B G VERGHESE Vs. UNION OF INDIA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This suit concerns the National Police Memorial located in a large public park at the Teen Murti End of Shantipath in an area that has come to be commonly known as the Diplomatic Enclave of New Delhi. Most of the embassies are located on either side of this road. The entire area is remarkable not only because of the foreign missions but also because of its vast and open expanses of greenery. It may well be an ideal location for a national memorial provided it gells and not jars, merges and does not mar with its environs. There is a perception that our police force is greatly ignored when compared to the armed forces, in terms of their respective working and living conditions. Police officers have to work long and unregulated hours, and their housing is dismal when compared with other Government servants. With the egregious escalation in terrorist activities within our country, the casualties in the police and armed forces are largely comparable. Therefore, none can legitimately oppose the recognition of the invaluable services of the police to the country. However, the building of a national memorial for police personnel killed in the line of duty could be viewed as a cosmetic recognition of their services, unless and until it is combined with a concerted effort to improve their lot. I do not see the present legal action as an onslaught upon the decision to establish a police memorial, and neither the pleadings nor the arguments of the Plaintiffs can be perceived as such. The Plaintiffs may be seen to have no personal interest in the outcome of the suit, if national or societal interests are considered to be altogether different to this controversy; one can only hope that in the very near future all these interests would be seen as coalescing with each other. The litigation should not be addressed as adversarial, as learned Senior Counsel for the Plaintiffs has been at pains to repeat. The plaint has received the support of very high dignatories, retired senior bureaucrats, artists, architects, engineers and citizens. It was therefore to be expected that the Respondent's may have thought it expedient to reappraise the nature of the memorial, even if not its location.

(2.) I shall immediately deal with the technical objections raised by the Respondents firstly to the effect that the plaint must be rejected as the Plaintiffs have failed to disclose particulars of the civil rights of the plaintiffs which have been violated by the Respondents. Learned Counsel for the contesting defendants had approbated and reprobated on whether the Plaintiffs should be taken as busy-bodies, since some of them were participants in the decision making process itself. It had also been contended that the Plaintiffs are giving vent to their spleens; and their egos have been ruffled, for the reason that their opinions have not been accepted and implemented. Is it essential that the plaint must disclose a violation of the personal civil rights of the Plaintiffs, as Counsel for the Defendant's contend? I find no reason or requirement to locate any watershed between a civil suit and a writ petition, and to favour the opinion that the Court can consider public issues in the latter domain only. A quarter century ago Justice Krishna Iyer had envisioned the harbinger of what has now become an integral part of judicial process, namely, Public Interest Litigation (PIL). The following extract from Maharaj Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh and Others, (1977) 1 SCC 155 is worthy of reproduction. It galvanizes me into adopting this approach and arriving at the prima facie view that the plaintiffs adequately and sufficiently possess locus standi even in this civil suit, in contradistinction to a civil writ. 19. Aside from this stand, it is easy to take the view that the first plaintiff is 'a person aggrieved' and has the competence to carry an appeal against the dismissal of the suit. Of course, he who has a proprietary right, which has been or is threatened to be violated, is surely an 'aggrieved person'. A legal injury creates a remedial right in the injured person. But the right to a remedy apart, a larger circle of persons can move the Court for the protection of defence or enforcement of a civil right or to ward off or claim compensation for a civil wrong, even if they are not proprietarily or personally linked with the cause of action. The nexus between the lis and the plaintiff need not necessarily be personal, although it has to be more than a wayfarer's allergy to an unpalatable episode. 'A person aggrieved' is an expression which has expanded with the larger urgencies and felt necessities of our times. Processual jurisprudence is not too jejune to respond to societal changes and challenges Law necessarily has to carry within it the impress of the past traditions, the capacity to respond to the needs of the present and enough resilience to cope with the demands of the future. A code of law, especially in the social fields, is not a document for fastidious dialectics; properly drafted and rightly implemented it can be the means of the ordering of the life of a people. 