Is Indian sedition law colonial? J. F. Stephen and the jurisprudence on free speech

This article critically evaluates the characterisation of sedition law as colonial by analysing the arguments made by J. F. Stephen in opposing such a claim. While Stephen obfuscated the close links between the sedition law and the requirements of colonial governance, he made a persuasive case for how the sedition law was completely consistent with British ideas of liberty, utility, and the rule of law. Stephen’s arguments about legitimate limits to political liberties, particularly his critique of J. S. Mill in this regard, offer us an opportunity to question the presumed antithesis between colonial and metropolitan jurisprudence and trace their shared origins in British political thought. To that end, with Stephen as an interlocutor, this article critically analyses themes such as the defence of empire, colonialism, and the idea of improvement within a wider set of writings by British political philosophers, to arrive at an alternative understanding of British political liberalism. My article concludes that rather than ‘colonial difference’, the constitutive relation between sedition law and liberal jurisprudence better explains the prevalence of similar authoritarian laws within democratic regimes across the globe.