Source: https://indconlawphil.wordpress.com/tag/article-12/
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 03:24:32+00:00

Document:
Krupakar Manukonda has drawn my attention to an interesting Supreme Court judgment handed down yesterday. In Dr. Janet Jeyapaul v SRM University, the question was whether a writ petition was maintainable against the SRM University, which is a “deemed University” within the meaning of S. 3 of the UGC Act (the petitioner had filed a writ petition complaining of unfair termination of services).
There is a distinction, therefore, between a body that is conferred with a certain legal status under a statute, and a body that is created by the statute. Unarguably, in the former case, the legal status, without anything more, is insufficient to bring the body within the meaning of Article 12. Here, however, the Supreme Court seems to have held that the mere fact that the SRM University is brought within the purview of the UGC Act automatically brings it within Article 12, without any analysis of whether the control test has been satisfied.
(The single judge’s opinion has been challenged on the ground that a previous division bench of the Rajasthan High Court had already held BITS to fall within Article 12. Interestingly, in that case, the Court had gone into a detailed analysis of the functional, financial, and administrative control exercised upon BITS by the government – see here).
It is unclear why the Supreme Court needed to go into Article 12 at all. As we have discussed before on this blog, the tests for maintainability under Articles 12 and 226 are different, and the word “authority” has a much broader meaning under Article 226 than it does under Article 12. A public function test is sufficient to attract Article 226, as compared to the much stricter control test under Article 12. This, being an Article 226 case, could have been decided solely on public function grounds. The introduction of Article 12, and the manner in which it has been discussed, raises some concerns about the future direction of law on the point.
In the last post, we saw how Ajay Hasia, and the cases following it up to Pradeep Kumar Biswas, gradually began to adopt the legal approach to the meaning of “State” under Article 12, at the expense of the functional approach.
The functional argument – as we have seen through this series of posts – has two (connected justifications). First, there is an idea of a “public function” – certain tasks that, because of their very nature, a government ought to perform, and that shouldn’t be left to the market (policing and defence are uncontroversial examples), such as provisions of social or individual goods that we think every person is entitled to in a modern democracy (education and healthcare are more contested examples). Secondly, it is argued that “centres of power” (a term used by the Supreme Court) are under particular obligations because of their ability to affect basic rights in a deep and pervasive manner, across the board (for instance, control over the country’s police force) – whether those centres of power are State entities, or private ones (like large corporations). In the two paragraphs excerpted above, we can see that the Zee Telefilms court directly rejected both these arguments, unambiguously consigning the functional argument to judicial oblivion.
But what if, tomorrow, the State “chooses” to leave the function of policing – or maintaining prisons – or national defence – or the judicial system – to private parties? Here, we have the classic problem of a purely descriptive baseline for State function, that we first highlighted in our discussion of R.D. Shetty. With a descriptive baseline, as the State retreats, the areas within which fundamental rights operate become more and more constricted. In fact, this is precisely the argument that the Court made at the end of Zee Telefilms. Cases such as Rajasthan Electricity Board and Sukhdev Singh, it held, were decided in a different socio-economic climate; now, on the other hand, “the State is… distancing itself from commercial activities and concentrating on governance rather than on business.” Yet surely, this cannot be right. Constitutional rights cannot depend upon the economic policy that a State follows at any given time. Intuitively, as well, it seems somewhat strange to visualise a situation where, for instance, a private corporation is given control over the country’s water supply, which it then withholds from people of a particular religion – and to imagine that the Constitution will have nothing to say about that. Again, these thought experiments highlight the need for a normative baseline of “State functions”, that the Court – throughout its jurisprudence – has consistently failed to engage with.
After Pradeep Kumar Biswas and Zee Telefilms, it seems clear that Article 12 is strictly limited to instances of pervasive governmental control, and the public function test is irrelevant to the enquiry. We must look elsewhere for the solution to the problems highlighted above.
