It is not quite clear why the Janata government has gone back on its earlier decision to provide for preventive detention in the criminal procedure code. The previous move was in a sense ill-conceived because incorporation of the necessary clauses in the Cr.P.C. would have made preventive detention a permanent feature of the country’s laws which it has not been so far despite its presence on the statue book for 28 long years. And there was opposition to the measure in the ruling party to which Mr. Jethmalani gave eloquent expression last week. But normally it should have been expected that the Prime Minister, the Union home minister, and the law minister and their other colleagues had taken both these factors into consideration before they approved the necessary legislation and therefore it was introduced in the Lok Sabha last December. Even so, they would have been justified in abandoning what was apparently a carefully prepared position if they had subsequently run into a virtual revolt in the party. It is possible that there was substantial support for Mr. Jethmalani’s viewpoint at the two-day meeting of the Janata parliamentary party on March 15 and 16. But Mr. S.N. Mishra had offered a compromise solution – he had proposed that a committee of 10 to 15 members be set up to review the bill – and Mr. Morarji Desai and Mr. Charan Singh had accepted it. Thus they were in a position to buy time if they so wished and in the process allow opinion in the Janata to crystallize one way or the other. Instead they have chosen hastily to retreat.
The only explanation the Union home minister has given is that “the true test of the health of a democracy is the responsiveness of the government to the public opinion”. Clearly this cannot convince anyone if only because “public opinion” can hardly be said to have been unduly agitated over this issue. Indeed, by “appealing” to all sections of the Lok Sabha to cooperate with the government in “curbing the activities of all groups and forces which may be or prove to be inimical to national security and public order”, Mr. Charan Singh has considerably weakened his case for not providing for preventive detention in some form. For implicit in his observation is the assessment that such disruptive forces already exist in Indian society. This is not merely an exercise in deductive logic because on March 22 he had said in the Lok Sabha that while the government wanted to “establish peace through the rule of law safeguarding the civil liberties of the people”, the trouble was that Mrs. Gandhi “wants to prove to this country that you cannot have democracy and civil liberties”. Ironically enough, her re-emergence as a powerful factor in political life may be one explanation for the change of heart on the government’s part on the issue of preventive detention. At least her party’s remarkable performance in the recent Vidhan Sabha poll is the most significant development that has taken place since the introduction last December of the bill to amend the Cr.P.C.
To say all this is not to suggest that the government’s present decision should not be welcomed. It should be, on several counts. Despite the growing uncertainty in Mizoram, the situation in the country as a whole right now is not such as to oblige the government to arm itself with powers of preventive detention. Since the administration has become accustomed to the use of what must in a civilized country be regarded as an extraordinary measure, intended to cope with extreme emergencies, it is only proper that it begins to learn to manage without such a law. Finally, it is necessary to ensure that no government is ever able to repeat equally easily Mrs. Gandhi’s experiment in authoritarianism, an experiment in which MISA played an exceedingly important role. In fact in order to provide such a guarantee it may also be necessary to amend the constitution to eliminate the provision for internal emergency. If unfortunately a new crisis arises as it did in the shape of the Telengana revolt in 1949-50 when the legislation authorizing preventive detention was first enacted – a revival of the Naxalite activities on a big scale could constitute such a crisis – the people and their elected representatives can review the situation. It would be idle to pretend that India is in the same position as other democratic countries which have not found it necessary to adopt such extraordinary laws as MISA or that the administration is equipped to bring disruptive and subversive elements to book through the normal and, as everyone knows, extremely dilatory and frustrating legal process or that the citizenry is sufficiently conscious of its obligations to society to help the administration. None of these things is true. But just now there is no reason to take a panicky view of the situation and to call in the fire brigade.