Bhopal Chandra Ghosh v. Arif Ali and Others

DWIVEDI, J. It is a petition for a writ in the nature of habeas corpus under Art. 32 of the Constitution. The petitioner alleges that he.is the acting President of the Council of the Displaced Bengalees hvmg in the State of Assam .. On April 2, 1973, the District Magistrate Sibasagar, Jorhat, in the said State, passed an order under s. 3(2) read withs. 3(1) (a)(ii) of the Maintenance of Internal Security Act, 1971 for detaining the petitioner in the Jorhat jail. Accordingly, he was so detained. On April 3, 1973 the District Magistrate served the grounds of detention on him. The State Government approved the order of detention.

The petition wa3 heard by us on October 30, 1973. After hearing counsel for the parties we were of opinion that the petition should be allowed. Accordingly, we passed an order directing the release of the petitioner. Th·o reasons in support of the order are now set forth in this judgrne11t.

The District Magistrate has detained the petitioner with a ·view to preventing him from acting in any manner prejudicial to "maintenance of public order." The sole argument before us is that some of the grounds served on him by the District Magistrate have got no rele-vance to public order. Grounds of detention are 16 in number. Some of the grounds do relate to public order, and it is not necessary to set them out here. We shall mention only such grounds as, in our opinion, have no relevance to public order. Those grounds are : ·

"(2) That he spoke ill of the State Government, and the

Assamese people in a camera meeting in the last part of March, 1961 held at the residence of Shri Hemen-dra Ki shore Roy, J'orhat. Then he was Secretary of the Refugee Association, Assam. · (3) That he issued a Press Statement on 6-12-1971 on

the Pak atrocities in East Pakistan (Bangla Desh) blaming General Yahaya Khan and the American Government. Another telegram was sent on 22-11-71 to Mr. Kenneth Keating, American Ambassador in India, to. stop mass killing in East Pakistan.

( 6) That he challenged the census operation in Assam

and stated that the figures of Assamese population were shown highly inflated at the cost of Bengalis.

(11) That he sent a telegram on 10-10-1972 to the Prime

Minister India on the language movement in Assam. ' The contents of the telegram were highly exaggerated and false.

( 12) That he sent another ex~erated telegram on

31-12-1972 to the Prime Mintster, India requesti?g her not to enter into any laJliuage settlemem w11h

Cachar leaders. He signed the telegram as the Coun-cil's actini: President."

Counsel for the respondent could not satisfy us as to how a11y one of these five grounds could have a rational connection with public order. Some of them may perhaJ?S have some connection with '"law and order". But it has been held m a series of decisions· of this Court that the concept of law and order is not identical with the concept of public order. Public order is an aggravated form of disturbance of public ,peace; It affects the general current of public life. In the result, five out of 16· grounds are not shown to have any rational relation with public order. In other words, one third of the grounds are irrelevant. The detention order is based on the subjective satisfaction of the de-taining authority. Accordingly we cannot assess how far these five grounds have swayed the mind of the District Magistrate and tilted his judgment against' the detenu. To the intertw.ining of relevant and irrelevant grounds of detention the rule of severalty would not apply, and the whole order of detention will fall down.

There is yet another aspect which we cannot overloo)<. As already stated, the detention order is passed in order to prevent tho petitioner from actin11 in any mann~r prejudicial to the maintenance of public order. Professedly, it is not made with a view to preventing hii:n from actin& prejudicially to the security of the State. But in . the grounds of detention, the District Ma&istrate specifically relies on 11ecurity ef State. He says : '-'the above prejudicial activities .......... and the sinister design of dislodging the present administration and hate Assamese campaign has, posed a serious threat to the se<:urity of the State and the maintenance of public order in the District of Siba· sagar." Grounds Nos. 4, 8, 9 and 16 are indeed connected with the security of the State.

A conjoint reading of the detention order. and the grounds of detenc !ion is suggestive of the inference that the District Magistrate had either no information of the grounds relevant to the security of the State at the tinte of the passing of the detention order, or that, if .he had information of those grounds, he did not believe them to be factually correct and accordingly did not bottom his . detention o~dcr on them. In the first event, he cannot now seel< to buttress bis deten· tion order by those grounds, because the detention order is made for the maintenance of public order only; in the second event also, t]\ose grounds should be totally ign0red. If he did not think it proper to rely on them while making the detention order, he cannot deploy them now as another string to the bow. There is difference between pub1ic order and security of the State. Every breach of public order will not necessarily affect the security of the State.

In Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia v. State of Bihar( 1) Hidayatullah J. has expressed this dit'lerence thus :

ff "One has to imagine three concentric circles. Law ·and

order represents the largest circle within whi.cb is the next ___:irclo representing public order and the smaliest circle re-

presents security of State. It is then· easy to see that an act may affect law and order but not public order just as an act .may affect public order but not security of the State." Turning to cases cited ·at .the Bar, The State of Bombay v. Atma Ram Sridhar Vaidya(') is distinguishable on facts. It is not conc.erned with the question, of relevancy of the grounds of detention. Jn Shib-ban Lal.Saxena v. The State of Uttar Pradesh(2) this Court observed :

"The detaining authority gave here two grounds for detaining the petitioner. We can neither decide whether '1 these grounds are good or bad, nor can we attempt to assess in what manner and to what extent each of these grounds operated on the mind of the appropriate authority and con· tributed to the creation of the satisfaetion on the basis of C" which the detention order . was made. To say that the · other ground, which still remains, is quite sufficient to sustain the order would be to substitute decision of the executive authority which is against the legislative . policy underlying the statute . .In such cases we think, the position would be the same as if one of these two growuls was irrelevant for the purposes of the Act or was wholly illusory and this would vitiate the detention order as a whole (emphasis added)."

The underlined observation fortiiies the view we are taking in this case.·

Jn Motilal Jain v. State of Bi/W(') the detenu was detained for the maintenance of supplies and services essential to the community. The detention order was based on six grounds. This Court held that two of the grounds could not be considered in judging the validity of the detention order. When asked by the Government to maintain the det·2ntion order on the basis of the four remaining grounds, the Court declined to. do so,. and said : .

' "The defects noticed ....•••. are sufficient to vitiate the · order of detention impugned in these proceedings as it is not possible to hold that those grounds could not have in-fluenced the decision of the .detaining authority."

It will follow from these observations that the detention order in ·the present case cannot be upheld on the basis of the remaining grounds, as we have taken thel view that five of the grounds served on the dctenu have got no rational connection with maintenance of public order.

In Pushkar Mukherjee v. The State of West Bengal(') Ramaswami J. said:

"But there is no doubt that if any of the grounds fur-nished io the detenu are found to be irrelevant. . . . . . the satisfaction of the detaining authority on which the order r of detention is based is open to challenge .and the· order is liable to be quashed."

(I} [1951] S.C.R. 167. · (2) [1954] $.C.R. 4tS at p. 422. (3) [1968] 3 S.C.R. 587 at p 593. · (4) [1969] 2 S.C.R. 635 at p>ge 641.

In Ananta Mll}chi @ Anania Hari v. State of West Be111al,(I) this Court held by majority-that the grounds of detention were relevant_ to the maintenance of public order and security of the State.

In Masood Alam v. Union of India,(') the detenu's argume,nt wu that the ·grounds of detention were itrelevant to the maintenance of public order and security of the State. But the Court did not accept the contention.

As a result of the foregoing discussion, we are of opinion that the order of detention is invalid and cannot stand.

Tlie petition is accordingly allowed.

(I) (1972) 3 S;C.11.. tl'·

Q) A.I.II.. 19?; S.C. 197.