One possible solution lies in R.D. Shetty. Recall our original analysis of the case: the Court’s reasoning proceeded along two distinct prongs. One was an Article 12 analysis. The other – which preceded it – was a public law analysis. That is, the Court began with examining the government’s obligations when it acted as a contractor – that is, obligations of fairness and non-discrimination – and then extended the argument to instrumentalities or agencies of the government (which included a strong functional component). It then located another source of those obligations within Article 14 of the Constitution, which launched it off into its Article 12 analysis. In other words, obligations of fairness and non-discrimination stem both from Article 14 and from general principles of public law. The judiciary’s subsequent narrowing down of Article 12 affects the reach of Article 14, limiting it to pervasively government-controlled bodies, but leaves the reach of public law – as outlined in R.D. Shetty – untouched.
Two Supreme Court cases support this proposition. The first is Justice Mohan’s concurring opinion in Unnikrishnan. The question in that case was whether Article 14 applied to private educational institutions. Justice Mohan observed: “What is the nature of functions discharged by these institutions? They discharge a public duty. If a student desires to acquire a degree, for example, in medicine, he will have to route through a medical college. These medical colleges are the instruments to attain the qualification. If, therefore, what is discharged by the educational institution, is a public duty that requires… [it to] act fairly.
The duty to act fairly – which, in content, is identical to the Article 14 obligation – stems directly from the public duty performed by the entity. As R.D. Shetty teaches, the source of that duty might be either the Constitution, or public law. Pradeep Kumar Biswas and Zee Telefilms close off the first avenue, but not the second.
Thus, the Court does not hold that non-State bodies do not have a duty to abide by the content of the fundamental rights; it expressly limits its holding to restricting the application of Part III, qua Part III, to non-State bodies. In fact, it specifically refers to Article 226, which vests in the High Court to issue orders and writs to “any person or authority” for the “enforcement of any of the rights conferred by Part III, and for other purposes.” The implications are that it is at least conceptually possible to hold a non-State body accountable for a substantive Part III violation – only not by invoking Part III via an Article 32 petition before the Supreme Court. The only way this is possible is by holding that while the content of the duties in both cases is identical (e.g., the duty to act fairly), their source is different (Article 14 and public law).
This, I would suggest, is sensible. Instead of applying Part III in a blanket manner to any “centre of power”, leading to strange and incongruous results (e.g., what connection could exist between a corporation in control of the nation’s water supply, and the right of minorities to preserve their culture?), the public-law approach allows us to calibrate the scope of an entity’s obligations to its function. For example, in Zee Telefilms, this would entail applying the substance of Article 19(1)(g) to the BCCI; and in Unnikrishnan, the substance of Article 14 to the admissions decisions of educational institutions. Ultimately, the logic boils down to this: entities that – as a structural (and not individual, or isolated) matter, have control over the effective exercise of individuals’ fundamental rights, ought to be accountable within their sphere of control.
If we examine Marsh vs Alabama (which the R.D. Shetty Court relied upon), we find something of this logic at work. In Marsh, one important reason why the Court held that First Amendment rights applied to the sidewalks and streets of a privately-owned company town, was the lack of a feasible exit option: people living in the company town couldn’t simply pack up and go elsewhere to engage in free speech and expression; thus, they would simply be denied any effective exercise of their constitutional rights, if the private owners’ property interests were allowed to trump the First Amendment. Or, in other words, the company-town was in a position where it effectively had exclusive power and control over the constitutional rights of a significant number of people. Consequently, the First Amendment applied. I suggest that, in the last analysis, examining the extent to which such power and control exists in individual cases, and accordingly deciding the scope of the (public-law sourced) obligations of private entities (for which there is precedent, in the form of Unnikrishnan and Zee Telefilms), is both intellectually the most defensible approach, and pragmatically the most sensible one.
In the last post, we discussed two approaches towards interpreting the term “other authority” in Article 12, exemplified by the majority and the concurrence in Rajasthan State Electricity Board v. Mohan Lal. The “legal approach” assimilates to the State those entities that the State creates (via statute), or has extensive control over. Or, in other words, the State must, in some way, be closely connected with the workings of the entity in question. The “functional approach”, on the other hand, brings within Article 12 all entities that perform State-like functions. Justice Mathew’s concurring opinion in Sukhdev Singh v. Bhagat Ram, as we saw, shuttled back and forth between the two conceptions, and his “agency and instrumentality” test appears to be agnostic about which approach it favours.
