Bandhua Mukti Morcha v. Union of India (1984)

A public interest petition is filed by someone who was not present at the violation, on behalf of people who cannot come to court, about facts that are usually not documented anywhere. Strict adversarial procedure — pleadings, affidavits, examination and cross-examination of witnesses produced by the parties — cannot get such facts before a court. If the court insists on it, the relaxation of standing achieved by S.P. Gupta is worth nothing.

Bandhua Mukti Morcha is the procedural answer, and it is the third step in the PIL sequence this course uses. It is also the authority for a point about the researcher's own work.

The proceedings concerned bonded labour and came to the Court under Article 32 at the instance of an organisation rather than the labourers themselves. The problem that shaped the ruling is a factual one: how is a court to satisfy itself about conditions affecting a large, scattered and powerless group?

When the poor seek enforcement of fundamental rights, the court must depart from strict adversarial procedure and evolve new methods to bring the necessary material before it. Article 32(2) deliberately places no restriction on the procedure the Court may adopt or the directions it may issue.

The judgment is also the authority for the proposition that the problems of the poor call for a different kind of lawyering skill.

1. Read the text of Article 32(2). It empowers the Court to issue directions, orders or writs, whichever may be appropriate, and prescribes no procedure. Where the Constitution leaves the procedure open, the Court may fashion one that fits the right it is enforcing.
2. Match procedure to the party who must use it. A procedure designed for two represented commercial litigants cannot be applied to a petitioner acting for illiterate and dispersed victims; insisting on it would defeat the right rather than protect it.
3. Find another route to the facts. Hence the new methods — commissions, reports from investigating officers and expert bodies, and other means of gathering material — which allow the Court to inform itself rather than depend wholly on what the parties choose to file.
4. Keep the enquiry disciplined. The point is not that facts may be assumed, but that they may be gathered differently. Material brought in this way still has to be reliable, because the Court will act on it.

It opens the procedure limb of the PIL question, in the sequence S.P. Gupta (standing), PUDR (nature), this case (procedure), M.C. Mehta (remedies).

It has a second and very practical use in this paper, on research method. Because the problems of the poor need a different kind of lawyering skill, the researcher must go beyond the library: facts often have to be collected from the affected people and from public authorities, and they must be verifiable, because the court will act on them. In a PIL research memorandum this is the reason the factual categories — the violation, the class affected, the duty broken, and why the affected persons cannot approach the court — carry annexures and evidence rather than assertion. Support the facts with reliable secondary material where it exists: official and expert body reports, and standard annual surveys and journals, rather than unauthenticated sources.

It disposes of the objection that a petition must fail because the petitioner cannot produce the victims as witnesses in the ordinary way.

It does not decide what relief may be granted — M.C. Mehta is the authority on remedies — and it does not licence a court to act on untested material. Nothing in it dispenses with the requirement of standing under S.P. Gupta.