New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday (March 1) took credit for repealing an obsolete colonial-era law that allowed the government to prevent any dramatic performance it deemed problematic.
Modi was referring to The Dramatic Performances Act (DPA) enacted by the British government in 1876. The law had come in response to a string of nationalist plays staged in the country that had drawn the ire of the colonial government.
What the prime minister didn’t mention during his speech was that the law had not been in use since at least 1956, when the Allahabad high court had declared it unconstitutional.
Fact check
Addressing the NXT Conclave at Bharat Mandapam on the launch of a news channel last week, the prime minister spoke about how DPA was deployed to prevent the use of theatre against the British government.
However, he misrepresented what the law could be used against when he said, “It means if 10 people are dancing in a baraat during a wedding, the police can arrest them along with the groom. This Act was there even after 75 years of Independence. Our (NDA) government abolished that law.”
The Dramatic Performances Act was enacted alongside a string of other laws that were meant to clamp down on dissent. These included the Vernacular Press Act, 1878, and the draconian sedition law of 1870, a version of which is still in place in the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita (BNS).
Neither was DPA meant to be used against “baratis”, nor was it being used “even 75 years after Independence”. The Allahabad high court had, on May 10, 1956, ruled that “the Dramatic Performances Act is ultra vires of the Constitution of India because its procedural part imposes such restrictions on the right of freedom of speech and expression which cannot be covered by the saving clause in Article 19(2).”
When the Modi government repealed the law in 2018, it was repealing a law that had been declared unconstitutional more than 60 years ago.
History of protests against DPA
“I have nothing to say to the government of that time. I am more surprised why the ‘Lutyens’ Jamaat’ and the ‘Khan Market Gang’ have been silent on such a law for 75 years. Those who visit courts every now and then and people who are the thekedar (contractors) of PILs, why are they silent? Liberty did not come to their mind back then,” Modi said during his speech.
It is untrue that the Dramatic Performances Act did not receive flak from concerned citizens.
In 1989, the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) launched a campaign against the Act which later grew into the first All India Street Theatre Festival, Chauraha, in September 1989. In an essay written by theatre practitioner Rati Bartholomew for the festival, she documented the various protests against DPA and its use in similar state-specific acts.
In her essay, ‘On the Dramatic Performances Act: Censorship in Theatre’, Bartholomew wrote:
It would have been assumed that after independence, many of the oppressive laws created by the British to protect their Raj would be abolished. The DPA was created to suppress “a growing national stage and its political repertoire”. Despite the provisions of the fundamental rights of a citizen. This “fearful engine of oppression” continues to this day. Except for changing the term ‘provincial’ to ‘State’, the DPA continued as it was till about the mid-fifties. Thereafter, the majority of states repealed the central act and introduced various state DPAs with some amendments largely within the original framework.
Bartholomew also mentioned how efforts to repeal the Act went back decades. In 1972, Rajya Sabha member and renowned Urdu playwright Habib Tanvir moved a private member’s Bill to repeal DPA. The Bill never came up for debate during his term. Subsequently, the ‘March group’ in Delhi protested against the entertainment tax and DPA in 1974. “Madhu Limaye, joining the fray, suggested an amended Act, on the plea that total abolition would not be acceptable to the government. Predictably nothing happened,” she wrote.
The essay said:
“Though there has been the possibility of judicial recourse, lPTA, since the early fifties, rightly urged concerted action by theatre workers for immediate withdrawal of the Act. Only In West Bengal did the struggle take proper shape. The united protest by theatre workers and artists forced the state government to drop the proposed state bill in 1962-63. Consequently, there is no Dramatic Performances Bill in West Bengal.”
Bartholomew also researched DPA for Anamika Haksar’s Raj Darpan, a production on the Act performed with students of the National School of Drama in 1994 and then later at NSD Repertory Company.
Other colonial laws and suppression of dissent under Modi
Why any concerned citizen would approach the courts to petition against a law that fell into disuse after the Allahabad high court judgement is anyone’s guess. But many have moved the courts to challenge the provision of sedition – a colonial-era law that is still in use.
Not only has the sedition law been retained in the BNS, which replaced the Indian Penal Code last year, its provisions have been expanded, albeit under a different name. The new provision, which mirrors the sedition law, has been criticised for being vague, criminalising dissent and lowering the threshold of harm.
As far as championing freedom of expression is concerned, which Modi appears to do while claiming credit for repealing DPA, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government’s track record is far from stellar.
Press freedom in the last decade has deteriorated drastically under the Modi government, with India ranking 159 on the 2024 World Press Freedom Index released by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). While it had moved up two spots on the index compared to 2023, RSF clarified that this was because press freedom in other countries worsened. India “was pushed up two places despite recently adopting more draconian laws. Its new position is still unworthy of a democracy,” the report had noted.
Only a fortnight ago, his government blocked Vikatan’s website after it published a cartoon featuring Modi and US President Donald Trump.
The Tamil media group’s website was inaccessible hours after the BJP’s Tamil Nadu unit complained about the cartoon, which showed Modi sitting shackled next to Trump. The final order confirming the block was only given to the website 10 days later.
The move drew widespread criticism from political parties as well as journalists’ bodies, who were quick to highlight the Modi government’s fascist tendencies and free hand with censorship.
The Modi government has also faced significant backlash over its 2023 amendments to IT rules, 2021, that were stayed by the Bombay and Madras high courts.
The amendments allowed the Union government to establish fact check units to identify “fake and false” information circulating on social media platforms. Calling the rules “vague” and failing the test of “proportionality”, the Bombay high court had declared the amendments unconstitutional last year. A subsequent Madras high court judgment had said that the Bombay high court’s ruling – which found the amendments violative of sections Articles 14, 19, and 21 – would apply all over the country.
