Supreme Court holds abuse is uncivil, but not obscene

“Use of mere swear words, profanities and vulgar expletives, however distasteful or uncivil they may be, cannot be equated with obscenity… Words which are merely vulgar or abusive may evoke a feeling of disgust, revulsion or shock, but that by itself does not make them obscene in law,” the court said.

The judgment by a Bench headed by Justice Sanjay Karol came in a land dispute case between neighbours in Tamil Nadu. During an altercation in 2017, one of them repeatedly flung the four-letter abuse, along with its various appendages, at another. The question before the Supreme Court was whether the user could be booked under Section 294(b) of the Indian Penal Code (obscene acts and songs).

Justice Karol turned to dictionaries — Collins and Cambridge — to explore the definitions of words such as ‘abusive’ and ‘vulgar’ in his judgment.

The judge observed that the lexicon described ‘abusive’ as language which was ‘extremely rude and insulting’ while ‘vulgar’ was meant to be words which were ‘rude and likely to upset or anger people, especially by referring to sex and the body in an unpleasant way’.

The court said that to qualify as ‘obscenity’ would require passing the ‘community standards test’. That is, the terms used must be lascivious, should appeal to the prurient interests of people, and provoke a tendency to deprave and corrupt the persons who are likely to see, hear, or read them. The court found nothing on record to show that the appellants’ verbal outrage passed the test.

Besides, the obscene words ought to have really annoyed others.

In the current case, Justice Karol said the choice of words and slang used by the now 70-year-old alleged abuser over 10 years ago were “at best, abusive or vulgar in nature” and did not reach the ‘obscenity threshold’.

A Constitution Bench in Ranjit D. Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra had explained that obscenity was something which could deprave and corrupt susceptible minds. “It is quite certain that it would suggest to the minds of the young of either sex, or even to persons of more advanced years, thoughts of a most impure and libidinous character,” the court had noted.

In Chandrakant Kalyandas Kakodkar versus State of Maharashtra, the court had held that the concept of obscenity differed from country to country, depending on the standards of morality of contemporary society. Quoting this judgment, Justice Karol said other factors such as place, customs, traditions, and social background also mattered in deciding what was obscene.

The court distinguished between vulgarity and obscenity. Vulgarity aroused a feeling of disgust, revulsion, and boredom but did not deprave, debase, and corrupt the morals as obscenity did.