Wrong map? You’re being seditious!

Cartographers of India, beware! One mistake and the government might assume that your maps are promoting disaffection towards the state.

In case you’re wondering how the seemingly harmless act of map making can lead to a charge of sedition, the Madhya Pradesh (MP) government has an unpleasant surprise for you. The owner and principal of Green Bells Public School in Burhar town (Shahdol district) of eastern MP, Mohammad Sharif and Govind Charan Das, were arrested by the police after receiving a complaint that the school’s diary contained a map of India which excluded parts of Jammu and Kashmir. In addition, A. K. Agrawal, who owns the press that printed the diary, has also been taken into custody.The matter was brought before the police thanks to Srikrishna Gupta, chief of Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha’s (BJYM) Burhar division. BJYM is the youth wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is in power in the state under the leadership of Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan.

While the police have said that Sharif has admitted that the truncated map was printed by mistake, the trio’s bail applications were rejected by the court and they have been remanded to judicial custody for 14 days. What kind of malicious intent the MP government is assuming the three had for printing the wrong map is a mystery. But it hasn’t stopped the state government from slapping two other charges in addition to sedition – section 153-B (imputations and assertions prejudicial to national integration) and section 34 (crime with a common intent) on the three arrested persons.

In the backdrop of the state government’s heavy handed response to what appears to be an error, is the current unrest in Kashmir. The MP government’s actions can be seen as a brazen attempt to establish that territorially, Kashmir belongs to India, no matter what Kashmiris may think about their right to self-determination.