(1.) This Writ Petition has been filed with a prayer that an order of detention passed against the petitioner on the 7th September, 1979, under S. 3 (1) of the Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Activities Act, 1974 be quashed. After the order was served on the detenu he made a representation on the 27th September, 1979 to the Government who received it on the 28th September, 1979. In support of the Rule Mr. A. K. Sen has raised a number of points, but in view of one of them which is to the effect that there has been an inordinate and unexplained delay on the part of the detaining authority in deciding the representation and that the detention is therefore vitiated, we need not go into the other points. On the question of delay the petitioner had expressly taken a plea in para 11 of the petition but in their reply the respondents have not at all explained or detailed any reason why there was inordinate delay in disposing of the representation submitted by the detenu to the detaining authority. The admitted position is that the representation was received by the Government on the 28th September, 1979 and it was rejected on 3rd November, 1979, that is to say, after about one month and five days of the receipt. It is now well settled that any unexplained delay in deciding the representation filed by the detenu amounts to a clear violation of Article 22 (5) of the Constitution of India and is sufficient to vitiate the detention. Our attention was drawn by the counsel for the petitioner to a recent decision of this Court reported in (1979) 2 SCR 315 (Narendra Purshotam Umrao v. B. B. Gujral) where the Court while relying on an earlier decision of this Court in Pankaj Kumar Chakrabarty v. State of West Bengal, (1970) 1 SCR 543 pointed out that under Clauses (4) and (5) of Art. 22 of the Constitution the detenu has a dual right, viz.
(2.) The observations extracted above clearly show that the representation must be considered by the Government as expeditiously as possible. Mr. Lalit submitted that the delay in deciding the representation was due to the fact that the representation had to pass through various channels and departments before the Government was in a position to decide it. In the first place no such facts have been pleaded in the reply filed by the respondents and, therefore, we cannot entertain the grounds now urged by the counsel for the Union for the first time in the arguments before us. Even so it appears that at the most the detaining authority had forwarded the representation to the Revenue Intelligence whose comments were received on 16-10-79. Thereafter there was absolutely no justification for any delay in taking a decision on the merit of the representation. Even if we assume that there was some reasonable explanation for the delay from 28th September, 1979 to 16th October, 1979, there appears to be no good explanation whatsoever for the delay from 16th October, 1979 to 2nd November, 1979 when the representation was rejected by the Government. It is manifest that the Government was not obliged to wait for the decision of the Board because it had to consider the representation independently of what the Board might say. In this view of the matter, we are satisfied that there has been unreasonable delay in deciding the representation filed by the detenu and that by itself is sufficient to render the detention void. For these reasons we allow this petition, set aside the order of detention and direct that the detenu be released forthwith.