Indelicate imbalance: On Supreme Court and Kashmir

The Supreme Court has actually failed to release a judicial duty it was called upon to perform. Its choice to send out the question of restoring 4G connectivity in Jammu and Kashmir for an evaluation to the very authorities who enforced the restriction in the first place is a clear abdication of duty. The mandate that the Court enjoys under Short article 32 of the Constitution– to impose basic rights– can not be moved to the executive. It is quite stark that the three-member Bench has resorted to this procedure despite pertaining to the conclusion that the grievance of the petitioners benefits factor to consider. The judgment remains in consonance with a judicial trend that seeks ‘balance’ in between rights and ‘national security’. In the J&K context, this approach inevitably results in unquestioning deference to any claim that the executive makes without scrutinising the nature and quality of the claim. The Court has not even pursued the effort it made in Anuradha Bhasin, to set a set of guidelines by which authorities seeking to enforce restrictions on basic rights need to abide by the teaching of proportionality. In that case decided in January, the Court refrained from taking any view on the legality of the governm