"A University Is Meant for Dissent" — a Retired Judge on Civil Liberties and Protest

Open in the app — quiz, notes, Mistake Vault

The news

Retired Supreme Court judge Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia tells The Indian Express that a university exists precisely to raise dissenting voices — 'agar aap issko daba doge, toh phir university kaise rahegi' (if you suppress this, how will it remain a university) — and that the Supreme Court recently used its extraordinary powers under Article 142 to quash FIRs registered across the country against students who had participated in protests over exam-paper leaks, an agitation spearheaded at Jantar Mantar. He also discussed judicial restraint on the death penalty and on court observations about the hijab.

Static syllabus linkage

Article 19(1)(a) (freedom of speech) subject to Article 19(2) reasonable restrictions; Article 142 (Supreme Court's power to pass orders for 'complete justice'); the ongoing judicial and political debate around sedition-type provisions and their use against student protestors.

Why UPSC loves this

Civil liberties versus public order is an evergreen GS2/Essay theme; a retired judge publicly framing dissent as constitutionally essential — while citing a concrete instance of the Supreme Court using Article 142 to quash protest-related FIRs — gives you a citable, current example rather than an abstract principle.

Prelims nuggets

Article 142 empowers the Supreme Court to pass any order necessary for 'complete justice' in a matter before it — used here to quash FIRs against students linked to the exam-paper-leak protests centred at Jantar Mantar.

Analysis

The case reveals a recurring administrative pattern: default to criminal law (FIRs, sometimes serious sections) first when a protest is inconvenient, and let judicial correction happen later. This is administratively 'efficient' in the short run — it disperses the protest and signals firmness — but institutionally costly, and the costs compound in three ways when courts eventually quash such FIRs en masse (here via the Supreme Court's extraordinary Article 142 power): first, it wastes police and prosecutorial resources that were never going to result in a conviction; second, it damages the credibility of the state's threat of prosecution for genuinely serious future offences, since courts and the public start discounting FIRs as reflexive rather than substantive; third, it creates a chilling effect on legitimate dissent that a functioning democracy actually needs — in this instance, students flagging exam-paper leaks were arguably serving the public interest of exam integrity, not undermining it. The deeper administrative lesson is that distinguishing protest which genuinely disrupts public order (legitimately regulable) from protest that is merely inconvenient or embarrassing to authorities (constitutionally protected) requires a proportionality judgment that field-level police, under political and bureaucratic pressure to 'restore order quickly', routinely get wrong. That the Supreme Court needed its rare Article 142 'complete justice' power — rather than ordinary case-by-case appellate correction — to fix this signals the scale of the overreach was systemic, not incidental.

Possible Mains question

"Reflexive criminalisation of protest, even when later corrected by the judiciary, imposes costs that far outweigh its short-term administrative convenience." Discuss with reference to the recent use of Article 142 to quash FIRs against student protesters.

Model approach

Introduction: State the doctrinal position — Article 19(1)(a) is subject to reasonable restrictions under 19(2), but any restriction must be proportionate to an actual, demonstrable public-order threat, not merely political inconvenience. Body: (1) the facts — protests over exam-paper leaks, a legitimate public-interest grievance; (2) why mass FIR-filing constituted overreach under the proportionality test; (3) the institutional incentives (political pressure, career incentives for a quick 'resolution') that push field administration toward over-criminalisation; (4) the compounding costs of over-criminalisation — wasted resources, chilling effect, erosion of public trust, and the need for the Supreme Court's rare Article 142 intervention. Conclusion: A rights-respecting, graded protest-management protocol — negotiation and grievance redressal before criminalisation, judicial-standard evidence built in from the start rather than treated as an afterthought — serves both public order and constitutional liberty better than reflexive FIR-filing.

Administrator's brainstorm

As a District Magistrate facing a sustained student protest movement over an exam-paper leak, where do you draw the line between maintaining law and order and respecting the constitutional right to peaceful assembly?

Apply a real-time proportionality test: if the protest is noisy or inconvenient but not violent, does not block essential services beyond a reasonable, time-bound threshold, and does not damage property, it stays protected — regulate only its time, place and manner (routes, duration) rather than banning or criminalising it outright. Reserve criminal-law escalation strictly for actual violence or property damage, documented at the moment it occurs, not anticipated as a precaution.

What proactive grievance-redressal or dialogue mechanisms could you institutionalise before a protest escalates to the point where filing FIRs becomes your default response?

Set up a standing grievance cell with published, fixed response timelines for the underlying complaint (here, exam-paper-leak integrity) so protest isn't the only channel available to be heard, and publicise this channel actively so organisers perceive the administration as responsive rather than adversarial from the very start of a dispute.

If a court later quashes FIRs your administration filed during a protest, what does that tell you about the long-term institutional cost of the 'easy' short-term option?

It tells you the short-term option wasn't actually cheap — it cost police and prosecutorial time, damaged the credibility of future genuine charges in the eyes of courts and the public, and chilled dissent the system arguably needed to hear. The operational lesson is to treat 'will this order or FIR survive judicial review' as a real constraint on decision-making in the moment, not a legal-department concern to be dealt with only if and when it is challenged.