ANTARYAMI ALIAS ANTUA SAHU Vs. STATE OF ORISSA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The petitioner has been detained with the aid of S. 3(2) of the National Security Act, 1980 to prevent him from acting in any manner prejudicial to the maintenance of public order. The detention order was passed on 10-1-1991 and is based on the following solitary incident:-

(2.) The validity of the impugned order has been assailed on the following grounds.-

(3.) We may examine the aforesaid submissions made by Shri Mohapatra seriatim. As to the first contention, it may be stated that the distinction between "law and order" and "public order" has come up for determination before the Apex Court in a number of cases. On the basis of decided cases, it may be stated that stray and unorganised crimes of theft and assault are not matters of public order since they do not tend to affect the even flow of public life. As stated in Kuso Shah v, State of Bihar, AIR 1974 SC 156, infractions of law are bound in some measure to lead to disorder, but every infraction of law does not necessarily result in public disorder. As observed in Pushkar Mukherjee v. State of West Bengal, AIR 1970 SC 852: (1970 Cri LJ 852), a line of demarcation must be drawn between serious and aggravated forms of disorder which directly affect the community or injure the public interest and relatively minor breaches of peace of purely local significance which primarily injure specific individuals and only in a secondary sense public interest. In Ram Ranjan Chatterjee v. State of West Bengal, AIR 1975 SC 609 (1975 Cri LJ 588), it was reiterated that if the contravention in its effect is confined only to a few individuals directly involved as distinguished from a wide, spectrum of public, it would raise a problem of law and order only.