The question came before the Court again, in the 1979 case of R.D. Shetty vs International Airport Authority. The International Airport Authority was a corporate body constituted under the International Airport Authority Act of 1971. It invited tenders for running restaurants and snack bars at the Bombay International Airport, and ultimately accepted the highest bid. This decision was challenged, on the ground that in awarding the contract, the Authority had failed to abide by its own stipulations, and in treating similarly situated persons differently, had violated Article 14. The first question, therefore, was whether the International Airport Authority was subject to Article 14 obligations.
Having established this proposition, the Court then held “that the Government which represents the executive authority of the State, may act through the instrumentality or agency of natural persons or it may employ the instrumentality or agency of juridical persons to carry out its functions.” Once again, the Court referred to the expanding role of the State, which created the environment for the creation and flouring of the public corporation, “as incidental to or in aid of governmental functions.” Naturally, such corporations would be subject to the same public and constitutional law obligations as the State. The key question then became the question of determining when a corporation was an “instrumentality or agency” of the State.
The Court held that that there could be no “cut and dried formula” that would provide the answer, and proceeded to examine a range of alternatives. Citing the American doctrine of State action, it noted that “extensive and unusual financial assistance” from the government might be a relevant consideration. The same considerations applied to an “unusual degree of [State] control over the policies and management” of the corporation (paragraph 15).
These two considerations – financial and administrative control – are, as we can see, part of the legal approach to the meaning of State. In the next paragraph, however, the Court shifted gears: “another factor which may be regarded as having a bearing on this issue and it is whether the operation of the corporation is an important public function.” This, as we have seen before, is a deeply fraught question, and depends almost entirely upon resolving the normative question about the proper role of the State. The Court was acutely aware of the problem, referring to the difficulty in determining “what functions are governmental, and what are not”, and noting that the answer to that question was changing continuously, even as the place of the State in society changed over the years. Nonetheless, ultimately it seemed to settle upon a largely descriptive test: “the modern State operates a multitude of public enterprises and discharges a host of other public functions. If the functions of the corporation are of public importance and closely related to governmental fun ctions, it would be a relevant factor in classifying the corporation as an instrumentality or agency of Government.” (Paragraph 16). Of course, there is a very important problem with this: what do you do when the State retreats from functions that it used to perform (as is happening under the present, neo-liberal model?). It is quite clear that a descriptive test can be of no help in such a situation: a normative baseline of “State function” is essential.
In affirming the public function test, the Court relied upon the American case of Marsh v. Alabama, which we have discussed before on this blog. In Marsh, a privately owned company-town was required to permit a Jehovah’s Witness to exercise her First Amendment rights by preaching on the sidewalk. In Marsh, there were a number of considerations that went into the final decision: the fact that traditionally, parks, public squares and sidewalks were places for the exercise of First Amendment rights, that there was no viable alternative for the residents of the company town (leading to unequal treatment between people who lived in company towns, and those who lived in ‘regular towns’), and that First Amendment rights were deemed to be superior in importance to property rights. Therefore, Marsh was not decided solely on the ground of a “public function”, and this ambiguity is reflected in the Court’s conclusion, where it held that “the public nature of the function, if impregnated with governmental character or “tied or entwined with Government” or fortified by some other additional factor, may render the corporation an instrumentality or agency of Government.” (Paragraph 18) The exact distinction between a “public function” and “governmental character” remains unclear.
In its analysis of whether or not the International Airport Authority fell within the definition of “State”, the Court undertook an extensive investigation of the nature and form of governmental control, from state financial and administrative control, to the corporation performing the erstwhile governmental function of administering airports, and so on. Crucially, the fact that the International Airports Authority was set up under a statute did not play a determinative (or even significant) role in the Court’s analysis, as it had in previous cases.
