Freedom of speech, only on paper?

IMG SRC

     
Recent arrests in our country relating to posts on facebook has left me baffled, confused and angry . A 21 yr old girl was arrested from the small town of Palghar, Mumbai for a post questioning the citywide shutdown to mark the death of a political leader and her friend was arrested merely for 'liking' her status. The two women faced charges  under the very controversial section 66A of Information Technology act 2008. Even though the charges were dropped because of the huge uproar it caused amongst the general masses and the cyber world , it still doesn't justify keeping the girls in jail until they apologized.
The question is valid why should one person's death affect an entire city? Is one person's death more important than the entire city's productiveness ?

Section 66A allows for "punishment for sending offensive messages through communication service", which include messages that cause annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred and even ill will. This very loosely defined law can be misinterpreted and has led to multiple arrests all around the country in the past year. These arrests include Air india crew members Mayank Mohan Sharma and KVJ Rao who were arrested in may this year for material they shared on facebook. The two are alleged to have shared sexual and vulgar jokes about politicians, made deprecatory remarks about the prime minister. They spent 12 days in prison and were suspended by Air India, the content was easily available on the net, they simply shared it, did not create it.

It does make one wonder how vocal can we truly be, how many times do we have to think before posting a tweet or updating our facebook status.
 In another instance anti corruption cartoonist Aseem Trivedi  from lucknow was arrested on sedition charges. He is alleged to have displayed cartoons mocking the indian constitution during an anti corruption protest led by Anna Hazare. It is somewhat funny i think that we call ourselves the largest democracy and here a person is jailed for expressing his views ! What wrong did he really do ? A government soaked neck deep in corruption shouldn't be the one on the offensive, should they ?