RAJ KAPOOR Vs. STATE

JUDGEMENT

(1.) In our constitutional order, fragrant with social justice, broader considerations of final relief must govern the judicial process save where legislative interdict plainly forbids that course. The dismissal by the High Court, on a little point of procedure, has led to this otherwise avoidable petition for special leave, at a time when torrents of litigation drown this Court with an unmanageable flood of dockets. The negative order under challenge was made by the High Court refusing to exercise its inherent power under Sec. 482 of the Criminal Procedure Code (the Code for short) because the subject fell under its revisional power under S. 397 and this latter power was not unsheathed because a copy of the short order of the trial court had not been filed as required not by the Code, but by a High Court Rule, although the original order, together with all the records, had been sent for and was before the court. A besetting sin of our legal system is the tyranny of technicality in the name of finical legality, hospitably entertained sometimes in the halls of justice. Absent orientation, justicing becomes 'computering' and ceases to be social engineering.

(2.) The story briefly. Only a woodcut of the profile of the case will do. A unique pro bono publico prosecution was launched by a private complainant, claiming (before us) to be the President of a Youth Organisation devoted to defending Indian cultural standards, inter alia, against the unceasing waves of celluloid anti-culture, arraigning, together with the theatre owner, the producer, actors and photographer of a sensationally captioned and loudly publicised film by name Satyam, Sivam, Sundaram, under Sections 282, 293 and 34 Indian Penal Code (hereinafter referred to as the Penal Code) for alleged punitive prurience, moral depravity and shocking erosion of public decency.

(3.) Were there serious merit in the charge, a criminal prosecution would serve to sanitize the polluted celluloid, handcuff cinemas running erotic and amok, and become a curial super-censorship of salacious films. Why not Were it otherwise, the precarious film producer had to face a new menace to public exhibition easily set in motion through the process of the court by any busybody willing to blackmail or wanting to harass, prodded by rival producers. Especially when a special statute (the Cinematograph Act) has set special standards for films for public consumption and created a special board to screen and censor from the angle of public morals and the like with its verdicts being subject to higher review, inexpert criminal courts must be cautious to 'rush in' and, indeed, must 'fear to tread', lest the judicial process should become a public footpath for any highway man wearing a moral mask holding up a film-maker who has travelled the expensive and perilous journey to exhibition of his 'certificated' picture. Omniscience, if one may adapt a great thought of Justice Holmes, is not the property of a Judge. We pronounce no opinion, at this state, on the merits of the rival stances with reference to the picture Satyam, Sivam, Sundaram.