Karnataka’s New Bill Turns Dissent Into A Crime
By Gajanan Khergamker
The Karnataka Hate Speech and Hate Crimes (Prevention) Bill 2025 arrives at a moment when the very architecture of democratic dissent in India seems more fragile than ever. A law in a constitutional democracy is meant to secure the rights of the citizen. It is the shield that counters the State’s natural temptation to control. When a law instead amplifies that temptation, the shield mutates into a weapon and the citizen becomes the target.
The tragedy of the Karnataka Bill lies precisely in this inversion. Presented as a response to the expanding climate of prejudice and polarisation, it is positioned as corrective medicine by a political class that has itself often stoked the same fires. What emerges is less a cure than a legislative smoke screen that threatens the core freedom guaranteed under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution.
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The most unsettling feature of the Bill is its sweeping definition of hate speech. It describes hate speech as any expression made, published or circulated with an intention to cause injury, disharmony, enmity or ill-will against a person, community or group, whether alive or dead, and even to further any prejudicial interest. No constitutional democracy can survive long on a foundation built with words this vague.
The Supreme Court, in the celebrated Shreya Singhal ruling, struck down Section 66A of the IT Act because terms such as “grossly offensive” and “annoying” invited arbitrary interpretation. The Karnataka Bill repeats the same constitutional mistake by using “disharmony,” “ill-will” and broad notions of prejudice without definitional precision or objective thresholds. The result is a statutory framework that criminalises speech on the basis of subjective perception rather than clear legal standards. This is the vice of vagueness that Article 14 jurisprudence repeatedly warns against. A law that leaves citizens guessing whether their criticism, satire or political dissent will be pulled into the penal net is no law at all. It is a trap laid in the name of social order.
There is, additionally, the question of intention. Although the Bill speaks of intention, criminal law in practice rarely affords the citizen the luxury of proving innocence from outside a jail cell. Since the offences under the Bill are cognisable and non-bailable, the first encounter with the law is not legal scrutiny but arrest. A repeat offence escalates the punishment to a mandatory minimum of two years and a maximum of ten. The accused is compelled to enter the criminal justice labyrinth and attempt to establish lack of intention long after liberty has been curtailed. The Supreme Court has repeatedly cautioned that criminal process cannot itself become punishment. Here, the process is structured in a manner that ensures exactly that.
The punishment proposed by the Bill is startling in its severity. A first-time offence carries imprisonment from one to seven years with a fine up to fifty thousand rupees. A second offence invites a mandatory minimum of two years and may extend to ten years with a fine up to one lakh rupees. These penalties are harsher than those already provided under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita for promoting enmity, inciting violence or causing communal disharmony. Existing provisions such as Section 196 and Section 299 already address these concerns. The low conviction rates under these sections are the consequence of inadequate investigation and prosecutorial incompetence, not legislative insufficiency. To respond to poor enforcement by introducing harsher laws is neither constitutionally sound nor logically tenable.
An even more troubling innovation is the imposition of collective liability. If an organisation is accused of a hate crime, every person who was responsible for its operations is deemed guilty unless they prove otherwise. This reverses the principle of mens rea and undermines the presumption of innocence, a cardinal principle of criminal jurisprudence reaffirmed in decisions such as Noor Aga and Navtej Singh Johar. By criminalising entire organisations for the actions of one individual, the provision creates fertile ground for political targeting. Civil society groups, opposition parties, advocacy collectives and independent media bodies can all be crippled under the weight of collective accusations. The chilling effect on democratic participation is immediate and severe.
Further, the Bill grants extraordinary power to a designated officer appointed by the State Government. This officer can direct service providers and intermediaries to block or remove material considered hate speech or hate crime content. The power is unilateral, pre-emptive and unreviewed. It bypasses judicial oversight and gives the executive unchecked authority to determine what may or may not circulate in public discourse. The Supreme Court in Shreya Singhal held that blocking orders must be anchored in procedural safeguards and subject to judicial review. The Karnataka Bill sidesteps this constitutional requirement and permits executive censorship masquerading as public protection. In an environment where political criticism is frequently labelled inflammatory, the threat of misuse is glaring.
The broader concern is national in scale. Karnataka may be the first state to propose a dedicated hate speech legislation but the inclination to weaponise law in the name of maintaining order has spread across India. Central laws such as Section 196 and Section 299 of the BNS already contain adequate protections against inflammatory and malicious speech. The challenge lies in implementation, not a shortage of statutes. If the Karnataka model is adopted by other states, India may soon find itself with a patchwork of sweeping speech restrictions, each one more intrusive than the last. This will not safeguard vulnerable communities. It will instead stifle dissent, restrict political expression and produce an atmosphere where every spoken word carries the risk of criminal sanction.
Legislation must be proportionate, precise and predictable. It must be narrowly tailored to address genuine harm while preserving the democratic space for debate, protest and disagreement. The Karnataka Hate Speech Bill fails every one of these constitutional tests. It is drafted in terms so broad that it places innocent speech and malicious speech on the same footing. It arms the State with the authority to silence and punish without adequate safeguards. It upends foundational principles such as mens rea, proportionality and the presumption of innocence. It transforms free speech, which the Supreme Court has held to be the lifeblood of democracy, into a privilege that can be withdrawn at the discretion of the State.
In attempting to address a social problem, the Karnataka government has created a legislative instrument that can be easily turned into a political weapon. The Constitution demands that restrictions on speech be narrowly defined and carefully applied. What has been proposed instead is a sweeping instrument that threatens the liberty of every citizen. If enacted in its present form, this Bill will alter the balance between citizen and State in a manner that is neither democratic nor constitutionally permissible. The government must revisit its approach, scrap the Bill and initiate a transparent consultation that prioritises judicial precedent, constitutional doctrine and democratic necessity over political expedience. The battle against prejudice cannot be fought by weakening the fundamental freedoms that sustain the republic. A democracy that silences dissent in the name of harmony preserves neither.
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