On April 8, 2026, the Union Government told a nine-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court that “the time has come to end Public Interest Litigation.” This is not a procedural reform. It is a constitutional dismantling dressed in the language of administrative tidiness.

Justice is not merely a service. It is a promise. The promise the Indian Constitution made — in 1950, to a people emerging from colonial subjugation, carrying centuries of caste exclusion and illiteracy and poverty — was that the law would reach everyone. Not merely those who could afford to reach the law.

That promise was always partly aspirational. Articles 32 and 226 gave citizens direct access to the Supreme Court and High Courts for enforcement of fundamental rights. But direct access, it turned out, assumed a citizen capable of exercising it: someone literate enough to know their rights had been violated, educated enough to understand the legal system, financially secure enough to step back from the daily struggle for survival and articulate a grievance, socially connected enough to find a lawyer, geographically proximate enough to approach a court.

For hundreds of millions of Indians, none of these conditions obtained. The bonded labourer in a brick kiln in Rajasthan did not know he was in violation of a law that had already abolished his condition. The undertrial prisoner rotting in a Bihar jail without trial had no way to know that his detention was unconstitutional. The tribal community watching their forest being stripped had no mechanism to place their loss before a court that might have protected them. The child working in a hazardous factory had no standing, literally and legally, to demand the protection the Constitution nominally guaranteed.

The law existed. Justice did not reach.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, two judges of the Supreme Court — Justice P.N. Bhagwati and Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer — asked a question so simple it should embarrass every legal system that had not already asked it: if justice is constitutionally guaranteed but structurally inaccessible to those who most need it, what is the guarantee worth?

Their answer was Public Interest Litigation. Any citizen, directly affected or not, could approach the court on behalf of those who could not approach it themselves. Even a postcard would do. A letter from a journalist describing bonded labour conditions was enough to set the Supreme Court in motion. A law professor writing about prison conditions could file on behalf of prisoners who had never heard of habeas corpus.

This was called epistolary jurisdiction — the court opening itself to the cry of the relation rather than waiting for the claim of the titleholder. After all the MP articulates the will of his electorate, the lawyer articulates his clients case, so why cant a concerned, sentient person commiserate with his fellow citizens.

It was a radical innovation. But it was not arbitrary or extra-constitutional. It was the judiciary reading the Constitution’s fundamental rights chapter as a living commitment rather than a formal list, as meaning something for the person who had no lawyer, no literacy, and no legal address.

What has PIL achieved? Not in theory — in fact.

Bonded labour was identified, documented, and freed through PIL proceedings when the executive had little incentive to enforce its own laws. Undertrial prisoners who had spent more time in jail awaiting trial than their maximum sentence would have required were released through PIL intervention. Environmental protections that governments had quietly abandoned were enforced at citizens’ insistence. Child labour in hazardous industries was challenged. Prisoners’ rights were articulated for the first time. Custodial deaths were investigated. The right to food was enforced as a fundamental right through a PIL that ran for years and produced the mid-day meal programme as a constitutional entitlement for schoolchildren.

These are not small achievements. They are the Constitution working for the people it was written for, rather than only for the people who could already access it.

The Centre’s argument before the Constitution Bench is that PIL has been misused — that it has become a vehicle for “agenda-driven litigation,” judicial overreach, publicity-hungry lawyers, and interference in matters that should be left to the elected executive and legislature.

But the Centre’s argument uses the misuse of a mechanism to argue for the abolition of the mechanism, when the remedy for misuse is already built into the system.

Courts have complete discretion over PIL admissibility. They can and do refuse frivolous petitions. They impose costs on vexatious litigants.

The misuse argument, in other words, is an argument for better gatekeeping — not for demolishing the gate.

The deeper argument — the one that the “misuse” framing is covering — is about who gets to speak in court.