Thus, in R.D. Shetty, the Court adopted the language of Justice Mathew – “instrumentality or agency” – but subsumed within it both the legal and the functional approaches, developing one composite test that took into account financial and administrative control as well as public function (the Court’s reliance upon Marsh is particularly significant, since in that case the holding turned not upon the company town’s formal association with the State, but almost entirely upon what it was doing), in a holistic, case-specific enquiry.
In the next post, we will continue to chart this development in subsequent cases.
But there are – as we discussed previously – a host of problematic cases that lie between “State” and “individual”. Bodies created by a statute, bodies that whose management has government representatives, bodies under the administrative control of the government, bodies funded entirely by the government, bodies performing government-outsourced tasks, and so on. Which of these fall within Article 12, and why?
The first time the Court was called upon to seriously grapple with these issues was in the 1967 case of Rajasthan State Electricity Board v. Mohan Lal. The case involved a promotion dispute between some workmen and the Rajasthan State Electricity Board. Articles 14 and 16 claims were raised, and consequently, the preliminary question that fell to be determined by the Court was whether the Board came within the purview of Part III, by virtue of being “State” (other authority) under Article 12.
The Rajasthan State Electricity Board was a corporate body that had been constituted under an Act (the Electricity Supply Act, 1948), for the purposes of supplying electricity within the State of Rajasthan. The Board argued that the phrase “other authority” must be read “ejusdem generis” – that is, when a law refers to a number of specific categories, and then ends with a general clause, that general clause must be understood only to contain those things which are part of the common genus to which the specific categories belong. To take a banal example, “BJP, Congress, AAP, TMC and other political parties” does not include the American Democratic Party, because clearly, what is being referred to is Indian political parties. According to the board, the common class running through Article 12 was bodies exercising governmental functions. The Electricity Board, on the other hand, was set up by a statute to carry out commercial activities. Thus – the Board argued – it could not be brought within the ambit of Article 12. It cited decisions from the High Courts of Madras, Mysore and Punjab to contend that Article 12 was limited to “a person or a group of persons who exercise the legislative or executive functions of a State or through whom or through the instrumentality of whom the State exercises its legislative or executive power. In those cases, State Universities had been found not to fall within the ambit of Article 12.
According to this language, the test appears to be two-pronged: either the body is created by a statute, or it is under the control of the government. Subsequently, however, the Court appears to run them together, holding that “the expression “other authorities” in Art. 12 will include all constitutional or statutory authorities on whom powers are conferred by law.” Or, in other words, they key test is a statutory connection between the government and the body in question (“control”, perhaps, is a function of creation by statute). The fact that the functions were commercial were irrelevant, since the State itself could clearly carry out trade and business. Thus, the Board – having been established by Statute – was found to come within the scope of Article 12.
The majority and the concurrence represent two approaches to Article 12, which we may label the “legal approach” and the “functional approach”. The legal approach begins with a certain understanding of the paradigm case of the “State” (the government itself”, and assimilates to “State” those entities that seem to bear a close family resemblance to it. This translates into entities that the government itself creates, or seems to have near-complete control over. The “functional approach”, on the other hand, starts from the perspective of the individual, and the individual’s guaranteed rights that act as limits upon the sovereign power of the State. Bodies that can affect those rights in a manner similar to that of the State, are – under this view – assimilated to the State. The crucial difference between the two approaches is evident if we consider the fact that under Justice Shah’s approach, had the electricity distribution been entirely outsourced to a private party (say, Reliance), it too would have fallen within the ambit of Article 12.
Subsequently, however, in Sukhdev Singh v. Bhagat Ram, a majority of the Court read Rajasthan Electricity Board to have established the narrower proposition that Article 12 was attracted if the body had the power to issue directions whose disobedience could be punished by criminal law, or if it had the power to make, administer and enforce rules and regulations. That case involved three public corporations – the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, the Life Insurance Corporation and the Industrial Finance Corporation. The majority’s narrow decision holding all three corporations to fall within the meaning of “State”, although clearly correct under both the majority and the concurrence opinions in Rajasthan Electricity Board does not, however, get us very far in a conceptual understanding of Article 12.
