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The Karnataka Cabinet is likely to discuss four crucial draft bills—including one against hate speech and another on crowd control—during the next Cabinet meeting next week.
Briefing the press after the cabinet meeting on Thursday, June 19, Law and Parliamentary Affairs Minister HK Patil said that the four draft bills were placed before the Cabinet, and the discussion on the draft bills would take place during the next Cabinet meeting, next week. These include the Karnataka Crowd Control (Managing Crowd at Events and Venues of Mass Gathering) Bill, the Karnataka Rohith Vemula Bill 2025, the Karnataka Hate Speech and Prevention of Hate Crime Bill, and the Karnataka Misinformation and Fake News Prohibition Bill.
The first murmurs of a law against hate speech were made in the last couple of weeks. Health and Family Welfare Minister Dinesh Gundu Rao said that the government was considering such a law, as many people booked for hate speech under existing laws obtained bail easily.
The move comes amid communal tension that rose in the coastal Dakshina Kannada and Udupi districts after the mob lynching of a Muslim man named Ashraf on April 27.
The law on crowd management comes weeks after 11 people died in a stampede outside Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru. The state government came under severe pressure for the manner in which the event was held. Although the state government suspended the Bengaluru Police Commissioner B Dayananda and sacked his own political secretary K Govindaraj, it has not been able to shake off the impression that there were lapses on the part of the government, too.
The Karnataka government had experimented with fact-checking and combating fake news when it set up the Information Disorder Tackling Unit during the Lok Sabha elections last year. Since then, there has been talk of drafting a law to combat fake news and misinformation.
