Public nuisance is the quiet workhorse of routine policing — it captures the obstructed footpath, the defaced wall, the menacing anonymous call and the late-night din that no graver penal provision quite fits. Within the Kerala Police Act, 2011, this terrain sits in Chapter VIII. A point of caution that aspirants must internalise at once: in the 2011 Act, Section 119 is titled "Punishment for atrocities against women," while the omnibus nuisance-and-public-order provision is Section 120. The numbering is frequently misremembered, so this note grounds every proposition in the bare text and the controlling case law, and treats both sections as the statutory home of "public nuisance."
The statutory scheme: where nuisance lives in Chapter VIII
Chapter VIII of the Kerala Police Act, 2011 collects the substantive offences and penalties that empower ordinary policing of public space. Sections 116 to 119 punish discrete wrongs — obstructing police, false alarms, and atrocities against women — while Section 120 is the broad, clause-based provision headed "Penalty for causing nuisance and violation of public order." It is Section 120, not Section 119, that an aspirant should reach for when the fact pattern is a generic public nuisance: an obstructed thoroughfare, a fouled water source, a defaced building, or a pestering caller. The drafting technique is deliberate: rather than a single open-textured offence (which courts have repeatedly distrusted for vagueness), the legislature enumerated specific clauses (a) through (o), each describing a concrete species of nuisance with a common penalty. This enumeration is what keeps the provision constitutionally durable, as the contrast with the struck-down cyber clause makes plain. To place this within the wider duties and functions of the police, the prevention and abatement of public nuisance is squarely a preventive-policing function, complementing the parallel powers under the Code of Criminal Procedure.
Section 119: atrocities against women, not generic nuisance
Because the topic slug carries the figure "119," the first analytical duty is to read the section as it actually stands. Section 119 is headed "Punishment for atrocities against women." Sub-section (1) penalises any person who, in a public place, performs sexual gestures or acts degrading the dignity of women, or who takes photographs or records videos or propagates them in a manner affecting the reasonable privacy of women; the punishment is imprisonment up to three years or fine up to ten thousand rupees, or both. Sub-section (2) fixes a smaller fine, up to one thousand rupees, on a service provider or person in charge of a public place who fails to take reasonable steps to prevent such acts or to inform the authorities. The Kerala High Court (per Badharudeen, J.) has held that the alleged "sexual gestures" must be discernible from the FIR, final report, or other materials before a prosecution under Section 119(1)(a) can stand — a vague averment will be quashed. Conceptually this is a dignity-and-privacy offence committed in public space; it overlaps with the idea of nuisance only insofar as it polices conduct in public, but it is a distinct, gender-specific wrong, not the Act's general nuisance clause.
Section 120: anatomy of the general nuisance provision
Section 120 — "Penalty for causing nuisance and violation of public order" — is the true public-nuisance section. It is structured as a long list of clauses describing acts that, on conviction, attract the prescribed penalty. The enumerated wrongs span the everyday: among them, causing a vehicle or conveyance to remain in a manner that obstructs, inconveniences or endangers the public (clause (b)); defacing walls, buildings or other structures without the custodian's permission (clause (d)); fouling water sources; trespassing on government property; operating non-motorised vehicles at night without proper lighting; and the much-litigated clause (o). The common thread is that each act disturbs the comfortable enjoyment of public space or breaches public order without necessarily rising to a grave offence under the penal code. The penalty for the communication-nuisance limb (clause (o)) is imprisonment up to one year or fine up to five thousand rupees, or both. The provision thus operates as a fine-grained ladder of minor public-order offences, which is why constables and station-house officers invoke it so frequently — and why the courts have had to police its outer limits. Conceptually, the clauses fall into recognisable families: traffic and movement nuisances (obstructing vehicles, unlit night conveyances), environmental and property nuisances (fouling water, defacing structures, trespass on government land), and communication nuisances (clause (o)). This taxonomy helps an aspirant predict which clause a fact pattern engages, because the Act does not create a single elastic offence of "nuisance" but rather a closed list, each limb of which must be pleaded and proved on its own terms. A complaint that gestures generally at "public nuisance" without identifying the specific clause is therefore vulnerable, mirroring the rigour the courts have applied to clause (o).
