Thirty-four years after the country's highest court approved of the suspension of fundamental rights during the Emergency, it has admitted that it had committed an injustice on the people of the country.
Thirty-four years after the Supreme Court approved of the suspension of fundamental rights in the name of the Emergency, it has admitted that it had committed an injustice on the people of the country.
Then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had advised President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed in June 1975 to declare a state of emergency under Article 352 of the Constitution.
The period witnessed large-scale detention of political opponents under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA).
Despite support from the Madhya Pradesh high court for habeas corpus in the case of additional district magistrate (ADM), Jabalpur, versus Shivakant Shukla, Chief Justice YV Chandrachud had gone along with Justice AN Ray, Justice PN Bhagwati and Justice MH Beg in a 4-1 verdict to reject such petitions on April 28, 1976.
The only dissenting opinion was that of Justice HR Khanna.
“The verdict of the five-member bench upholding the suspension of fundamental rights was erroneous,” said a bench of justice Aftab Alam and justice Asok Kumar Ganguly while commuting to life imprisonment the death sentence, earlier upheld by it, of a man who murdered four members of a family.
The bench said Justice Khanna rightly gave a dissenting judgment by holding that “under clause (8) Article 226 under which the high courts can issue writs of habeas corpus is an integral part of the Constitution. No power has been conferred upon any authority in the Constitution for suspending the power of the high court to issue writs in the nature of habeas corpus during the period of emergency.”
There is no doubt that the majority judgment of this court in the ADM Jabalpur case violated the fundamental rights of a large number of people in this country, Justice Ganguly observed.
The judge was setting aside his own verdict of May 5, 2009, along with Justice Arijt Pasayat, now retired, wherein the apex court had upheld the death sentence of Remdeo Chauhan alias Rajnath Chauhan who murdered Bhabani Charan Das and three members of his family on March 8, 1992.
“The instances of this court’s judgment violating the human rights of the citizens may be extremely rare, but it cannot be said that such a situation can never happen," the bench said.
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