Examine the risks of using broadly-defined public-order offences as instruments of state control, with reference to historical and contemporary examples.

Public-order offences framed in open-ended language — "hooliganism", "sedition", "subversive activities" — hand the executive a discretion that long outlives the disorder they were meant to curb. Their central risk is the quiet conversion of ordinary policing into political control.

Why vagueness becomes a tool of control

• Definition shifts from legislature to constable: in Shreya Singhal (2015) the Supreme Court struck down Section 66A, IT Act as "open-ended, vague and undefined", holding it disproportionate under Article 19(2) [2].
• Chilling effect: the Court expressly recognised that imprecise wording deters lawful speech even without conviction [2].
• Process as punishment: prolonged investigation, arrest and trial impose costs regardless of outcome — which is why the Supreme Court kept Section 124A IPC in abeyance in 2022 pending review [5].
• Reform can re-enact vagueness: BNS Section 152 penalises "subversive activities" without defining the term, broadening the acts that may be treated as threatening unity and integrity [3].

Historical evidence

• Soviet Russia, 1926: a dispatch from Riga reported hooliganism making streets unsafe after dark in Moscow and Leningrad, with the Commissar of Interior proposing capital punishment for the worst offenders, citing Ukraine's precedent — a catch-all offence meeting a summary penalty [1].
• Weak formal capacity pushed workmen's clubs to form unofficial self-protection bodies, showing how such laws coexist with, rather than replace, vigilantism [1].

Safeguards that narrow the risk

• Judicially reading offences down to incitement to imminent violence; the 279th Law Commission Report (2023), while retaining sedition, urged explicit procedural safeguards against misuse [4].
• Statutory definition of loose terms, sanction before FIR, and time-bound judicial review.

Vague public-order law is attractive precisely because it is elastic, and dangerous for the same reason: it converts dissent into disorder by definition. The remedy is not fewer public-order powers but sharper ones — narrowly defined offences, tested against the proportionality standard, so that Article 19 freedoms and genuine security needs advance together.