functioned as a consolidated reckoning—bringing together nearly every strand of hate-speech litigation that has occupied the Court since 2020, and laying bare the Court’s evolving understanding of its own role, the limits of judicial supervision, and the persistent failures of enforcement.
The Beginning: 2020 and the turn to the Supreme Court
The present batch of cases originated in 2020, at a moment when hate speech entered the Supreme Court not as a marginal criminal issue, but as a structural constitutional concern.
The immediate triggers were:
- The “Corona Jihad” campaign during the COVID-19 pandemic, which communalised disease and cast Muslims as biological and civic threats; and
- Sudarshan TV’s “UPSC Jihad” programme, which alleged a conspiracy by Muslim candidates to infiltrate the civil services.
Petitioners argued that these narratives violated equality, dignity, and fraternity, and that State authorities had either failed to act or were complicit through inaction.
In 2020, the Supreme Court intervened to restrain the telecast of the “UPSC Jihad” programme, marking an early acknowledgment that certain forms of hate speech—especially when amplified through mass media—implicate constitutional values beyond ordinary criminal law.
This story was originally published in sabrangindia.in. Read the full story here.