An Analysis Of The Pratapgadhi Judgement and its precedent
When a Rajya Sabha MP shared an Urdu poem on X, the Gujarat police saw incitement. however the Supreme Court saw poetry. But the more interesting story is not that the FIR was quashed — it is the standard the Court used to quash it. Resurrecting a 1947 pre-independence Nagpur High Court formulation, the Court held that speech must be judged through the eyes of a "reasonable, strong-minded, firm and courageous" person. This raises a question nobody has yet asked: who exactly is this person, and what work is this standard silently doing in India's free speech jurisprudence?
Imran Pratapgadhi, a sitting Rajya Sabha member, attended a mass wedding ceremony in Jamnagar, Gujarat on December 29, 2024. Post the ceremony, he uploaded a video on X with an Urdu poem "Ae khoon ke pyase baat suno", set in the background, dealing with an abstract sense of resistance, sacrifice and injustice. A private complainant filed a complaint on the ground that the poem was likely to incite communal discord and disharmony between different communities, following which the Jamnagar police filed an FIR under sections 196, 197(1), 299, 302, 57 and 3(5) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023.
Pratapgadhi sought quashing of the FIR before the Gujarat High Court, which dismissed his plea citing that the investigation was in its infancy, and a look at the public reaction to the post revealed the likely consequences in terms of potential communal disharmony. It added that, as an MP, Pratapgadhi should be more careful in his public pronouncements.
Dissatisfied, he appealed to the Supreme Court, which stayed further proceedings before ultimately allowing his appeal.
Speaking through Justice Abhay S.Oka, the SC held that the poem, prima facie, did not make out any offence as it had no religious or communal color to it, nor could it be deemed anti-national. The Court quashed the entire FIR, calling the registration a "mechanical exercise" and a "clear abuse of process of law". It also held that a mandatory preliminary enquiry, required to be made before registration of an FIR for speech offences under Section 173(3) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, was not done in the instant case. Beyond its procedural findings, the Court also developed a substantive test to measure the impact of potentially inciting speech that would arguably be the more significant outcome of the judgment.
In determining whether the poem attracted the offences under Sections 196, 197, 299 and 302 of the BNS, the Court did not merely read the poem and declare it harmless. It showed the lens through which such speech must always be evaluated. Borrowing from Justice Bose's formulation in *Bhagwati Charan Shukla v. Provincial Government, C.P. & Berar*. The Court held that speech must be judged by "the standards of reasonable, strong-minded, firm and courageous men, and not those of weak and vacillating minds, nor of those who scent danger in every hostile point of view." This standard, originally articulated by a Nagpur High Court bench, has now been endorsed by the Supreme Court across at least four decisions - most recently in Javed Ahmad Hajam v. State of Maharashtra (2024), which traced it through Manzar Sayeed Khan and Ramesh v. Union of India and its adoption in Pratapgadhi cements it as the operative test in India's free speech jurisprudence.
The standard deserves closer examination than it has received.
On its face, the "reasonable, strong-minded" formulation appears to be a descriptive test, a device to identify what the average, sensible person would make of a piece of speech. But a closer reading reveals that it is doing something more normative. The adjectives chosen are strong-minded, firm, courageous are not neutral descriptors of an average person. They describe an ideal person. The law is not asking what most people would feel upon encountering the poem; it is asking what a person of a certain moral and psychological character would feel. The distinction matters enormously.
Consider the contrast with the "reasonable man" standard in tort law. That standard, despite its own well-documented problems, at least attempts to approximate an ordinary person, someone neither exceptionally careful nor exceptionally reckless. The Bhagwati Charan Shukla standard makes no such claim to ordinariness. Its explicit counterpart is "weak and vacillating minds" and those who "scent danger in every hostile point of view" shows a description that would apply to a significant portion of any actual population, particularly in a country as diverse and as susceptible to communal tension as India. The standard, in other words, is created not to protect ordinary people but to protect an idealised citizen who is emotionally resilient, politically mature, and constitutionally literate.
This is not necessarily a criticism. There are strong reasons to prefer such a standard in a constitutional democracy. As the Court noted in *Shreya Singhal*, "liberty of thought and expression is a cardinal value that is of paramount significance under our constitutional scheme." A free speech standard calibrated to the most sensitive member of society would effectively permit the most thin-skinned complainant to veto public discourse. The Gujarat High Court's reasoning in this very case illustrates the danger; it looked at public reactions to the post and concluded that the potential for communal disharmony existed, essentially allowing mob sentiment to determine the limits of protected speech. The Supreme Court was right to reject this approach emphatically.
However, the standard as currently formulated carries its own unexamined tensions. The Court in *Pratapgadhi* applied it to exonerate the speaker - Pratapgadhi, from liability. But the standard speaks to the audience, not the speaker. It asks what a reasonable, strong-minded person in the audience would make of the speech. This creates an interesting dilemma: the speaker bears the risk of being judged against an idealised audience that may bear little resemblance to the actual audience of his speech. A poem posted on X in Jamnagar, Gujarat in December 2024 does not travel to a population of strong-minded, firm and courageous readers. It travels to an algorithmically curated feed, to users already focused by existing tensions, to a complainant who found it alarming enough to approach the police. The gap between the Court's imaginary audience and the poem's actual audience is not incidental — it is structurally baked into how social media operates.
This is not to suggest that the standard should be abandoned. It should not. The alternative is creating free speech protection to the most offendable person in the room — would be constitutionally catastrophic. But the Court's uncritical resurrection of a 1947 formulation into the social media age warrants at least an acknowledgment of this gap. The "reasonable, strong-minded" person was conceived in a world of newspapers and public speeches, where the reach of any given statement was geographically and temporally bounded. In an environment where a 46-second video clip can travel nationally within hours and be encountered by millions of people with vastly different political and communal contexts, the fictional audience the standard constructs becomes increasingly divorced from reality.
What *Pratapgadhi* ultimately demonstrates that India's free speech jurisprudence is stronger on outcomes than on reasoning. The Court reached the right result, that the FIR was an abuse of process, the poem was not incitement, and the Gujarat Police's conduct was constitutionally indefensible. Justice Oka's observation that even after 75 years of constitutional governance, the law enforcement machinery is "either ignorant or does not care" for Article 19(1)(a) is damning and accurate. The test that justified the outcome, borrowed unthinkingly from a pre-independence judgment, deserves far greater critical examination than has hitherto been offered in commentaries on this decision. *Pratapgadhi* answers the question before it cleanly, but the standard it relies upon quietly raises several more questions.
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