In light of the recent honor killing in Rajasthan, Chief Justice of India Dhananjaya Y. Chandrachud, stated that hundreds of people are killed every year for falling in love or marrying outside their castes or against the wishes of their families.
He was speaking on morality and its interplay with the law at the Ashok Desai Memorial Lecture in Mumbai on the topic “Law and Morality: The Bounds and Reaches.” He said this while addressing questions on the indissoluble link between law, morality, and group rights.
Defining “adequate morality” as the morality of men, the upper castes, and able-bodied persons, the CJI said that people’s confidence in the protection of liberties rests in the judiciary.
“Even after the framing of the Constitution, the law has been imposing ‘adequate morality’, that is, the morality of the dominant community. In our Parliamentary system of democracy, laws are passed by the vote of majority. Therefore, the discourse around public morality often finds its way into the law enacted by the majority,” he noted.
“To counter the social morality of dominant groups that are imposed under the garb of common morality, there is a need to shift the conversation towards the values enshrined in the Constitution,” he added.
He further lamented that biases often creep into law, and said that such biases reflect a categorical preference for and against certain people within our community. To support his statement, CJI cited examples of bans on books, plays and restrictions on dance bars in Maharashtra. “Under the garb of protecting morality, the state tried to use the repressive power of law to restrain freedom of expression which is a constitutionally guaranteed right. Thus, even in societies governed by rule of law, we find that morality has always influenced how the law is interpreted and enforced,” he said.
The CJI emphasized through the lives of the members of the bar, who fearlessly espouse those causes, “the flame of liberty burns bright even today”.
He further referred to a theft case where a man would have spent 18 years in jail had the SC not intervened to say “trust us to be guardians of the liberties of our citizens.”
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