Free Speech and Media Law in India: What Article 19 Does and Doesn’t Protect

Foreign researchers comparing free-expression regimes often start from the assumption that India’s Article 19(1)(a), guaranteeing freedom of speech and expression, works like the US First Amendment. It does not, and the difference lies mainly in Article 19(2).

A qualified right, not an absolute one

Unlike the US First Amendment’s famously strong textual protection, Article 19(1)(a) is explicitly subject to Article 19(2), which permits the state to make laws restricting free speech “in the interests of” a listed set of grounds: sovereignty and integrity of India, security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states, public order, decency or morality, contempt of court, defamation, or incitement to an offence. Indian courts have developed a “reasonable restriction” and, more recently, proportionality test to assess laws made under these grounds, rather than the strict-scrutiny framework familiar from US constitutional doctrine.

Sedition and its contested status

Section 124A of the old Indian Penal Code (sedition) was reproduced with modifications as Section 152 of the new Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, despite years of litigation and a Supreme Court order in 2022 putting the old provision’s prosecutions in abeyance pending review; the retention of a sedition-like provision under the new code, after sustained civil-society and judicial criticism of the old one, remains a live and closely watched comparative free-speech topic.

Defamation: both civil and criminal

India retains criminal defamation (now Section 356 of the BNS) alongside civil defamation, a dual-track system increasingly rare internationally, where many democracies have decriminalised defamation entirely; the Supreme Court upheld criminal defamation’s constitutionality in 2016 in Subramanian Swamy v. Union of India.

Internet speech and intermediary liability

The Information Technology Act’s intermediary guidelines, read with the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (which struck down Section 66A’s vague “offensive” online-speech provision as unconstitutional), together shape how far platforms and individuals can be held liable for online content, an area Lexfolio’s cybercrime and IT Act guide covers from the criminal-law side.

Lexfolio’s AI Law and Governance course covers emerging online-speech and platform-regulation questions in further applied detail.