Ananya Bhattacharya

Last night IFF, @SFLCin and @geoblockedindia received a legal notice said to be issued purportedly on behalf of the RSS. It’s hard to believe this comes from an organisation that has had a century to practise its paperwork and hence this may even be a weird prank! This notice asks us to stop criticising the Government’s blocking orders and stop documenting them. It also wants us to confirm in writing within seven days (seriously). We can tell it’s an excellent teaching aid and here are seven lessons from it. 1) Say who you are: The notice names no advocate and gives no enrollment number. It is signed by an “Authorised Signatory” with no name. Replies go to a free Proton Mail ID, and the “office” is a residential flat in outer Delhi. A notice that can’t tell you who sent it is less a legal document than a weather event. 2) Have a grievance of your own: It never says how its client is harmed when we criticise a MeitY advisory. It complains on behalf of the Government’s blocking orders. The Union has no shortage of lawyers, and it hasn’t asked for volunteers. 3) Name the law: It threatens “appropriate legal action” under “the applicable provisions of law” and doesn’t cite a single section of any statute. A threat with no law, is literally an empty threat. 4) Don’t ask people to give up a fundamental right within seven days: The first demand is that we stop “publicly opposing” government directions. In Shreya Singhal (2015), the Supreme Court held that discussion and advocacy of a cause, however unpopular, sit at the heart of Article 19(1)(a). Opposing an order is how its legality gets tested. That is the Constitution working as intended. 5) Check whether the courts asked for the thing you want stopped” In Anuradha Bhasin (2020), the Supreme Court held that orders restricting fundamental rights must be made available so people can challenge them. The Reddit order is on the public Lumen Database because Reddit put it there. Reading a public database and saying what’s in it has a name. It’s called research. 6) Show us the spark and the powder keg: The notice says our work weakens national security measures, but it gives no instance, date or harm. In S. Rangarajan (1989), the Supreme Court held that the danger feared from speech can’t be remote, conjectural or far-fetched. It has to be like a spark in a powder keg. A post about a Lumen filing is not a spark. 7) Read it once more before you press send: The paragraphs run 1, then an empty 2 and 3, then 4. A PIN code wanders into the facts. The account it targets is on “Twitter”. Our reply is short. The notice is legally deficient because it makes no material allegation and cites no illegality. We will respectfully continue to advance constitutional rights, as we have done before. Notices like this rarely expect to win in court. They expect the recipient to get tired. We often are tired, but it has never changed what we do. Solidarity with @SFLCin and @geoblockedindia. If your post or account has been blocked in India, write to [email protected].