by
Shobha Aggarwal
This article is based on a research study conducted by
the writer towards the end of the last century and later published in 2005 by
the PIL Watch Group as a citizen’s report titled “The
Public Interest Litigation Hoax – Truth Before the Nation: A Citizen’s Report
on How PIL Fails to Provide Justice to Those Who Need It Most.” The report
was widely circulated among lawyers, judges, NGOs, and social activists
regularly engaged in filing PILs. We still await a critique of our document.
We drew encouragement from Manu Kothari and Lopa
Mehta’s campaign critiquing the mainstream management of cancer globally. These
professors later wrote that no one in the establishment could challenge their
viewpoint. Similarly, when Ivan Illich wrote Medical
Nemesis, he was called iconoclastic; today, the medical
establishment acknowledges the value of his critique on the limits of medicine.
While campaigning with the Report, some organizations
privately conceded that they filed PILs even though Supreme Court orders rarely
reached victims to provide relief. A number of international publications have
cited the Report, less often by the homebred academic journals. [A list of these
publications will follow soon.] A section of the national press covered it when
it was released at the Press Club of India. Freelance journalists carried
half-page features on it. Late Mastram Kapoor, veteran socialist ideologue,
drew a parallel between Ram Manohar Lohia’s efforts to file cases for the poor
and the original purpose of the earliest PILs. Ram Avtar Shastri, a syndicated
journalist, covered it on the front page of Punjab
Kesari, and the article was widely reproduced in the
vernacular press.
We even dared to present our Report to those who had
made a business out of PILs. Copies were kept at the Central News Agency, and
we were surprised when an individual from Goa ordered 100 copies. Copies from a
left-leaning bookshop at the Constitution Club even reached the United States!
The Report was covered in Mainstream Weekly, Manushi, Free Press Journal, The Tribune,
Jansatta, Punjab Kesari, The Statesman, SACW, Frontier Weekly, Countercurrents.org
and The Telegraph. One of the first commendations we received was from
APDR, West Bengal. The study remains as relevant today – and stays as contested
till date – as when it was first published.
The idea of Public Interest Litigation was propagated
by a handful of Delhi-based Supreme Court lawyers and judges in the late 1970s
and early 1980s. In the half-century since its inception in India, PIL has
assumed pandemic proportions, spreading even to countries where Indian judicial
precedents carry weight. Though originally intended to provide judicial redress
to the poor, PIL has been hijacked to advance ideologically driven agendas.
Today, very few PILs are filed on behalf of the poor and needy.
Much judicial time in the Supreme Court and High
Courts is wasted on sprawling, inconclusive proceedings—for example, M.C.
Mehta’s mammoth petition on environmental pollution, pending in the Supreme
Court since 1985. Forty years on, Delhi’s air and water are more polluted today
than they were in 1985. As a result, adjudication of important constitutional
issues has taken a back seat.
In effect PILs have managed to depoliticize society
through subversion of people’s campaigns and movements. It has now become an
industry, often sustained by massive foreign funding. PILs flout basic
principles of natural justice and lack any sound legal foundation. Far from
being a tool of justice, PIL has become a genie that must be put back into the
bottle.
Abstract
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In Public Interest Litigation (PIL) cases hundreds of thousands of poor people
in India have been adversely affected to the extent of losing their livelihood,
homes and even Constitutional guaranties all in the name of ‘public interest’;
even though PIL in India derives its legitimacy as an instrument to provide
justice to the underprivileged and the downtrodden. Why have things come to
such a pass? The most important reason appears to be that in PILs the
principles of natural justice are not followed. For example in the case of
Delhi industries the Supreme Court (SC) thought nothing of taking away the
livelihood of around one million workers (and their families) without giving
them a hearing and displacing them from Delhi where they were rooted for two generations.
Where lower adjudicating authorities violate principles of natural justice the
affected can appeal to higher judicial bodies. But if the highest court in the
land violates principles of natural justice people have nowhere to turn to.
This study critically examines the PIL judgements of the Supreme Court of India
through the eighties and nineties in the light of principles of natural justice
and how they adversely affect the poor.
See the full article
at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QlLSNu84dL_uK1blxIaQ3MYyuEdg0lME/view?usp=sharing