Clause (o): communication nuisance and its ingredients
Section 120(o) is the most contested clause and the one most likely to surface in an exam. It punishes a person causing, through any means of communication, a nuisance of himself to any person by repeated or undesirable or anonymous call, letter, writing, message, e-mail or through a messenger. The ingredients, distilled by the High Court, are threefold: (i) a person causes a nuisance of himself to another; (ii) the nuisance is caused through some means of communication; and (iii) it is done by a repeated, undesirable or anonymous call, letter, writing, message, e-mail, or via a messenger. The phrase "nuisance of himself" is important — the gravamen is the persistent or anonymous imposition of one's communications on an unwilling recipient, not the content's defamatory or insulting quality. This distinction is what separates a sustainable 120(o) prosecution from one that collapses into vagueness, and it is the fault line along which the leading authorities divide.
FR Geevargese John: a Facebook post is not automatically 120(o)
In FR Geevargese John v. State of Kerala (Kerala High Court, 2023; per Kunhikrishnan, J.), the Court confronted a complaint alleging that posting a manipulated photograph on Facebook attracted Section 120(o). It held that a Facebook post would not be construed as an offence under Section 120(o) unless it causes nuisance and violation of public order — "causing nuisance and violation of public order" being an essential ingredient that must be made out, not presumed. Merely posting defamatory or manipulated content on social media, without satisfying the statutory ingredients, does not attract the clause; the appropriate remedy for defamation lies elsewhere. The complaint was accordingly quashed. The ruling is a textbook application of the principle that a minor public-order offence cannot be stretched to cover every objectionable online expression, and it harmonises the clause with constitutional free-speech values.
James Jose: abusive phone calls and the boundary with the penal code
James Jose v. State of Kerala (Kerala High Court, 17 May 2019) arose from a caller hurling abuse at a police officer over the telephone, prosecuted under Sections 294(b) and 506(1) of the Indian Penal Code together with Section 120(o) of the Kerala Police Act. The Court's analysis is instructive on the dividing line between provisions: abusive words over the phone, however offensive, do not amount to the offence of obscenity under Section 294(b) IPC, which requires obscenity in or near a public place in a manner annoying others. The case illustrates how 120(o) is invoked alongside penal provisions for telephonic harassment, and how courts insist on a clause-specific analysis — a charge cannot be sustained merely because conduct is rude. Read together, James Jose and Geevargese John establish that 120(o) requires proof of genuine nuisance through the specified channels, not a generalised grievance about another's speech.
The cautionary tale: Section 118(d) and Shreya Singhal
No discussion of nuisance under this Act is complete without Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, AIR 2015 SC 1523, (2015) 5 SCC 1 (decided 24 March 2015). Alongside striking down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, the Supreme Court invalidated Section 118(d) of the Kerala Police Act — which had punished, with up to three years' imprisonment, "causing annoyance to any person in an indecent manner by statements or verbal or comments or telephone calls or calls of any type or by chasing or sending messages or mails by any means." The Court held that 118(d) suffered from the very same vagueness and over-breadth that doomed Section 66A: "causing annoyance in an indecent manner" gave no ascertainable standard, chilled protected speech, and was not saved by Article 19(2). It was therefore declared violative of Article 19(1)(a) and unconstitutional. This is why the surviving Section 120 is drafted as enumerated, concrete clauses rather than an open-ended "annoyance" offence — the legislature learned the constitutional lesson the hard way. The reasoning in Shreya Singhal is worth carrying forward in full: the Court distinguished discussion, advocacy and incitement, holding that only the last may be restricted, and it stressed that a statute which fails to define the prohibited conduct with reasonable certainty hands arbitrary power to enforcement agencies and chills constitutionally protected expression. Applied to 118(d), the words "annoyance" and "indecent manner" supplied no such certainty. The judgment is doubly important for this topic because it is the sole instance in which the Supreme Court has struck down a substantive provision of the Kerala Police Act, making it the constitutional benchmark against which every nuisance-of-speech clause in the Act must now be measured.
Section 118A: the ordinance that was repealed
The constitutional saga continued in 2020. By the Kerala Police (Amendment) Ordinance, 2020 (21 November 2020), the State inserted Section 118A, making the production, expression, publication or dissemination of any matter "threatening, abusing, humiliating or defaming" any person through any means of communication punishable with imprisonment up to three years and/or fine up to ten thousand rupees. Critics — including digital-rights organisations and the Bar — immediately argued that 118A revived precisely the vice condemned in Shreya Singhal, importing the discredited vocabulary of "annoyance" and "defamation" into a vague, cognizable offence. Amid sustained criticism, the Chief Minister announced that 118A would not be implemented, and the Government moved to repeal it. The episode reinforces the doctrinal point: a nuisance or public-order offence touching speech must be narrowly and concretely drawn, or it will not survive Article 19 scrutiny. For aspirants, 118(d) and 118A together form a compact case study in over-breadth and the limits of nuisance legislation.
