The judgment emphasizes the importance of procedural safeguards in preventive detention and highlights the need for fair and just procedures, minimal restrictions, and the protection of personal liberty.

JUDGMENT :

1. Personal liberty of a person known and recognized as a fundamental right is self-inhering right the enjoyment of which by a person is guaranteed and guarded by none other than the Constitution of India. Thus, something which the Constitution of India itself guarantees and guards cannot be allowed to be fiddled with by an entity i.e. the State and its authorities which function under the aegis of the Constitution of India, except by following the strict regime of law under which such fundamental right of a person can be impinged, curtailed or restricted. Preventive detention jurisdiction is one of such laws.

2. Preventive detention jurisdiction is, thus, a subject to be handled with care and caution envisaging and expecting legal maturity of the trustees entrusted with the authority to exercise the jurisdiction which is eventually meant to end in depriving a citizen of his personal liberty by reference to his potentiality rather than actuality for acts endangering the society and the State. Stakes of far reaching effects are envisaged and involved in each and every case of preventive detention both from the point of view of the State and the society and also the person facing/suffering preventive detention.

3. The preventive detention of a person is a safety serving for the State and the society. To carry out a preventive detention of a person, there are non-negotiable procedural checkmates and check-points which if ignored, by design or default, by a public authority/officials acting on behalf of the State, in detaining a person under preventive detention jurisdiction, then there is no scope for expecting a judicial diplomacy from a Constitutional Court to provide a let off to the wrong/omission/error attending preventive detention of a person. Lost personal liberty of such a person is to be restored even if the subjective satisfaction to detain a person in itself may be justifiable. The present case is one where the check-points have been punctured in effecting the preventive detention of the petitioner who has come asking to restore the snatched personal liberty.

4. The Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Jammu (in short “SSP, Jammu”), upon the basis of fact that the petitioner was found involved on five occasions at different points of time in the alleged commission of offences under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 (in short “NDPS Act, 1985”), had considered the petitioner to be a fit case to suffer deprivation of his personal liberty in order to check his further indulgences in activities as may amount to offences under the NDPS Act, 1985.

5. The SSP Jammu compiled a dossier with respect to the petitioner bearing alleged facts upon the basis of which the case for preventive detention of the petitioner curtailing his personal liberty under the Prevention of Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1988 (in short “PIT NDPS Act, 1988”) was allegedly made out to be presented before the authority vested with the power to order preventive detention. It is this act of the SSP Jammu which resulted in preventive detention of the petitioner who has now come forward to impugn his preventive detention order terming it to be illegal and unconstitutional.

6. The chronology of the case relates back to booking of the petitioner in FIR no. 225/2017 with the Police Station Satwari, Jammu that being the first FIR for alleged acts of commission of offences under the NDPS Act, 1985 on the part of the petitioner and the last being FIR no. 79/2022 with the Police Station Satwari, Jammu under the NDPS Act, 1985.

7. The SSP, Jammu came to compile and submit a Dossier no.CRB/Dossier/2022/13/DPOJ dated 22.09.2022 to the respondent no. 2- Divisional Commissioner, Jammu urging thereby that the petitioner is a part of vicious network of drug traffickers and dealers who is involved in vari