In a stinging judgement reclaiming democracy, the Gujarat High Court has shredded the Ahmedabad Police’s years-long practice of imposing back-to-back Section 144 orders — calling the state’s conduct “arbitrary, unjustified, and violative of fundamental rights”.
The message from the bench seems to be blunt:
Gujarat Police has no business treating an emergency law as a permanent rulebook.
Justice M.R. Mengdey’s order, delivered on December 4, doesn’t just quash a 2019 notification — it tears open a pattern of policing that critics say has long been used to smother public dissent in the state.
HC Nails It: ‘This Was Never an Emergency — So Why the Endless Bans?’
The petitioners, who were booked for peacefully protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act, told the court that from 2016 to 2019, Ahmedabad Police was practically addicted to Section 144 — issuing prohibitory orders one after another, with barely a gap.
The High Court agreed.
The judgment makes it clear that the city police had turned Section 144 — meant ONLY for brief, exceptional situations — into a rolling clampdown, imposing a near-constant ban on public assembly.
The court’s observations make Gujarat Police look less like a law-enforcement agency and more like a force governing by notifications instead of justification.
The court pointed out the most damning detail:
The Ahmedabad Police did not record any reasons for imposing these restrictions. Also, there was no transparency in the matter.
Just order after order, stamped and imposed.
Worse, the public didn’t even know these bans existed. The notifications were dumped into the official gazette — a place the average citizen never sees — and never communicated through any public channel.
The HC reprimanded the state for this opacity, saying modern governments cannot hide behind paperwork when fundamental rights are at stake.
HC: Stop Calling Everything a Law-and-Order Problem
In a sharply worded remark, the court said that authorities “clearly circumvented” the legal safeguards of Section 144 by mechanically reissuing orders.
Translation:
Gujarat Police was using a legal shortcut to avoid accountability.
The court even noted that similar excessive orders were being churned out under Section 37 of the Gujarat Police Act — hinting that the problem isn’t isolated, but part of a broader policing culture in the state.
A Judicial Blast at Gujarat’s Policing Style
This judgment is more than a legal setback — it is a public reprimand.
By calling out the arbitrary, unexplained and repetitive use of a powerful legal provision, the Gujarat High Court has effectively accused the state police of:
- normalising emergency powers,
- suppressing peaceful protest,
- and undermining constitutional freedoms.
For a force that often claims to be a model of efficiency, the verdict exposes something deeper:
a policing system that prefers control over accountability.
