Why the Supreme Court Is Using Article 142, Not New Law, to Save NEET Protesters

An Extraordinary Power Used to Fix an Ordinary Failure Article 142 of the

Constitution lets the Supreme Court "pass any decree or make any order necessary for doing complete justice" in a matter before it. In plain English, it is not a law-making power - it is a gap-filling power, used when the normal machinery of justice would produce an unjust result and no ordinary remedy can fix it in time.

The Court's decision to invoke it here, to quash FIRs against NEET-UG protesters en masse, is not the Court overruling Parliament or writing new criminal procedure. It is the Court substituting for a police force that, by its own admission, has failed to do the one thing its job requires: tell an activist from an accused.

The Gap Article 142 Is Filling Ordinarily, a

person named in an FIR seeks quashing individually, under Section 528 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, through the High Court - a case-by-case process that could take months or years for thousands of students. Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta told the Court the police would confine their investigation to 2,873 people with serious criminal backgrounds; but advocate Vrinda Grover pointed out that Delhi Police have not even shared FIR numbers with the students they promised not to pursue.

That gap - between an executive promise and an executive's actual paperwork - is precisely the terrain Article 142 exists to cross. The CJI's insistence on first getting "a list of FIRs where only students are involved" shows the Court is not overriding the police's classification; it is forcing the police to actually produce one, then converting that list into blanket relief.

Why This Isn't Judicial Overreach Justice Joymalya

Bagchi's remark that the state cannot describe "undesirable elements" in "generic" terms is the constitutional heart of this case. Article 19(1)(b) guarantees the right to assemble peaceably; Article 19(3) allows only "reasonable restrictions," which cannot be satisfied by an FIR drafted broadly enough to sweep in a peaceful protester along with a history-sheeter.

When an executive fails to draw that line with the specificity the Constitution demands, the judiciary stepping in with Article 142 is not activism in the pejorative sense - it is the Court doing precisely what Kesavananda Bharati-era case law has always permitted: filling a procedural vacuum the executive created, without touching the substantive criminal law itself.

For an aspirant, the exam-relevant point isn't that the Court used Article 142 - it's recognising when Article 142 is the right tool: not to legislate, but to correct an administrative gap so large that ordinary remedies cannot close it before the underlying rights are irreversibly harmed.