words per minute
22
510SWATI
00:00
Speed
The impugned legislation, ss. 5, 6 and 10 especially, must be tested even under Art. 21 on canons of processual justice to the people outlined above. Hearing is obligatorymeaningful hearing, flexible and realistic, according to circumstances, but hot ritualistic and wooden. In exceptional cases and emergency situations, interim measures may be taken, to avoid the mischief of the passportee becoming an escapee before the hearing begins. 'Bolt the stables after the horse has been stolen' is not a command of 'natural justice. But soon after the provisional seizure, a reasonable hearing must follow, to minimise procedural prejudice. And when a prompt final order is made against the applicant or passport holder the reasons must be disclosed to him almost invariably save in those dangerous cases where irreparable injury will ensue to the State. A government which reveals in secrecy in the field of people's liberty not only acts against democratic decency but busies itself with its own burial. That is the writing on the wall if history were teacher, memory our mentor and decline of liberty not our unwitting endeavour. Public power must rarely hide its heart in an open society and system.
728 I now skip Art.14 since I agree fully with all that my learned brother Bhagwati J.has said. That article has a Pervasive processual potency and versatilequality, egalitarian in its soul and allergic to discriminatory diktats.Equality is the, antithesis of arbitrariness and excathedra ipse dixit is the ally of demagogic authoritarianism. Only knight-errants of 'executive excesses'-if we may use a current cliche-can fall in love with the Dame, of despotism, legislative or administrative.
If this Court gives in here it gives up the ghost. And so it that I insist on the dynamics of limitations on fundamental freedoms as implying the rule of law; Be you, ever so high, the law is above you.' A minor pebble was thrown to produce a little ripple. It was feebly suggested that the right to travel abroad cannot be guaranteed by the State because it has no extraterritorial jurisdiction in foreign lands. This is a naive misconception of the point pressed before us. Nobody contends that India should interfere with other countries and their sovereignty to ensure free movement of Indians in those countries. What is meant is that the Government of India should not prevent by any sanctions it has over its citizens from moving within any other country if that other country has no objection to their travelling within its territory. It is difficult to understand how one can misunderstand the obvious.
A thorny problem debated recurrently at the bar, turning on Art. 19, demands some juristic response although avoidance of overlap per- suades me to drop all other questions canvassed before us. The Gopalan (supra) verdict, with the cocooning of Art. 22 into a self contained code, has suffered supersession at the hands of R. C. Cooper(1). By way of aside, the fluctuating fortunes of fundamental rights, when the proletarist and the proprietariat have asserted them in Court, partially