01-08-2022 (Important News Clippings)
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Core constraints
Infrastructure sectors’ headline growth may be robust, but is not broad-based yet
Editorial
The eight core sectors of the Indian economy not only account for over four-tenth of its measured industrial output but also serve as an indicator of the momentum in investment activity through demand for items such as cement and steel. Electricity generation is a good proxy for overall demand in the economy while fertilizer production numbers help gauge agricultural activity. So, it is heartening that the official index to measure these sectors’ output has registered two successive months of double-digit growth. Factoring in the 9.3% uptick for these sectors in April — it was 19.3% and 12.7% in May and June — the first quarter of 2022-23 has seen output growth of 13.7%, despite the high base of 26% growth in Q1 last year. Total industrial output grew 6.7% in April and 19.6% in May. Based on June’s core sectors’ data, economists reckon industrial production to rise anywhere between 9% and 13% in June. These high numbers are a tad misleading because the first quarter of 2020-21 was marred by national lockdowns, and though output did not suffer as much during the second COVID-wave in Q1 of 2021-22, economic conditions were not ideal either. In any case, these base effects will start fading from July. For better context to assess where the economic recovery stands, industrial output in May was 1.7% over pre-pandemic levels and core sectors’ output in June is 8% over 2019.
What should cause concern is that the recovery is still fragmented and dissonant. Moreover, the rebound momentum seems to be flagging as core output declined 4.08% in June over May 2022. Just four infra sectors drove most of the growth in June, led by coal output jumping 31.1% and cement rising 19.4% from 2021 levels. Crude oil output tanked again in June after a positive blip in May, while natural gas grew a mere 1.2% and steel 3.3%. Refinery products grew 15.1%, driven by higher global oil prices making exports attractive, and electricity rose 15.5%, signalling domestic demand. The monsoon would dampen coal production, pressuring generators to import more coal if electricity demand sustains. The only two sectors to record a month-on-month growth in June — cement and fertilizers — also face headwinds. Cement production is expected to taper off on the same meteorological account as coal, even as an uneven monsoon could hurt fertilizer demand. The good news is that the Centre’s capital spending, critical to sustain the recovery, bounced remarkably in June to ₹68,000 crore from an underwhelming ₹28,000 crore in May — ensuring that a quarter of the year’s target has been met in Q1. With private capital still shy, global turmoil and local inflation playing spoilsport with the recovery, it is vital that the Centre keep the pedal pressed on this front and cajoles more States into availing the ₹1 lakh crore capex loan window soon.
Date:01-08-22
PMLA verdict, an erosion of constitutional buffers
It enables the reintroduction of an ‘unconstitutional’ law and also holds that the linked bail conditions are not arbitrary
Suhrith Parthasarathy is an advocate practising in the Madras High Court
India’s criminal justice system, we are led to believe, is built on a set of received axioms that are inherent to the basic precepts of justice and fairness. These include the idea that a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty; the idea that a person detained on suspicion of having committed an offence would be entitled to bail pending trial; the idea that a criminal law ought not to be retroactive; the idea that a person accused of an offence must be informed of the charges made against him; and the idea that a suspect has a privilege against incriminating herself.
Today, each of these principles is so consumed by a welter of exceptions that their bases have lost all vigour. Regrettably, this erosion in our values has time and again received the Supreme Court of India’s imprimatur. The latest example is the judgment of a three-judge bench in Vijay Madanlal Choudhary vs Union of India, delivered on July 27. In it, the Court has upheld vast parts of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), 2002, despite the law’s inversion of seemingly time-honoured maxims of criminal jurisprudence.
Defined in vague terms
Briefly put, “money laundering” refers to the process through which the proceeds from criminal activity are masked with a view to concealing their illegitimate source. From the mid-1980s onwards, countries around the world began to see a need to introduce special legislation to curb and punish this process. The PMLA came out of these initiatives. It defines the crime itself in vague terms. Section 3 of the Act says, “Whosoever directly or indirectly attempts to indulge or knowingly assists or knowingly is a party or is actually involved in any process or activity connected with the proceeds of crime including its concealment, possession, acquisition or use and projecting or claiming it as untainted property shall be guilty of offence of money-laundering.”
The definition makes for difficult reading. But as we can see it is pegged on the use of what is termed as “proceeds of crime”. This phrase is separately defined to mean property that is obtained out of the commission of a crime “relating to a scheduled offence”. The schedule, in the law’s present iteration, contains an array of breaches under 30 different statutes. These range from specific offences under the Indian Penal Code, 1860, such as murder, extortion and kidnapping, and offences under laws such as the Arms Act, 1959 and the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956, to more minor infractions under the Copyright Act, 1957, and the Trade Marks Act, 1999. The judgment in Vijay Madanlal Choudhary confirms what ought to have been obvious on a bare reading of the law: although the offence under the PMLA is separately prosecutable, unless the proceeds of crime relate to a “scheduled offence” — or what is also described as a predicate offence — no case can be made out under the statute. In other words, if a person is ultimately acquitted or discharged in a case concerning the predicate offence, the charge under the PMLA can no longer be maintained.
