My years in the Supreme court continues....

When the government assumed the right to take citizens into detention not for any offence they had committed but to prevent them from committing specified offerences which the government believed they were about to commit, we had a large number of applications challenging the action of the various governments.

In the very first case that came before us, K. Gopalan vs. State of Madras, the Court unanimously held that the grounds of detention supplied to a detenue must be produced before the Court so that it may decide whether they were relevant to the objectives for which the Preventive Detention Act had been passed.

The Court therefore held that Section 14 of the first Preventive Detention Act, 1950 was invalid because it made the grounds communicated to the accused confidential, not to be disclosed in the Court. The minority
went further and held that the Preventive Detention Act under which Mr Gopalan had been detained was invalid as it did not prescribe—as required by the Constitution—the circumstances and the
cases in which a citizen could be detained for more than three months without reference to an Advisory Board. The minority held his detention illegal and was of the opinion that the Constitution demanded that statutory invasion of the right to freedom of a person for more than three months could only be authorised if the statute laid down the circumstances under which this was to be done and also described the type of cases in which this would be permissible.

The majority held otherwise. The Government however decided to profit by the dissent and provided for an Advisory Board in the later versions of the Act.

To be continued...