The intriguing point about this paragraph is that it is based on a non-sequitur. If the Constitution ought to apply to wherever there is arbitrary application of power be centers of power, it does not follow – at all – a corporation must be State-created to fulfill those conditions (again, Reliance is a classic example). In other words, in substance, Justice Mathew put forward an argument for the functional approach, but in conclusion, he subordinated it entirely to the legal approach. In fact, he takes the majority and concurring opinions in Vidya Verma, and holds that the requirements laid out in both must be satisfied for Article 12 to be attracted!
“Agency or instrumentality” is not a self-interpreting term, however, and the true test, after the judgments in Rajasthan Electricity Board and Bhagat Ram, was still fuzzy. It would be up to later judgments to clarify it.
When we think of a Bill of Rights, there are two structural questions that we must answer before we even get to analysing its substantive content. Against whom are the rights enforceable – i.e., which parties are subject to the obligations that the rights impose. And who is entitled to enforce the rights – a question that often (but by no means always) translates into the question of which parties do the rights protect. Both these questions have been controversial. Evidently, individuals are beneficiaries of fundamental rights. But what about corporations? If individuals incorporate in order to do business, it would seem perverse to deny the right to carry on a business or profession to the corporation. But how about other non-commercial rights, like the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion? The church exists in a corporate form, but surely the church has freedom of religion rights separate and independent from the rights of its members? But what about a for-profit corporation whose owners have certain religious beliefs, which they wish to exercise in hiring decisions? Again, the press exists in corporate form, and if there’s anything that free speech includes, it’s the freedom of the press. But what about corporations donating large sums of money to political candidates, and justifying it on free speech grounds? The issues are endless, complex and often intractable.
In this series of posts, however, I wish to examine the first question: against which entities can fundamental rights be invoked?
One of the important rules of legal interpretation is the rule of ejusdem generis. When a legal text has a number of specific and concrete terms, followed by a general term, then the general term must be interpreted to contain only that which would broadly be consistent with the specific terms. Insofar as Article 12 begins with the terms “the Government and Parliament of India and the Government and Legislature of each of the States”, the phrase “other authorities” – under the rule of ejusdem generis, ought to be interpreted in a manner consistent with the concrete terms that come before it. That is, “other authorities” must be confined to State-like entities.
This is not altogether surprising. Classically, bills of rights are designed to structure a vertical relationship between State and citizen. The regime of private law – the law of contract and tort – operate between citizens, while the regime of non-Constitutional public law – e.g., criminal law – operates between citizens via enforcement by the State. That, very roughly, is what the legal map would look like.
To understand why, a brief excursion into history would be apposite. Bills of rights – in their modern form – first emerged out of the Glorious Revolution in England (1689), the American Revolution (1776) and the French Revolution (1789). These revolutions were driven by a rising bourgeois class, against the dying vestiges of feudalism, and its concomitant aspects such as hereditary nobility, a landed gentry, and an economic system based around feudal relations of lord and vassal, serf and master. Consequently, while the bourgeois framed the language of the revolution in universal terms, it ultimately reflected their class interests. This is particularly evident in these Bills of Rights. Because the greatest threat to the bourgeois was an over-intrusive State meddling with trade, the primary functions that Bills of Rights played was to wall off an entire sphere of action from State interference, within which the bourgeois were free to shape their economic relations as they saw fit. The rights that we now take for granted as universal human rights – rights of expression, religion and so on – had their origins in the bourgeois’ desire to construct an unregulated economic realm free from State interference.
This explains why bills of rights were exclusively enforceable against the State. The standard answers – that there is something particularly egregious about State oppression as opposed to private oppression, and/or the State has much greater power, and so we must be particularly solicitous in protecting individuals against the State – might explain part of the issue, but not all of it. We are well aware that economic relations exist between private parties, and ultimately, are as powerful a weapon in a society of deeply unequal resource distribution, as is the coercive power of the State (the history of industrial Europe in the 19th century bears this out). The complete explanation, as we have noticed, lies elsewhere.
