The Public Interest Litigation Hoax in India: its Adverse Impact on the Poor

 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 - 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