T.K. Rangarajan v Government of Tamil Nadu (2003)

It is the modern authority for the proposition that government employees have no right to strike, and the source of the most quoted and most criticised formula in Indian labour law: that such employees have no fundamental right, no statutory right, and no moral or equitable right to go on strike.

It is set as a short note every year, and it separates the candidate who recites from the candidate who analyses. Reciting the holding gets half the marks. The rest goes to saying which part is ratio and which is obiter, explaining why the "moral or equitable" limb has been so heavily criticised, and placing the case correctly against Kameshwar Prasad, All India Bank Employees' Association and B.R. Singh. Present the criticism fairly — the examiner is testing judgement, not partisanship.

In July 2003 the employees of the Government of Tamil Nadu went on strike. The demands concerned pension and other service benefits, principally the restoration of a pension scheme the State had withdrawn. The strike was called by the associations of government employees and very widely observed; the strikers were mostly clerks and subordinate staff, and the administration of the State was largely paralysed.

The State's response was extraordinary in scale. Relying on the Tamil Nadu Essential Services Maintenance Act 2002 and on Tamil Nadu Ordinance No. 3 of 2003, promulgated during the strike, the Government dismissed some two lakh — about 200,000 — employees who had taken part. Large numbers were arrested; the figure before the Court was 2,211 persons taken into custody, of whom 74 were women, and only a small proportion had been released on bail.

The dismissed employees moved the Madras High Court under Art. 226. A single Judge granted interim relief directing that they be permitted to resume duty. On appeal, the Division Bench set that order aside and held the writ petitions not maintainable, because the employees had an alternative remedy before the Tamil Nadu Administrative Tribunal.

That ground was formally correct and practically hopeless. The Administrative Tribunal was functioning with a single member. Two lakh dismissed employees could not conceivably obtain relief from it within any useful period.

The employees appealed to the Supreme Court; writ petitions under Art. 32 were also filed.

1. Were the writ petitions under Art. 226 maintainable notwithstanding the alternative remedy before the Administrative Tribunal?
2. Do government employees have any right to go on strike — fundamental, statutory, or otherwise?
3. What relief should be granted to the dismissed employees?

For the employees. An alternative remedy is a rule of discretion, not of jurisdiction, and where the alternative is a one-member Tribunal facing two lakh cases the discretion must favour the writ court. On the merits, the dismissals were disproportionate and effected en masse without any enquiry. The strike was a last resort after negotiation failed; the right to form associations under Art. 19(1)(c) would be hollow if the association could never withdraw labour; and India's obligations under ILO instruments and Art. 8 ICESCR recognise the right to strike.

For the State. Government servants are not industrial workmen; they are governed by service rules, and Rule 22 of the Tamil Nadu Government Servants' Conduct Rules 1973 expressly prohibits strikes. A strike by government servants is not a dispute between an employer and labour; it is the withdrawal of the machinery of the State from the people, who are neither party to the dispute nor able to protect themselves. And the settled position since 1962 is that there is no fundamental right to strike.

The appeals were allowed in part; the Court decided all three questions.

1. On maintainability. The High Court ought to have entertained the petitions. An alternative remedy is not an absolute bar, and "because of the very exceptional circumstance that arose in the present case, there was no justifiable reason for the High Court not to entertain the petitions on the ground of alternative remedy". Where thousands require relief and the Tribunal is manned by one person, the alternative remedy is illusory.

2. On the right to strike, in three parts:

• No fundamental right. "The employees have no fundamental right to resort to strike." This follows the settled line from All India Bank Employees' Association v National Industrial Tribunal (1962) — Art. 19(1)(c) guarantees the right to form associations but does not guarantee that an association will achieve its objects, nor confer any particular means of doing so — and from Kameshwar Prasad v State of Bihar (1962), where a service rule banning demonstrations and strikes was struck down as to demonstrations (a peaceful demonstration being a form of expression under Art. 19(1)(a)) but upheld as to strikes.
• No statutory right. There is no statutory provision empowering government employees to strike, and an express prohibition in Rule 22 of the Conduct Rules.
• No moral or equitable right. The famous limb. Government employees cannot claim that they may "take the society at ransom by going on strike"; even if there is some injustice to them, in a democratic welfare State they must resort to the machinery the law provides for redressal; and strikes "cannot be justified on any equitable ground". The Court dwelt on the consequences — patients untreated, children untaught, the ordinary citizen left without services he pays for and cannot obtain elsewhere.