This model was upset in the mid-20th century, with the philosophical discrediting of laissez-faire economics, and the advent of the welfare State. The conception of the State changed from the classical liberal vision of simply guaranteeing law and order so that private parties could shape their own economic relations without interference, to a provider of important public goods ranging from education to healthcare to transport to essential commodities. Oftentimes, especially in mixed economies, the State would carry out many functions working alongside private corporations.
The philosophical shift in the functions of the State, however, also led to a corresponding philosophical shift in the idea of a bill of rights. If, now, the baseline of legitimate State action is the provision of public goods, then it stands to reason that whoever is in charge of providing those public goods ought to be subject to obligations under the bill of rights. So, for example, if we hold that it is the State’s task to provide low-cost, accessible healthcare to all its citizens, then insofar as that function is outsourced to a private party, that private party continues to perform a State function. Correspondingly, the argument goes, we are justified in imposing fundamental rights obligations upon that private party, as long as it continues to be in the shoes of the State.
An equally important interpretive principle is the principle against surplusage. The legislature is deemed not to have wasted its words, and thus, an interpretation that renders a word or a phrase superfluous, is to be avoided. Here we can see that two phrases have been used: “within the territory of India” and “under the control of the Government of India”. They are connected by the word “or”, which implies that they are disjunctive. Consequently, there is a set of bodies that comes under Article 12, which is not under the control of the Government of India.
There are three possible ways of interpreting this. First, this refers to bodies under the control of the State governments. This is unsatisfactory, however, because it is clear that where the framers wanted to specify “under the control of…”, they expressly included it in the constitutional text. In other words, it seems strangely inconsistent drafting to specify “under the control of” when it comes to the federal government, and imply the same when it comes to the State government. It would have been far more convenient – and lucid – to have said, for example, “under the control of the Government of India or the legislatures of the States“.
Secondly, “within the territory of India” might be narrower than “under the control of the Government of India”, referring only to bodies expressly set up under statute. This would seem, again, to make part of the provision superfluous, because presumably statutory bodies, that owe their very existence to parliamentary legislation, are “under the control” of the Government.
The last option is to read “within the territory of India” as covering a set of circumstances parallel to that of bodies “under the control of the government”: that is, private bodies not under the control of the government, but performing governmental functions. This, of course, was the upshot of our theoretical distinction – and I argue that it is the interpretation supported by the most natural reading of the text, and the historical circumstances in which the Constitution came about.
This means, in turn, that the interpretation of Article 12 must be steeped in political philosophy. The interpreter needs to set her conceptual baseline for what she considers to be legitimate State functions – and it is on that basis that the term “other authority” will be interpreted.
Keeping this framework in mind, both historical and conceptual, we shall examine the Supreme Court’s approach to this question, in the coming posts.
Posted by Gautam Bhatia in Judicial Accountability, Meaning of "State"
Part I in this series of posts attempted to survey the precedent. The crux of the argument there was this – contrary to the assertion of a Constitution bench of the Supreme Court in Ashok Rupa Hurra, the proposition that judicial orders may be subject to Part III scrutiny is not foreclosed by precedent. I will make two further points here. First, there are strong reasons in principle for concluding that judicial orders must indeed be scrutinised on the basis of Part III standards. Second, the seemingly worrying consequences of this proposition (some of which were highlighted by responses to the previous post) are capable of resolution through other means. I will consider each of these in turn.
There are at least three reasons in principle that, in my view, dictate the conclusion that judiciary does fall within the purview of “State” as defined by Art. 12 of the Constitution.
It may be argued that, in the light of the nature of the impugned provision in P. C. Garg, that decision must be confined to legislative actions by judicial bodies. However, as noted above, this argument sits uneasily with the wording of Art. 12. It is difficult to see how a functional distinction of this nature can be accommodated within the clearly institutional classification adopted by Art. 12.
