Rights, Courts, and Public Interest Litigation in India

The Indian Supreme Court's approach to fundamental rights transformed dramatically between the 1950s and 1980s. In the early case of A.K. Gopalan v. State of Madras (1950), the Court read fundamental rights narrowly and separately, holding that a law satisfying 'procedure established by law' under Article 21 need not also satisfy natural justice or fairness — a formalist, positivist reading that gave the state considerable latitude to restrict personal liberty through duly enacted procedure alone. This position was decisively overturned in Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India (1978), where the Court held that any procedure depriving a person of life or liberty under Article 21 must be 'just, fair and reasonable', effectively fusing Article 21 with Article 14 (equality) and Article 19 (freedoms), and importing due-process-style substantive review reminiscent of American constitutional jurisprudence despite India's framers having deliberately rejected the American 'due process' phrase in favour of the narrower British-influenced 'procedure established by law'.

Following Maneka Gandhi, the Court progressively read an expanding list of unenumerated rights into Article 21's guarantee of 'life and personal liberty', including the right to livelihood (Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation, 1985), the right to a speedy trial, the right to education (later codified as Article 21A via the 86th Amendment in 2002), the right to a clean environment (in cases following the Ganga pollution litigation led by M.C. Mehta), the right to privacy (Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, 2017, a landmark nine-judge bench decision), and ultimately the recognition of individual dignity and autonomy underlying decisions decriminalising homosexuality (Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, 2018) and recognising the right to passive euthanasia (Common Cause v. Union of India, 2018).

Alongside this expansion of rights, the Indian judiciary developed a globally distinctive procedural innovation: Public Interest Litigation (PIL), pioneered by Justices P.N. Bhagwati and V.R. Krishna Iyer from the late 1970s, which relaxed the traditional common law requirement that only a directly aggrieved party could approach a court, allowing any public-spirited citizen or organisation to file a petition on behalf of those unable to approach the court themselves — prisoners, bonded labourers, slum dwellers, or environmental victims. Bhagwati's judgment in S.P. Gupta v. Union of India (1981), sometimes called the 'Judges Transfer case', formally articulated the doctrine of 'epistolary jurisdiction', under which even a letter addressed to the Court could be treated as a writ petition.

PIL enabled the judiciary to intervene in matters ranging from prison conditions (Hussainara Khatoon v. State of Bihar, 1979, addressing undertrial prisoners) to environmental protection (M.C. Mehta's decades-long litigation on Ganga and Delhi air pollution) to bonded labour (Bandhua Mukti Morcha v. Union of India, 1984) and, more recently, to matters of governance and accountability such as electoral reform and anti-corruption enforcement. Critics, including some judges themselves, have warned that PIL's flexibility risks 'judicial overreach' into matters properly belonging to the executive and legislature, and that it has sometimes been misused for publicity or to settle private disputes under a public interest guise, prompting the Court itself to develop guidelines curbing frivolous PILs.

The Indian model of expansive rights jurisprudence combined with liberalised standing has attracted comparative attention from jurisdictions including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and South Africa, which have studied or adapted aspects of PIL to their own courts, making it one of India's most significant original contributions to global constitutional and human rights practice, alongside the basic structure doctrine.

Yet this judicial activism exists in tension with democratic accountability: unelected judges expanding rights and directing executive action raises enduring jurisprudential questions about the proper boundary between adjudication and legislation — questions that connect directly back to the Hart-Dworkin debate over whether judges 'find' or 'make' law when they read new content into open-textured constitutional phrases like 'life' and 'personal liberty'.