Indian Polity Quiz: Internal Security Laws: UAPA, AFSPA, NSA and the NIA

The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act was passed by Parliament in 1967 on the recommendation of the National Integration Council, to provide for the banning of unlawful associations and for punishing activity directed against the sovereignty and integrity of India.

Until then the UAPA allowed the Government to notify only an organisation as a terrorist organisation; the UAPA (Amendment) Act, 2019 added the power to notify an individual as a terrorist and to enter that name in the Fourth Schedule of the Act.

Section 3 of AFSPA empowers the Governor of a State, the administrator of a Union Territory or the Central Government to declare the whole or a part of a State or Union Territory to be a disturbed area, and that declaration is the condition on which every other power in…

Section 6 of AFSPA provides that no prosecution, suit or other legal proceeding shall be instituted against any person in respect of anything done in exercise of the powers conferred by the Act, except with the previous sanction of the Central Government.

The National Security Act, 1980 permits preventive detention for a maximum of twelve months from the date of detention, though the detaining authority may order a shorter period and extend it within that ceiling.

Article 22(4) says that no law providing for preventive detention shall authorise detention for longer than three months unless an Advisory Board, consisting of persons qualified to be judges of a High Court, has reported before the expiry of that period that there is sufficient cause for the detention.

The National Investigation Agency Act was passed in the weeks following the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, which had exposed the absence of a central agency able to take over a terror case on its own, since police and public order are State subjects.

The committee headed by Justice B. P. Jeevan Reddy, appointed in 2004 to review AFSPA, reported in 2005 that the Act should be repealed and that the powers genuinely needed should instead be written into the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

The Prevention of Terrorism Act was enacted in 2002 and repealed in 2004, and the amendment of the UAPA made in the same year carried its definitions of terrorist act and terrorist organisation into that older Act, which is why the UAPA is today the principal anti-terror law.

When the Central Government declares an association unlawful under the UAPA, the notification does not stand on the Government's word alone: it must be referred to a Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Tribunal constituted of one person who is a sitting judge of a High Court, and the Tribunal decides within six…