20. The classical concept of a 'person aggrieved' is delineated in Re Sidebotham ex p. Sidebotham. But the amplitude of 'legal grievance' has broadened with social compulsions. The State undertakes today activities whose beneficiaries may be the general community even though the legal right to the undertaking may not vest in the community. The State starts welfare projects whose effective implementation may call for collective action from the protected group or any member of them. New movements like consumerism, new people's organs like Harijan or Mahila Samajams or labour unions, new protective institutions like legal aid societies operate on the socio-legal plane, not to beat 'their golden wings in the void' but to intervene on behalf of the weaker classes. Such burgeoning of collective social action has, in turn, generated gradual processual adaptations. Test suits, class actions and representative litigation are the beginning and the horizon is expanding, with persons and organisations not personally injured but vicariously concerned being entitled to invoke the jurisdiction of the Court for redressal of actual or imminent wrongs. 21. In this wider perspective, who is a 'person aggrieved'? Dabholkar gives the updated answer The test is whether the words 'person aggrieved' include 'a person who has a genuine grievance because an order has been made which prejudicially affects his interests'. American jurisprudence has recognised, for instance, the expanding importance of consumer protection in the economic system and permitted, consumer organisatoins to initiate or intervene in actions, although by the narrow rule of 'locus standi', such a course could not have been justified (see p. 807 New York University Law Review, Vol. 46, 1971). In fact, citizen organisations have recently been campaigning for using legal actions for protection of community interest, broadening the scope of 'standing' in legal proceedings (see p.403 Boston University Law Review, Vol. 51, 1971). In the well-known case of Attorney-General of the Gambia v. Peirre Sarr N.'Jie, Lord Denning observed about the Attorney-General's standing thus .....The words 'person aggrieved' are of wide import and should not be subjected to a restrictive interpretation. They do not include, of course, a mere busybody who is interfering in things which do not concern him; but they do include a person who has a genuine grievance because an order has been made which prejudicially affects his interest. 22. Where a wrong against community interest is done, 'no locus standi' will not always be a plea to non-suit an interested public body chasing the wrong-doer in Court. In the case before us, Government, in the spacious sense of 'person aggrieved' is comfortably placed. Its right of resumption from the Gaon Sabha, meant to be exercised in public interest, will be seriously jeopardised if the estate slips into the hands of a trespasser. The estate belonged to the State, is vested in the Gaon Sabha for community benefit, is controlled by the State through directions to the Land Management Committee and is liable to be divested without ado any time. The wholesome object of the Legislature of cautiously decentralised vesting of estates in local self-governing units will be frustrated, if the State, the watchdog of the whole project, is to be a helpless spectator of its purposeful bounty being wasted or lost. It must act, out of fidelity to the goal of the statute and the continuing duty to salvage public property for public use. Long argument is otiose to make out a legal grievance in such a situation of peril and, after all the star of processual actions prc bono publico has to be on the ascendant in a society where supineness must be substituted by activism if the dynamic rule of law is to fulfil itself. 'Locus standi' has a larger ambit in current legal semantics than the accepted, individualistic jurisprudence of old. The legal dogmas of the quiet past are no longer adequate to assail the social injustices of the stormy present. Therefore, the State, in the present case, is entitled to appeal under Section 96 of the Code of Civil Procedure.

(3.) The second technical objection that has been raised by Mr. Mehra, learned Counsel for defendant Nos. 1,2 and 5 is that Order 1 Rule 8 of the Civil Procedure Code has not been complied with. This provision enables one person to sue or defend on behalf of all persons having the same interests in the suit, but with the leave of the Court. This is an enabling provision and not a prohibiting one. In civil actions which partake of a public character there is no legal impediment in a few persons joining together as plaintiffs/defendants; otherwise such actions would become impossible to initiate unless each and every protagonist or sympathiser is joined as a signatory to the plaint. In an issue such as the present one, so far as the public is concerned there may be sections of it which whole-heartedly agree with or are indifferent to the plaintiffs' opinion, and others who disagree altogether. The rigours of Order 1, Rule 8 would be attracted if the plaintiffs contend that they represent each and every person having the same interest. The intent and purpose of the provision, inter alia, is to eradicate multiplicity of proceedings and conflicting decisions on the same subject matter. In the present instance this is not so since there is a patent divide between detractors who find almost all aspects of the memorial to be unacceptable if not illegal, and protagonists who desire the memorial to be completed exactly in its present conception. The objection as to misjoinder of parties is thus without merit.