Is a sedition law necessary in a modern democracy or does the state need something to protect itself from civil war? Is sedition a question of merely offending someone (or many) or does it have to include an incitement to the larger populace to overthrow a ruling government and its institutions. Is what is happening in Syria a civil war or a freedom struggle?

Jawaharlal Nehru is supposed to have said in 1951: “Now so far as I am concerned, that particular section is highly objectionable and obnoxious and it should have no place both for practical and historical reasons, if you like, in any body of laws that we might pass. The sooner we get rid of it the better.”