JUDGMENT

V. R. KRISHNA IYER, J. :— Every litigation has a touch of human crisis and, as here, it is but a legal projection of lifes vicissitudes.

2. A complaint was filed by the Deputy Superintendent of Police, Vigilance (Directorate of Vigilance) Cuttack, against the appellant, the former Chief Minister of Orissa under S. 179. I.P.C., before the Sub-Divisional Judicial Magistrate, Sadar, Cuttack alleging offending facts which we will presently explain. There upon the Magistrate took cognizance of the offence and issued summons for appearance against the accused (Smt. Nandini Satpathy). Aggrieved by the action of the Magistrate and urging that the complaint did not and could not disclose an offence, the agitated accused-appellant moved the High Court under Art. 226 of the Constitution as well as under S. 401 of the Cr. P. Code, challenging the validity of the Magisterial proceeding. The broad submissions, unsuccessfully made before the High Court, was that the charge rested upon a failure to answer interrogations by the police but this charge was unsustainable because the umbrella of Art. 20 (3) of the Constitution and the immunity under S. 161 (2) of the Cr. P. Code were wide enough to shield her in her refusal. The plea of unconstitutionality and illegality, put forward by this pre-emptive proceeding was rebuffed by the High Court and so she appealed to this Court by certificate granted under Art. 132 (1), resulting in the above two appeals, thereby taking a calculated risk which might boomerang on the litigant if she failed, because what this Court now decides finally binds.

3. Every appeal to this Court transcends the particular lis to incarnate as an appeal to the future by the invisible many whose legal lot we decide by laying down the law for the nation under Article 141; and, so, we are filled with humility in essaying the task of unravelling the sense and sensibility, the breadth and depth, of the principle against self-incrimination enshrined in Art. 20 (3) of our Constitution and embraced with specificity by S. 161 (2) of the Cr. P. Code. Here we must remember, concerned as we are in expounding an aspect of the Constitution bearing on social defence and individual freedom, that humanism is the highest law which enlivens the printed legislative text with the life-breath of civilized values. The Judge who forgets this rule of law any day regrets his nescient verdict some day.

4. Now, we move on to the riddle of Art. 20 (3), the range of the right to silence and the insulation of an accused person from police interrogation under S. 161 (2) of the Cr. P. Code. Counsel on both sides have presented the rival viewpoints with utmost fairness and some scholarship and we have listened to them, not as an abstract intellectual exercises peppered by lexical and precedential erudition but as deeper dives into the meaning of meanings and the exalted adventures in translation of twinkling symbols. Our Constitutional guarantees are phrased like the great sutras - pregnant brevities enwombing founding faiths.

5. The basic facts which have given rise to this case need to be narrated but the law we have to settle reminds us, not of a quondam Minister, the appellant, but of the numerous indigents, illiterates and agnostics who are tensed and perplexed by police processes in station recesses, being unversed in the arcane implications of Art. 20 (3) and unable to stand up to rough handling despite S. 161 (2). Law-in-action is tested b its restless barks and bites in the streets and its sting in hostile camps, especially when the consumers are unaware of the essential contents of the protective provisions, and not by its polished manners and sweet reasonableness in forensic precincts. The pulse of the agitated accused. hand-cuffed and interrogated the rude voice and ready rod of the head constable and the psychic strain, verging on consternation, sobbing into involuntary incriminations, are part of the scenario of police investigation which mu