The dangers
This finding, routine by itself, is perhaps the only silver lining in the judgment. As scholars of criminal law will surely attest to in the days to come, in almost every other regard the ruling either falls back on familiar misgivings in India’s criminal procedure law, or, worse still, creates a pathway for further violations of the Constitution. The lawyer, Abhinav Sekhri, has already published a fine analysis on different aspects of the judgment, particularly on the unfounded conclusion that the PMLA is not a penal statute, but a sui generis one, which means that the law can, according to the Court, overlook several constitutional safeguards, including the right against self-incrimination.
A section and bail conditions
Although many of the conclusions in the judgment are tenuous, none is more striking, and more damaging, than its ruling upholding Section 45. This provision imposes twin conditions for bail. Apart from mandating that the prosecutor is allowed a hearing before bail is granted, the clause also requires the court to be satisfied that there are “reasonable grounds” for believing that the accused is not guilty of the offence and that he or she is not likely to commit any offence while on bail.
In its previous version, prior to an amendment made in 2018, the law classified the predicate offences contained in the schedule into two categories. It separated those which carried with it an imprisonment for a term no less than three years from other offences. The twin requirement was mandated only for those cases where the predicate offence was viewed as more serious. A two-judge Bench in Nikesh Tarachand Shah vs Union of India declared this version unconstitutional. The Court found the classification between offences unreasonable and the conditions themselves too disproportionate.
Now, Parliament could have introduced a new provision for bail, by removing the defects pointed out by the Court. But instead it chose to delete the classification that it had made, and imposed through Section 45 the twin conditions for all offences under the PMLA. The petitioners in Vijay Madanlal Choudhary argued that the legislature could not have validly amended a law that had already been declared unconstitutional. The Court, however, held that the judgment in Nikesh Tarachand Shah did not obliterate the provision and that Parliament was entitled to revive the law by deleting its defects. In this vein it found that the only flaw highlighted in Nikesh Tarachand Shah was the classification distinguishing different manners of offences in Section 45, which had now been removed.
This might have been an acceptable conclusion if Nikesh Tarachand Shah had indeed struck down Section 45 only on this ground. But a reading of the judgment shows (and strangely these portions find mention in the latter parts of the ruling in Vijay Madanlal Choudhary) that the Court also found the twin conditions by themselves manifestly arbitrary. Nikesh Tarachand Shah distinguished crimes of terror from crimes under the PMLA and pointed out that in virtually requiring something akin to a finding of innocence at the stage of bail, Section 45 far outweighed the ordinary demands of a penal law. This, therefore, should have meant that a provision for bail could not have been reintroduced into the PMLA without explicitly removing the twin conditions.
Yet, Vijay Madanlal Choudhary not only grants sanction to Parliament’s effort at reintroducing a law previously declared unconstitutional but also holds that the requirements for bail are by no means arbitrary or unreasonable. This, the judgment does, not through any independent analysis of the PMLA’s objectives, but through a mere equation, in the Court’s belief, of the offence of money laundering with the offence of terrorism. The Court arrives at this finding unmindful of the fact that the predicate offences contained in the Schedule include crimes ranging from the discharging of pollutants under the Environment Protection Act to penalties for applying for a false trade mark under the Trade Marks Act.
Test of proportionality
We are fast approaching the five-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s judgment in K.S. Puttaswamy vs Union of India. In it, a nine-judge Bench declared the existence of a right to privacy. But the verdict turned momentous because it went beyond this otherwise unremarkable declaration. The Court held that fundamental rights operate not in silos, but by giving and taking meaning from each other and that any invasion of a constitutionally guaranteed freedom must satisfy a test of proportionality. This meant that every time the state impinged on a right, it had to show, among other things, that there existed not only a rational nexus between the law made by it and the objective at stake but also that it had satisfied itself that there were no less invasive means available to achieve the same aim.
Applied in its true spirit, Puttaswamy ought to have transformed India’s constitutional landscape. In theory, the Court had provided a road map for a jurisprudence grounded in ideas of justice, fairness, and due process. But the grand principles championed there in the abstract have failed to translate into genuine constitutional advancement. Instead, personal liberty has increasingly come to be seen as a pettifogging irrelevance.
