Why in news?

The Supreme Court recently used its special powers under Article 142 of the Constitution to quash FIRs filed against participants in nationwide exam protests led by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP).

This decision has renewed debate over a provision that gives the Court unusually wide powers — one that legal scholars have argued about since the Constitution was adopted.

What’s in Today’s Article?

• What Happened in the CJP Case?
• About Article 142
• How Has the Court Used This Power Before?
• Has the Court Tried to Limit Its Own Power?
• A Recurring Source of Controversy

What Happened in the CJP Case?

• A bench led by CJI Surya Kant, along with Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana, closed cases linked to the July protests over the NEET-UG 2026 exam leak.
• The Centre told the Court it had "consciously decided" not to pursue these cases, and the Court also ordered compensation — within three months — for families of students who died by suicide over the leak.
• Nearly all FIRs from the protests were quashed, except those involving about 2,873 individuals with "serious and grave criminal antecedents."
• As part of the same hearing, CJP was asked to publicly commit to calling off a protest march planned for September 5.
• In effect, the Court became the platform through which the government fulfilled a demand CJP had made back in July.

About Article 142

• Article 142 allows the Supreme Court to pass any order necessary for "doing complete justice" in a case before it.
• Unusually for a constitutional provision, it does not define what "complete justice" means, or lay down when it can be used — leaving this entirely to the Court's discretion.
• Its roots go back to Section 210 of the Government of India Act, 1935, and further still, to the colonial-era practice of deciding cases based on "justice, equity and good conscience" when no written law applied.
• It appeared in the Draft Constitution as Article 118 and was adopted by the Constituent Assembly on May 27, 1949 — without any real debate.
• Essentially, its true scope was left for the Court to shape over the following decades, case by case.

How Has the Court Used This Power Before?

• Because it is so open-ended, Article 142 has become one of the Supreme Court's most frequently used tools. Some notable examples:
  • Bhopal Gas Tragedy (1989): Used to secure a $470 million settlement from Union Carbide, and to quash criminal cases against the company.
  • Ayodhya Title Dispute: Applied to resolve the case on "preponderance of probability," awarding five acres of land to the Muslim side.
  • A G Perarivalan's release (2022): Ordered release of a convict in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case.
• The Court has also used it to grant divorces where a marriage has "irretrievably broken down," and in various public interest cases
• An empirical study by IIM Ahmedabad researchers, examining all cases from 1950 to 2023 referencing "Article 142" or "complete justice," found 1,579 references and 791 direct invocations — mostly in civil matters.

Has the Court Tried to Limit Its Own Power?

• The Supreme Court is often called one of the most powerful constitutional courts in the world, largely because of how it uses Article 142.
• This power becomes even more significant in a "polyvocal" court, where 38 judges typically sit in small benches of two.
  • A "polyvocal" court is a supreme court that speaks through multiple small, independent benches rather than a single unified voice, leading to different or overlapping interpretations of the law.
  • The term is most famously used to describe the Supreme Court of India.
• The Court has occasionally tried to set boundaries on itself:
  • Prem Chand Garg v State of Uttar Pradesh (1962): Held that Article 142 orders must still respect fundamental rights and existing law.
  • Supreme Court Bar Association v Union of India (1998): Held that Article 142 can fill gaps left by a statute, but cannot override an existing statutory scheme.
• However, the Court has often departed from its own cautionary rulings.

Why Does the CJP Order Raise Concerns?

• Normally, an FIR is examined individually — under Section 528 of the Bharatiya Nagrik Suraksha Sanhita — to check whether an offence is genuinely made out, or whether the case is clearly malicious.
• In the CJP order, however, thousands of FIRs from multiple states were grouped together and quashed without individual scrutiny, as part of a negotiated deal between the government and a protest group.
• Legal scholars argued that criminal law provisions cannot be overridden through such a blanket judicial decree — since this bypasses the normal legal process, rather than simply filling a gap in it.

A Recurring Source of Controversy

• This isn't the first time Article 142 has drawn sharp criticism:
  • When the Court last year used the same provision to treat long-pending Tamil Nadu Bills as automatically assented to, the then Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankhar described it as a "nuclear missile" against democratic institutions.
  • Former Attorney General K K Venugopal wrote in 2017 that while the provision had done "tremendous good" for disadvantaged sections, it needed proper checks and balances.
  • After the Sabarimala judgment, he went further, calling Article 142 a "Kamdhenu from which unlimited powers flowed" (referring to the mythical wish-granting cow).
  • He suggested that only five-judge Constitution Benches should be allowed to invoke it — to prevent its use resting on the interpretation of a single small bench

Conclusion

Article 142 remains one of the Supreme Court's most powerful yet controversial tools — enabling it to deliver justice beyond the limits of ordinary law, but also raising concerns about judicial overreach when used to bypass established legal procedures.

The CJP case highlights this tension sharply, reviving long-standing calls for clearer limits on how and when this extraordinary power should be exercised.