The Line a Retired Judge Keeps Drawing - Liberty Yes, Disruption No

THE LINE JUSTICE DHULIA KEEPS DRAWING

• AND WHY ARTICLE 142 IS WHERE IT GETS ENFORCED Justice Dhulia's interview isn't newsworthy for any single quote - it's newsworthy for the pattern across five years of decisions: dissent, hijab, sedition, judicial appointments. In each, he sides with individual liberty over institutional convenience, but never abandons a second, quieter commitment - that liberty stops where disruption begins. The real story is how that second commitment is currently being enforced: not by legislation, but by the Supreme Court's discretionary power under Article 142. A pattern, not a single position On dissent: "a university is meant to raise dissenting voices." On the 2022 hijab case: choice doesn't "stop at the school gate." On sedition: "the old colonial laws should be given up." Each stance is framed around the same value - the individual's right to be different from what the state or institution prefers - and each comes with an explicit boundary. Dhulia is careful to add, in the same breath as his defence of dissent, that "a line has to be drawn between dissent and outright disruption." This isn't hedging; it's the actual content of his constitutional philosophy - liberty is protected precisely because it has a shape, not because it is unlimited. Where Article 142 does the enforcing That boundary needs an instrument to hold it in practice and right now that instrument is Article 142 - not ordinary criminal procedure, not legislative reform. When the Supreme Court quashed FIRs against NEET-UG protest students in September 2026, it wasn't applying a settled statutory test for what counts as protected protest; it was using its power to do "complete justice" to override state action it judged disproportionate. That's a significant admission by omission: there is no codified legal standard distinguishing protected campus dissent from punishable disruption. The line exists in judicial discretion, exercised case by case, through an article designed as a safety valve - not as a routine mechanism for protecting speech. Why this should unsettle a UPSC aspirant, not reassure them A protection that depends on the Supreme Court choosing to invoke its most extraordinary power, rather than on a settled Article 19(1)(a) doctrine applied by trial courts and police at the first instance, is a protection that only works after the fact - after FIRs are filed, after students are already inside the system. Dhulia's own comments on sedition point at the same gap: colonial-era tools remain available to state actors precisely because Parliament, not the judiciary, would need to close them. Article 142 can undo damage; it cannot prevent the initial overreach it corrects. For the exam, this is the sharper reading: judicial sympathy for dissent, however consistently expressed, is not the same as a structural safeguard for it - and the distance between those two things is exactly where FIRs against students keep getting filed in the first place.