सोशल मीडिया पर नकेल
संपादकीय
जमानत की आस में गुनाह से बड़ी सजा काटते कैदी
हरबंश दीक्षित, ( विधि विशेषज्ञ)
भारतीय जेलों में कैद कुल बंदियों में से दो तिहाई से अधिक संख्या विचाराधीन कैदियों की है। उनके ऊपर लगे आरोपों के बारे में अभी अदालतों को निर्णय लेना है कि उन्होंने वास्तव में अपराध किया भी है या नहीं। इनमें से तकरीबन आधे कैदी तो जमानत योग्य छोटे-छोटे अपराधों के आरोपित हैं। कानून के मुताबिक, जमानत मिलना उनका अधिकार है, लेकिन जागरूकता के अभाव में या कई बार तकनीकी कारणों से वे लंबे समय से बगैर दोष साबित हुए जेल में बंद हैं। दंड शास्त्र का स्थापित सिद्धांत है कि बिना अपराध साबित हुए किसी व्यक्ति को जेल में बंद नहीं रखा जाना चाहिए। जमानत के प्रार्थनापत्र का शीघ्रता से निस्तारण संविधान के अनुच्छेद 21 के अंतर्गत जीवन और दैहिक स्वतंत्रता के मूल अधिकार का हिस्सा है। ऐसे प्रार्थनापत्रों का एक समय-सीमा में निस्तारण होना चाहिए, और जब तक अभियुक्त को छोड़ने से न्याय पर प्रतिकूल असर पड़ने की आशंका न हो, तब तक उसे जमानत से इनकार नहीं किया जाना चाहिए। पर हकीकत इससे अलग है।
भारतीय कानून में जमानत के व्यापक उपबंध दिए हुए हैं। सर्वोच्च न्यायालय ने भी समय-समय पर दिशा-निर्देश जारी करके जमानत की प्रक्रिया को आसान बनाने का प्रयास किया है। दंड प्रक्रिया संहिता की धारा 436 में कहा गया कि जमानती अपराध का अभियुक्त का यह अधिकार है कि उसे जमानत दी जाए। यदि वह जमानत भरने को तैयार है, तो मुकदमे के किसी भी चरण में जमानत की मांग कर सकता है और उसे जमानत देने से इनकार नहीं किया जा सकता। गैर-जमानती मामले, जमानती मामलों से अलग होते हैं। उनमें अभियुक्त अधिकार के रूप में जमानत की मांग नहीं कर सकता। इसका यह मतलब यह नहीं है कि उसे जमानत नहीं दी जा सकती। दंड प्रक्रिया संहिता की धारा 437 के गैर-जमानती मामलों में ऐसे आरोपितों को जमानत नहीं दी जाती, जिनके बारे में अदालत को यह विश्वास करने का कारण हो कि अभियुक्त को मृत्युदंड या आजीवन कारावास की सजा हो सकती है। हालांकि, ऐसे मामलों में भी बीमार लोगों, बच्चों या महिलाओं के लिए यह व्यवस्था है कि अदालत उन्हें अपने विवेक से जमानत दे सकती है।
जमानत की पहली अर्जी जिला अदालतों के सामने आती है। इन अदालतों की कुछ व्यावहारिक परेशानियां हैं, जिनको नजरअंदाज नहीं किया जा सकता। कुछ मामले तो ऐसे होते हैं, जो मीडिया में इतना तूल पकड़ लेते हैं कि अदालतों पर यह दबाव बन जाता है कि वे जमानत देने का जोखिम नहीं उठा सकते। वे तकनीकी रूप से चाहे जितने सही हों, हमारा समाज उनकी उस अच्छाई को समझने लायक अभी परिपक्व नहीं हो पाया है। फिर उन्हें अपने खिलाफ जांच की भी आशंका रहती है। हाल के दिनों में न्यायिक अधिकारियों के खिलाफ निराधार शिकायतों की संख्या खूब बढ़ी है। ऐसे में, संवेदनशील न्यायाधीश को न्याय देने के साथ ही अपनी प्रतिष्ठा की चिंता भी रहती है। यही कारण है कि कई बार कोई निर्णय न लेना सबसे सुरक्षित विकल्प होता है।
इस चक्रव्यूह से निकलने के लिए यह जरूरी है कि जमानत देने या इनकार करने की स्पष्ट कानूनी व्यवस्था हो, ताकि अभियुक्त के साथ न्याय हो और न्यायाधीश को अपने करियर को लेकर कोई चिंता न रहे। ग्रेट ब्रिटेन, अमेरिका, न्यूजीलैण्ड, श्रीलंका जैसे मुल्कों ने जमानत के लिए अलग से कानून बनाया है और उसके अच्छे परिणाम आए हैं।
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