The Same Order That Freed Thousands Also Named 2,873 Exceptions - What Article 142 Actually Permits

The Power That Has No Limiting Clause

• And Why That Is Both Its Strength and Its Risk Article 142 gives the Supreme Court the power to pass "such decree or order as is necessary for doing complete justice in any cause or matter pending before it." What it does not give is a definition of what "complete justice" means or a limit on how far the Court can go to achieve it. That absence of a boundary is precisely what let the Court, in a single order, quash every FIR against NEET-UG protesters nationwide while simultaneously authorising fresh FIRs against 2,873 named individuals - two outcomes that would ordinarily require two entirely different legal processes, delivered here as one exercise of one unlimited power.

The

Rule as Written and the Rule as Used Here In its ordinary form, quashing an FIR is a High Court function, exercised case by case under Section 482 of the CrPC (now the BNSS), requiring a petition, a hearing and a judicial finding on each individual complaint.

Article 142 let the Supreme Court bypass that entirely - consolidating relief across every State and Union Territory in one hearing, for every protester swept up between July 20 and 25, without requiring each of them to litigate separately.

That is the power working exactly as the Constituent Assembly envisioned it in 1949-50: as a safety valve for situations where procedural law, applied strictly, would produce an unjust and administratively impossible outcome - thousands of individual quashing petitions clogging courts for months.

Where the Exception Reveals the Limit But the

order's second half is the more instructive part. The Court did not treat "complete justice" as blanket amnesty - it drew a line at 2,873 individuals identified through facial recognition as having criminal antecedents, explicitly preserving the Delhi Police's power to pursue fresh, specific cases against them while directing that this "should not prejudice their rights." This is Article 142 being used with restraint even while being used expansively: broad enough to spare bona fide protesters from years of litigation, narrow enough to avoid becoming a shield for individuals with documented criminal history.

The power itself carries no such calibration mechanism built into its text - the restraint here came entirely from how this particular Bench chose to exercise it, which is exactly the criticism Article 142 has faced since the 2G spectrum case: its safeguards are judicial habit, not constitutional text.

For an aspirant, the exam-relevant insight is not that Article 142 exists - that's a one-line fact. It's that the provision's actual operation depends entirely on the Bench wielding it, because the Constitution wrote it as unlimited by design, trusting future Courts to self-regulate.

Whether that trust holds is the real constitutional question this order reopens.