Finally, it appears that many provisions in Part III are, at least in part, directed at judicial bodies. A good example is the power of the Supreme Court under Art. 32 to issue the writ of certiorari. Since that power can only be exercised against judicial or quasi-judicial bodies, the view that judicial orders fall outside the purview of Part III renders it nugatory. [H. M. Seervai, Constitutional Law of India: A Critical Commentary, 4th edn., p. 394]. Another set of similar examples may be found in the rights guaranteed by Art. 20 of the Constitution. Consider for instance, the right not to be “convicted of any offence except for violation of a law in force at the time of the commission.” Since conviction cannot but be by a judicial authority, it is clear that the addressee of the right under Art. 20(1) is the judiciary. Similar is the case with the right not to be “prosecuted and punished for the same offence more than once” and the right of an accused to not be “compelled to be a witness against himself.” These rights are inexplicable on the view that judicial orders fall outside the purview of Part III.
In the light of these reasons, it is submitted that the mere fact that “judiciary” does not find express mention in Art. 12 should not lead one to the contrary conclusion. This is especially so since the nature of the definition in Art. 12 is expressly inclusive.
Bringing judicial orders within the purview of Part III scrutiny may give rise to several seemingly worrying consequences. If orders made by the Supreme Court are capable of offending Part III rights, does that mean that those orders can be infinitely challenged by way of Art. 32 petitions? Are the Court’s decisions on those Art. 32 petitions then amenable to further challenge? If yes, when will this lead to a final resolution? In my view, the answer to these questions must be found in the proposition that the right guaranteed by Art. 32 is not an absolute right. The right to move the Supreme Court to enforce rights guaranteed by Part III, must itself be subject to reasonable restrictions.
If this is true for Art. 26(c), it must equally be true for Art. 32. This is especially so since, in contrast to Art. 26(c) Art. 32 only guarantees the right to move the Supreme Court “by appropriate proceedings.” This phrase is capable of being interpreted as embodying an inherent restriction on the scope of that right.
This writ petition has been filed under Article 32 of the Constitution for declaring the amendment brought about in the West Bengal Land Reforms Act, 1955… as unconstitutional…. In our opinion, the petitioner can file a writ petition before the High Court under Article 226 of the Constitution for this purpose. Hence, we are not inclined to entertain this writ petition under Article 32 of the Constitution.
In sum, there are strong reasons in principle for concluding that judiciary must be held accountable to Part III norms. However, admittedly, accepting this view may lead to the result that Art. 32 petitions will now be filed in circumstances under which they were not previously available. In my view, an approach that addresses these consequences head-on is preferable to one that turns a blind-eye to the principled reasons that dictate a contrary conclusion. However, I have not attempted to exhaustively define how each of the circumstances under which Art. 32 petitions may be filed, can be dealt with. My attempt is only to suggest that the correct methodology for dealing with the ‘infinite regress’ problem may lie in the recognition that the right under Art. 32 is itself subject to reasonable restrictions.
** This is not to suggest that these decisions are correct in result though. In my view, they are not. In the interests of clarity, I will briefly explain why. As per the decision in Daryao v State of U.P. it is clear that decisions of High Courts while dismissing petitions under Art. 226 constitute res judicata for the purposes of subsequent petitions under Art. 32. Thus, once a petition under Art. 226 has been dismissed by a High Court, a subsequent petition under Art. 32 will succeed only if the ground on which the former petition was dismissed is not a ground applicable to Art. 32 petitions. Now, consider this result in the light of the above decisions. This leads one to the conclusion that Art. 32 will be available to the petitioner in extremely restrictive circumstances i.e. only when the previous petition under Art. 226 was dismissed on a ground that is inapplicable to Art. 32. In more general terms, the reason why this line of decisions in wrong is not because Art. 32 is an absolute right, but because the restriction that these case impose is not a reasonable one.

References: v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 v. 
 Art. 12
 v. 
 Art. 12
 Art. 12
 Art. 12
 Art. 32
 Art. 20
 Art. 20
 Art. 12
 Art. 12
 Art. 32
 Art. 32
 Art. 32
 Art. 26
 Art. 32
 Art. 26
 Art. 32
 Art. 32
 Art. 32
 Art. 32
 Art. 226
 Art. 32
 Art. 226
 Art. 32
 Art. 32
 Art. 32
 Art. 226
 Art. 32
 Art. 32