In an effort to stifle widespread protests against new farm laws, many led by Sikhs, India’s government has launched a new set of regulations to censor online content and is leveraging a colonial-era sedition law to arrest anyone the government deems as critics.

The sedition law dates back to the 1870s when the British controlled the sub-continent and criminalizes anyone who “excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the government.”

The government’s crackdown on dissent comes after thousands of Indian farmers, many of them Sikhs from the northern farming state of Punjab, turned their months-long sit-in protest into a tractor rally on India’s Republic Day Jan. 26, plowing past police barriers to enter the capital and storm into Delhi’s iconic Red Fort. While many farmers flew the Indian tri-color flag, some carried the orange Sikh flag called the Nishan Sahib, hoisted atop Sikh gurudwaras around the world.

READ: Indian Farmers Stormed The Capital’s Fort To Fly A Sikh Flag

The Indian government is now pointing to the Sikh flags flown as proof that the farmers’ rally on Jan. 26 was led by the separatist movement in Punjab, the pro-Khalistan movement. The fringe Khalistan movement seeks to create an independent Sikh homeland inside India’s Punjab but does not seem to have mass political support even among Sikhs in the region.

Crackdown on free speech

Recently, the government filed sedition cases against journalists and activists for taking part in the farmers' protest. Labor rights activist Nodeep Kaur, actor Deep Sidhu, environmentalist Disha Ravi, lawyer Nikita Jacob and a few journalists have been slapped with sedition charges. Ravi and Jacob are under investigation for a sedition case filed by the Delhi police concerning a toolkit created supporting farmers' movement with an alleged "pro-Khalistani" organization, Poetic Justice Foundation, PJF, an India's national daily reported. 

The kit in question is a Google doc of resources designed to support the farmer's movement created by a small group of Indian activists and diaspora. The toolkit does not mention Khalistan but is nonetheless being viewed as part of a covert plot to divide India and form a separate Sikh state because a Vancouver-based Indian-Canadian sympathetic with the movement helped put the document together. 

Under the colonial-era sedition law, police can arrest a person before filing formal charges if an individual's act or speech is considered to "be disloyal to or threatening to the state." The maximum penalty can be a life term in prison.  

At least eight leading journalists and politicians have been charged with sedition for misreporting, spreading disharmony, and inciting riots via Republic Day tweets. 

The sedition case filings have risen astronomically since Prime Minister Narendra Modi government has come to power in 2014, according to a report published in February by Article-14, an Indian research organization.

Since 2010, 816 sedition cases have been filed against 11,000 people and 65% of these cases were filed after Modi assumed power. Of the 405 cases filed since 2010 specifically for criticizing the government, 96% were filed after 2014, the year Modi-led government came to power.

Earlier in February, the Indian government threatened Twitter with legal recourse if it failed to suspend over 500 Twitter accounts that it alleged were linked to spreading misinformation about the government. Twitter ended up suspending these accounts. 

On Feb. 25, the Indian government also launched a new set of regulations that will require social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to quickly erase content authorities deem unlawful. The laws also include a strict oversight mechanism that would allow the government to ban content affecting "the sovereignty and integrity of India," the Associated Press reported. 

The regulations that seek to learn about the originators of information are set to take effect within three months and impact all digital media, including streaming and news sites.  

Apar Gupta, executive director of India Freedom Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group, said the government asking social media platforms to give details about originators of information "undermines user rights and can lead to self-censorship if users fear that their conversations are no longer private," according to the Associated Press. 

United Nations Human Rights commissioner Michele Bachelet also raised concern over the Indian government's response to the farmers' movement, along with sedition charges against journalists and the curbing of social media. In a statement on Feb. 27, Bachelet said, "continued protests by hundreds of thousands of farmers highlight the importance of ensuring laws and policies are based on meaningful consultations with those concerned."

In a video published Feb. 16, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, founder of "Sikhs for Justice," a U.S.-based advocacy group supporting the Khalistan movement, also blasted Modi for using violence, and the “terror tool – sedition” to suppress protesters. 

According to a White House readout in a call with Modi on Feb. 8, President Joe Biden made no mention of the farmers' protests. 

Emergence of the movement 

Farmers in India have been protesting for decades. From a lack of farmer-friendly policies, low subsidies to high production costs, the current farming system has led to a suicide epidemic.

But the most recent grievance that fueled the months-long protests concerns the Modi government's farm bills that seek to deregulate India's agricultural industry. 

In September, bypassing parliamentary procedures, the Indian government decided to introduce three contentious farm reform bills, sparking outrage among farmers, most prominently in northwest Punjab.  

The government's plan benefits private buyers and limits state intervention. The bills lay the groundwork for farmers to rely on contracts with corporations that can afford to buy large swaths of farmland. This move can significantly hurt poor farmers and the rural industry as the Modi government paves the way for corporations to further supersede state governments' regulatory powers. 

Michael Levien, Associate Professor of Sociology at John Hopkins University, has studied and outlined how farmers in India have historically suffered under different agrarian policies set in place by various political regimes.

The development model in the decades between India's independence in 1947 and economic liberalization in the early 1990s was based on the impoverishment of tens of millions of people, Levien wrote.

"The Indian state dispossessed land for state-led industrial and infrastructural projects, ensuring compliance through coercion and powerful ideological appeals to national development," Levien wrote.

When India opened its markets in the 1990's, "economic liberalization… generated a transition to a new neoliberal regime of dispossession in which state governments restructured themselves as land brokers for private capital," Levien explained.

With the ongoing pandemic, the agrarian crisis in India has continued to worsen. So far, at least 60 people have died since the mass mobilization for protests began. Hundreds of thousands of Sikh farmers from the Punjab region have marched to the capital for sit-in protests over the last couple of months. 

Manmeet Sahni is an independent journalist from New Delhi based in New York. She writes about politics, human rights, inequality and social movements. Her bylines have appeared in Documented, The Article and others and she is an alumna of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.