A court in Hyderabad on Monday ordered the police to register a first information report against politician K Kavitha for saying in an interview that Kashmir and Hyderabad had been forcefully annexed by India. Kavitha is a member of parliament, where she represents the constituency of Nizamabad in Telangana. Her father, K Chandrasekhara Rao, is the first chief minister of the newly created Telangana state.

The charges include sedition, promoting enmity between different groups, committing acts prejudicial to the maintenance of harmony, and making statements that could cause public mischief. There is one problem with those Indian Penal Code provisions: sedition. The honourable court is unlikely to be able to convict her for sedition, as the sedition law was read down (that is, reduced in scope) by the Supreme Court in 1962. The court ruled that sedition law, section 124 of the Indian Penal Code, would apply only if words against the state were accompanied by a direct incitement of violence.

Parliamentarian K Kavitha did no such thing. She wasn’t inciting anyone to do anything. She may be factually incorrect about Kashmir, but on Hyderabad, her critics may want to look up Operation Polo, the code name for the Indian armed forces operation in Hyderabad that followed the Nizam's decision not join the Indian Union. Newsreel footage of Indian troops entering the territory is available here.

Despite the Supreme Court’s reading down of IPC 124(A), the use of sedition law in India is rampant, even though it does not result in any convictions. The most prominent recent example is cartoonist Aseem Trivedi, who was arrested in 2012 and booked under sedition and other charges for publishing anti-corruption cartoons that featured the Indian flag and the national emblem.

Such clear and frequent misuse of the sedition law in cases where there is no incitement to violence against the state is one of the threats to freedom of speech and expression in India. It should be noted that sedition is not part of Article 19 (2) of the Indian Constitution, which lays down “reasonable restrictions” to freedom of speech.

IPC 124 (A) has become a tool of harassment against dissidents, whether they are critics of the Union of India or just the party or ideology in power. In a way, it is a great tribute for someone to be charged with sedition, considering that Gandhi once told a British judge that “sedition was the highest moral duty of a citizen”. Since the law is about “disaffection against the state”, Gandhi pointed out that “affection cannot be manufactured or regulated by law”.

India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, said of the sedition law, “Now as far as I am concerned that particular Section is highly objectionable and obnoxious and it should have no place…in any body of laws that we might pass. The sooner we get rid of it the better.”

The British gave India the sedition law in 1860, to be able to detain those who spoke against the colonial government. In 2010, the British parliament repealed the sedition law. In the end it boils down to the question of security. Not national security, but nationalist security. Are we as a nation so insecure that we feel India is threatened by a remark here or there about how India was created?