Sodhi Shamsher Singh And Ors. vs The State Of Pepsu And Ors. on 1 October, 1953

Rewritten Version Notice: This is a rewritten version of the original judgment.

Court: supreme-court

Case Number: Not extracted

Decision Date: 1 October 1953

Coram: P.K. Mukherjea

In the matter of Sodhi Shamsher Singh and others versus the State of PEPSU and others, decided on 1 October 1953, the Supreme Court of India considered three applications filed under Article 32 of the Constitution. The applications sought writs of habeas corpus on behalf of three detainees, namely Sukhdev Singh, Jagjit Singh and Hardayal Singh. The petitions were presented to the Court on 9 September 1953 by the petitioner, Sodhi Shamsher Singh. After a preliminary hearing, a Vacation Judge, Ghulam Hasan J., granted the rules, and those rules were subsequently taken up for a final hearing before the Court.

The detainees had been arrested on 1 September 1953 pursuant to an order issued by the Chief Secretary of the PEPSU Government, an order made in the name of the President of India and grounded in Section 3(1) of the Preventive Detention Act, 1950. Following their arrest, they were confined in the Central Jail at Patiala, where they remained until the date of the hearing. On 5 September 1953, the Government supplied the detainees with the grounds of detention, and it is on the basis of those grounds that the legality of their confinement was challenged before the Court.

The grounds of detention assert that the detainee Sukhdev Singh, who had previously served as a Sessions Judge of Patiala before being removed from service, authored two pamphlets under the pseudonym “Lal Chand Sharma.” The first pamphlet, dated 24 May 1953, bore the heading “The petition of mercy by the afflicted public of the Patiala Union to Pandit Jawaharlal Ji, Prime Minister” and was described as the first installment. A second pamphlet, dated 4 August 1953, carried the heading “The public wants impeachment of Bhapa Mohan Singh and Billa Teja Singh: Mercy petition to Shri Jawaharlal, Prime Minister,” constituting the second installment. Both pamphlets were said to have been widely circulated and to contain serious allegations against Shri Teja Singh, the Chief Justice of Patiala, alleging that he administered justice on communal lines, favoring Sikhs and persecuting Hindus irrespective of case merits. The Government contended that these passages tended to encourage Sikhs to resort to lawlessness, to engender a sense of frustration and discouragement among Hindus, and thereby to provoke them to take the law into their own hands. The other two detainees were alleged to have assisted Sukhdev Singh in the publication and distribution of the pamphlets.

The Court reiterated a principle it has affirmed on several occasions: the propriety or reasonableness of the satisfaction of the Central or State Government, which forms the basis for an order of detention under Section 3 of the Preventive Detention Act, is not a matter that can be examined by this Court. Consequently, the Court stated that it could not be invited to investigate the sufficiency of the materials upon which such governmental satisfaction purports to rest.

The Court observed that it was not within its jurisdiction to conduct an inquiry into the adequacy of the material upon which the Government’s satisfaction was founded. Nonetheless, the Court explained that it was entitled to review the reasons presented by the Government to ascertain whether those reasons pertained to the purpose contemplated by the legislation, namely the prevention of activities prejudicial to the defence of India, the security of the State, and the maintenance of law and order therein. The Court then noted that the learned Attorney-General had placed before it both pamphlets under consideration and expressed a firm view that the publication and distribution of those pamphlets bore no rational connection with the preservation of law and order in the State or with the prevention of conduct likely to disturb public tranquillity. The Court accepted that the pamphlets were written in extremely filthy and abusive language and amounted to a virulent assault on the character and integrity of the incumbent Chief Justice of PEPSU. In the pamphlets the Chief Justice was, inter alia, accused of serious partiality and communal bias both in the recruitment of officers for judicial posts and in the adjudication of cases between litigants. While acknowledging that other remedies might be available to an aggrieved party or to the Government to curb such scandalous attacks on the head of the State judiciary, the Court held that the provisions of the Preventive Detention Act could not be employed for that purpose. The Court further observed that the allegations contained in the pamphlets were designed to erode public confidence in the proper administration of justice in the State, yet it considered it too remote to conclude that such erosion would endanger the security of the State or its maintenance of law and order. The Court emphasized that facts must be assessed according to ordinary standards of common sense and probability, and rejected any argument that unforeseen and unusual events automatically justified the detention. Consequently, the Court concluded that the detention orders were illegal and ought to be set aside. Accordingly, the detainees had already been released, and the Court set out the reasons for that order.