3. On relief. The Court did not leave the dismissed employees without a remedy, and this is regularly forgotten in student answers. It gave a graded set of directions:

• A large body of employees — the figure before the Court was 8,063 — were to be reinstated in service with effect from 25 July 2003, on tendering an unconditional apology for resorting to the strike and an undertaking to abide by Rule 22.
• Several categories were not reinstated at that stage but dealt with separately: those against whom criminal cases had been registered; Secretariat staff and senior officers, who were to be suspended rather than dismissed pending action; and those alleged to have committed offences under the Essential Services Maintenance Act.
• Representations by the remaining employees were to be decided without regard to s. 7 of the Ordinance, and as far as possible in accordance with the Conduct Rules and equity.
• Those against whom FIRs had been lodged could approach the Administrative Tribunal, which was directed to pass appropriate orders, including interim orders, within two weeks.

Ratio. Government employees have no fundamental right to strike under Art. 19(1)(c) or otherwise, and no statutory right to strike where the service rules governing them prohibit it; and the existence of an alternative remedy does not bar a writ petition under Art. 226 where that remedy is, in the circumstances, illusory.

Both propositions were necessary. The maintainability holding was necessary to reach the merits at all; the absence of a fundamental and statutory right was the ground on which the strike was held to be without legal foundation.

Obiter. The "no moral or equitable right" limb. Once the Court had held that there was no fundamental right and no statutory right, the case was decided; the additional pronouncement added nothing to the result. It is therefore, on any orthodox view, obiter dictum — and saying so is the single most valuable sentence you can write about this case.

A further limit on the ratio, and an important one. The case concerned government employees governed by service rules which expressly forbade strikes, in a State which had enacted an essential-services statute and an Ordinance. The Court was not construing the Industrial Disputes Act and did not purport to take away the regulated right of workmen in an industry under that Act. Nothing in Rangarajan touches the position of an industrial workman whose strike complies with ss. 22 and 23 of the ID Act (now s. 62 of the Code). Say this; it is the correct legal reading and it limits the case to what it decided.

The constitutional reasoning is short because it was settled. In All India Bank Employees' Association the Court had held that Art. 19(1)(c) does not guarantee that an association will achieve its objects, nor any particular means of achieving them — otherwise a whole industrial code would be read into a single sub-clause. It follows that neither collective bargaining, nor recognition, nor the strike is a fundamental right. Kameshwar Prasad applied the distinction precisely: a demonstration may be protected expression under Art. 19(1)(a), so a blanket ban is bad; a strike is not. The statutory reasoning is shorter still: Rule 22 forbade it.

The interesting question is why the Court went further. The answer lies in the passages on consequences. The Court was plainly moved by the scale of the disruption, and by the asymmetry between an industrial strike and a strike by public servants. In an industrial dispute the pressure falls on the employer, who is party to the dispute and can settle it; in a public services strike it falls on the public, who are not party to it, cannot settle it, and cannot obtain the service elsewhere. That asymmetry is a real point and is the strongest justification for the additional dictum.

But the Court paid a price for the form it chose. Denying a moral right is a claim about the ethics of collective action, not about law — a claim a court is not well placed to make and did not need to make.

What came after Rangarajan was, above all, criticism — a substantial and respectable academic body of it, directed at the "moral or equitable" limb. An answer that reproduces the case approvingly and stops will not get full marks. Present the criticism fairly.

1. The dictum was unnecessary and is obiter. Once the fundamental and statutory questions were answered, the case was over, and courts ordinarily avoid pronouncing on questions of morality.

2. It goes further than the authorities it relies on. All India Bank Employees' Association denied a fundamental right; it did not deny the legitimacy of the strike as an instrument of industrial relations. Kameshwar Prasad upheld a service rule and said nothing about the morality of strikes — and is itself authority that a ban framed too widely is bad, a nuance Rangarajan does not engage with. In B.R. Singh v Union of India (1989) the Court had described the strike as a recognised mode by which workmen assert their bargaining strength. Rangarajan is in tension with that.