Procedure: cognizability, investigation and the magistrate's permission
Classification matters because it dictates how the offence enters the criminal process. Offences under Section 120(o) are non-cognizable, which means a police officer cannot investigate them without the order of a magistrate under Section 155(2) of the Code of Criminal Procedure. This procedural gate is a meaningful check: it prevents the clause from being weaponised for arrest-first policing of mere communications. By contrast, the Act's cognizability schedule treats the graver offences differently, and Section 119 (atrocities against women) sits among the offences the Act earmarks for cognizable treatment. The practical lesson for the exercise of police powers of detention, search and investigation is that the label on the offence — cognizable or non-cognizable, bailable or not — governs whether an officer may act suo motu or must first obtain judicial sanction.
Overlap with the penal code and the CrPC nuisance powers
Public nuisance under the Kerala Police Act does not occupy the field alone. The Indian Penal Code (now the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023) contains its own definition of public nuisance and a chapter of offences affecting public health, safety, convenience and decency, while Section 133 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (now the corresponding Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita provision) empowers an Executive Magistrate to make conditional orders for the removal of public nuisances. The Kerala provisions are thus supplementary: they give the State police a quick, fine-based tool for minor, localised disturbances, leaving graver or structural nuisances to the penal code and the magistracy. As James Jose shows, the same conduct may be charged under both the special Act and the penal code, but each charge must independently satisfy its own ingredients. This layered architecture — special-Act clause, penal-code offence, and magisterial abatement order — is the complete picture an examiner expects.
Exam takeaways and common traps
For the judiciary and CLAT-PG aspirant, the high-yield points are sharp. First, get the numbering right: in the 2011 Act, Section 119 punishes atrocities against women and Section 120 is the general nuisance-and-public-order clause — a favourite trap. Second, master the three ingredients of Section 120(o) and remember that nuisance plus violation of public order is essential, per FR Geevargese John v. State of Kerala. Third, Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) struck down Section 118(d) for vagueness and over-breadth under Article 19(1)(a), and Section 118A (2020) was repealed for the same vice — the constitutional thread is over-breadth. Fourth, note that 120(o) is non-cognizable, requiring a magistrate's permission under Section 155(2) CrPC to investigate. To consolidate, revisit the introduction to the Act for context on its objects and the broader scheme of policing it establishes.
Frequently asked questions
Does Section 119 of the Kerala Police Act deal with public nuisance?
No. Section 119 is headed "Punishment for atrocities against women" and penalises sexual gestures in public and the filming or propagation of images affecting women's privacy. The general public-nuisance provision is Section 120, "Penalty for causing nuisance and violation of public order." The numbering is commonly confused.
What are the ingredients of an offence under Section 120(o)?
Three: (i) a person causes a nuisance of himself to another; (ii) through some means of communication; (iii) by a repeated, undesirable or anonymous call, letter, writing, message, e-mail, or messenger. The Kerala High Court has stressed that nuisance plus violation of public order must actually be made out.
Can a Facebook post be prosecuted under Section 120(o)?
Only if it causes nuisance and violation of public order. In FR Geevargese John v. State of Kerala (2023), the Kerala High Court held that merely posting a manipulated or defamatory photograph on Facebook does not attract Section 120(o) without satisfying these essential ingredients, and quashed the complaint.
Why was Section 118(d) of the Kerala Police Act struck down?
In Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, AIR 2015 SC 1523, (2015) 5 SCC 1, the Supreme Court held that Section 118(d) — punishing "causing annoyance in an indecent manner" — suffered the same vagueness and over-breadth as Section 66A of the IT Act, violated Article 19(1)(a), and was not saved by Article 19(2).
Is an offence under Section 120(o) cognizable?
No, it is non-cognizable. A police officer therefore cannot investigate it without an order of a magistrate under Section 155(2) of the Code of Criminal Procedure. This procedural safeguard prevents the clause from being misused for arrest-first policing of mere communications.
What happened to Section 118A introduced in 2020?
Section 118A, inserted by an Ordinance on 21 November 2020 to punish threatening, abusive, humiliating or defamatory communications with up to three years' imprisonment, was widely criticised as reviving the vice condemned in Shreya Singhal. The Government announced it would not be implemented and moved to repeal it.