Shreya Singhal v. Union of India

Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, made it a criminal offence to send, by computer or communication device, any information that was 'grossly offensive', had 'menacing character', or was known to be false but sent to cause annoyance, inconvenience, danger, or ill will. Several people had already been arrested under it for Facebook posts and forwarded messages before the Supreme Court was asked to decide whether the provision could stand at all.

Facts

The petition was triggered by a series of arrests over online speech — including two young women arrested for a Facebook post questioning a shutdown following a politician's death — that made the provision's reach visible in a way abstract argument couldn't. Petitioner Shreya Singhal, a law student, challenged Section 66A's constitutionality directly before the Supreme Court under Article 32.

Legal issues

• Whether Section 66A's terms — 'grossly offensive', 'menacing character', 'annoyance', 'inconvenience' — were so vague that they failed to give citizens fair notice of what speech was actually prohibited.
• Whether the provision fell within any of the specific restrictions on free speech permitted under Article 19(2), or whether it swept more broadly than any permitted ground.
• Whether a restriction on online speech could be upheld on the same terms as restrictions on other media, given how differently the provision was drafted from analogous offline offences.

Decision

The Court struck down Section 66A in its entirety as unconstitutional, holding it violated Article 19(1)(a)'s guarantee of free speech and was not saved by any of the restrictions permitted under Article 19(2).

The public's right to know is directly affected by Section 66A. Information of all kinds is roped in — such information may be defamatory, encroach on privacy, cause enmity or hatred, or be obscene. All such information cannot be brought within the net cast by Section 66A.Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, (2015) 5 SCC 1

Reasoning

The Court distinguished 'discussion', 'advocacy' and 'incitement' as three distinct stages of speech, holding that only incitement — speech that actually threatens public order, not speech that merely offends — can constitutionally be restricted under Article 19(2). Section 66A criminalised huge amounts of speech at the discussion and advocacy stages, with no requirement that the speech cause or be likely to cause any actual harm. Its terms were also undefined and open to wildly subjective application, meaning ordinary people could not know in advance what would land them in a police station.

Significance

Shreya Singhal remains the leading Indian precedent on online speech and vagueness doctrine, cited in nearly every subsequent case testing whether a law restricting expression is drawn narrowly enough to survive Article 19. It also settled, without much room for dispute afterward, that speech on the internet gets the same constitutional protection as speech anywhere else — not less, on the theory that it's more dangerous, and not more, on the theory that it's less regulated.