3. It is out of line with India's international commitments. In ILO jurisprudence the right to strike is a corollary of freedom of association under Convention No. 87, whose principles bind India as a member State; and Art. 8 ICESCR, to which India is a party, requires States to ensure the right to strike exercised in conformity with domestic law. To say there is no moral right sits uneasily with an obligation to ensure a legal one.

4. It removes a counterweight without supplying a substitute. Government servants are excluded from most collective bargaining machinery. If they may neither bargain effectively nor strike, the residual remedy — representation to the very employer complained against — is thin, and the Court's answer that they must use "the machinery provided under different statutory provisions" assumes machinery that for pension and pay grievances is largely absent.

5. The relief granted sits oddly with the reasoning. Having held the strike wholly unjustified, the Court nevertheless directed reinstatement of thousands on an apology and an undertaking — closer to an equitable accommodation than to the position that no equitable claim exists at all.

The balanced conclusion to write. The right to strike in India is a legal right, regulated by statute — not a fundamental right, and not a right at common law either, since it involves a breach of contract. Its exercise carries the risk of illegality, loss of wages and disciplinary action. Rangarajan is authoritative on government servants governed by service rules that forbid strikes; it is best read as a decision on that class of employees, and its "moral or equitable" limb is obiter.

The case survives the repeal, largely untouched, because it was never a decision on the repealed Acts. Rangarajan turned on the Constitution, on State service rules and on a State essential-services statute. Rule 22 is a service rule, not a labour statute; the Tamil Nadu Essential Services Maintenance Act 2002 is a State enactment untouched by the Codes; and the constitutional propositions from All India Bank Employees' Association and Kameshwar Prasad are unaffected.

Nor would the Codes have applied to these employees in any event. IR Code s. 2(zr) excludes from "worker" persons employed mainly in a managerial or administrative capacity, and the machinery in Chapters VII to X operates on workers in an industry; while s. 2(p) excludes from "industry" any activity of the appropriate Government relatable to its sovereign functions.

But the strike provisions have changed substantially for everyone else, and that is the point to make.

The successor provision is IR Code 2020, s. 62 ("Prohibition of strikes and lock-outs"), in Chapter VIII. Under the Industrial Disputes Act, s. 22 required notice of a strike only in a public utility service; strikes elsewhere needed no notice and were controlled only by the general prohibitions in s. 23. Section 62 universalises the notice requirement. It applies to every industrial establishment, and the category of "public utility service" has disappeared from the statute book.

Under s. 62(1), no person employed in an industrial establishment shall go on strike, in breach of contract —

• (a) without giving the employer notice of strike within sixty days before striking; or
• (b) within fourteen days of giving such notice; or
• (c) before the expiry of the date of strike specified in the notice; or
• (d) during the pendency of conciliation proceedings before a conciliation officer and seven days after their conclusion; or
• (e) during the pendency of proceedings before a Tribunal or National Industrial Tribunal and sixty days after their conclusion; or
• (f) during the pendency of arbitration proceedings and sixty days after their conclusion, where a notification has been issued under s. 42(5); or
• (g) during any period in which a settlement or award is in operation, in respect of matters covered by it.

Section 62(2) imposes the mirror-image restrictions on lock-outs; s. 62(3) dispenses with notice where a strike or lock-out is already in existence, requiring intimation on the day it is declared; s. 62(6) requires the employer to report such notices within five days to the appropriate Government and the conciliation officer. Section 63 makes a strike commenced in contravention of s. 62 illegal, and s. 64 prohibits financial aid to an illegal strike or lock-out.

Two further points connect to Rangarajan. IR Code s. 2(zk) widens "strike" to include concerted casual leave by fifty per cent or more of the workers on a given day — the mass casual leave device, precisely the form many public-sector agitations took. And s. 53(1) requires conciliation where a s. 62 notice has been given, with a report due within fourteen days, so the notice period is not dead time.

The practical effect is that the legal right to strike, which Rangarajan denied to government servants, is now more tightly regulated for industrial workers than before. The critics' point in 4 above therefore has wider application under the Code than under the Act.

Under the Code. IR Code 2020, s. 62 replaces ID Act ss. 22 and 23 and extends the strike-notice requirement to every industrial establishment, abolishing the "public utility service" category; s. 63 makes contravention illegal; s. 2(zk) brings concerted casual leave by 50 per cent or more workers within "strike". T.K. Rangarajan itself, being a decision on the Constitution and on State service rules, is unaffected by the repeal.