Traditional locus standi says: only the person directly injured can bring the injury before the court. You must own the grievance to litigate it. This seems reasonable in a society of equal, literate, legally aware citizens who can each independently assert their own rights. It is catastrophically inadequate in a society where those most in need of legal protection are precisely those least able to articulate and assert it.

The Centre wants to restore this rule. What this means in practice is not the elimination of “agenda-driven litigation.” It means the elimination of litigation on behalf of those who cannot litigate for themselves.

The bonded labourer cannot file a writ petition. If he could, he wouldn’t be a bonded labourer. The undertrial prisoner in solitary confinement cannot appear before a court to complain about his own solitary confinement. The tribal community whose forest is being destroyed in violation of the Forest Rights Act cannot easily afford the lawyers and the travel and the procedural compliance that formal litigation requires.

When PIL is abolished, these people do not suddenly acquire standing. They simply disappear from the court’s cognisance. The injury continues. The constitutional guarantee continues to exist on paper. The person it was supposed to protect cannot reach it, and now no one else can reach it on their behalf.

This is not the elimination of agenda-driven litigation. This is the elimination of justice for those for whom the Constitution’s promises were most urgently made.

India’s Constitution is not a document that trusts the majority or the executive to protect everyone. It was written by people who had experienced exactly what an unchecked colonial executive could do — and who understood that elected majorities could oppress minorities, that legislatures could be complicit in rights violations, that formal democracy could coexist with substantive tyranny.

This is why the Constitution explicitly empowers the judiciary to override both legislature and executive in protection of fundamental rights. Article 32 makes the Supreme Court the guarantor of fundamental rights — Dr. Ambedkar called it the “heart and soul” of the Constitution. Article 142 allows the Supreme Court to pass any order necessary for complete justice. Article 226 gives High Courts similar sweeping powers. Section 482 of the CrPC allows High Courts to prevent abuse of process. The basic structure doctrine, upheld in Kesavananda Bharati, places the judiciary above parliamentary power in protection of the Constitution’s essential features.

These are not judicial inventions or overreaches. They are express constitutional provisions, written deliberately, to ensure that citizens have a counter to the executive when the executive fails them.

To call judicial review of executive action “overreach” is to argue that the Constitution itself has overreached. That is not a legal argument. It is a political one — and a revealing one.

The timing of this argument is not incidental.

The Centre’s submissions came before a nine-judge bench hearing a reference arising from the Sabarimala case — a case fundamentally about whether constitutional rights can be overridden by religious practice and executive deference to it. The government is arguing, in the very forum deciding the scope of judicial review over executive and institutional power, that the mechanisms by which citizens access judicial review should be abolished.

It is an argument about who controls the courts, made in the courts, to the courts.

The Supreme Court bench has responded with caution rather than agreement.

But the argument has been made, at the highest level, by the government’s most senior law officer. That it was made at all is significant. That it was made in this forum, at this moment, in this political climate, is more significant still.

Justice Bhagwati, in the early PIL judgments, wrote that the courts must be “the last resort of the oppressed and the bewildered.” That phrase is worth sitting with.

Not the first resort. Not the primary mechanism. The last resort — for those who have exhausted every other avenue, who have no representative willing to represent them, no bureaucrat willing to process their case, no administrative mechanism adequate to their situation. For them, the court existed as a final guarantee that the Constitution’s promises were not entirely empty.

PIL is what makes that guarantee real for those who cannot access it in its formal form.

Its abolition would not clean up the court dockets. It would not eliminate frivolous litigation — frivolous litigation by titled parties will continue exactly as before. What it would eliminate is the last constitutional avenue available to those who have no title, no standing, no resources, and no representative — but who have a right, written into the Constitution seventy-five years ago, that the law will not abandon them.

The question the Centre’s argument poses, stripped of its procedural language, is very old and very simple: Is justice only for those who can reach it.

यह भी पढ़ें: सबरीमाला की आड़ में केंद्र का जनहित याचिकाओं के औचित्य पर सवाल