The Emergency of 1975-77 and the long shadow it casts today
Published on: 25 June 2022, 01:04 pm
Perhaps the legal community would care to demonstrate how they make the fine distinction between an Emergency regime that subverts the Constitution and suspends fundamental rights, and other regimes that do likewise in a society that is bereft of due process of law and is yet considered an electoral democracy, however tawdry.
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WRITING in 2013, Justice Rajinder Sachar, former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court asked the question as to whether the Emergency would have collapsed if the Supreme Court had decided the ADM Jabalpur case of 1976 differently. The court had failed to show spine and follow well-established law that in cases of habeas corpus, every imprisonment is prima facie unlawful and that it is for a person directing imprisonment to justify the act.
The Union Government held that Article 21 was the sole repository of liberty and that as the right to move for enforcement of that right had been suspended by the Presidential Order of June 27, 1975, such petitions were liable to be dismissed in limine. This objection having been overruled by nine High Courts, the appeal was heard by a five-judge constitution bench at the Supreme Court.