Is there a connection between Public Interest Litigation and Fundamental Rights?

My daily ranting on PIL continues with an interesting question. Is Public Interest Litigation related to Fundamental Rights? My gut feeling was `No'. One should be able to file a PIL whenever there is a public interest that needs to be addressed. There doesn't have to be a violation of a specific fundamental right. Isn't that the whole point of PIL?

Today, I came across a few interesting cases. The first one is Janata Dal v. H.S. Chowdhary ((1992) 4 SCC 305). The operative part of the judgment is:
It is thus clear that only a person acting bona fide and having sufficient interest in the proceeding of PIL will alone have a locus standi and can approach the Court to wipe out the tears of the poor and needy, suffering from violation of their fundamental rights, but not a person for personal gain or private profit or political motive or any oblique consideration. Similarly, a vexatious petition under the colour of PIL brought before the Court for vindicating any personal grievance, deserves rejection at the threshold.

What I understand from this is that there needs to be a violation of a fundamental right, for a person to approach the Court in public interest. This seems to be the dominant theory in the Court for a few years.

Then I saw BALCO Employees Union v. Union of India where the Court says 'Such a litigation [PIL] cannot per se be on behalf of the poor and the downtrodden, unless the Court is satisfied that there has been violation of Article 21 and the persons adversely affected are unable to approach the Court'.
The strange thing is that the Supreme Court seems to have just quietly gone from allowing PILs only when there is an accompanying Fundamental Right infraction to allowing PILs even without Fundamenal Right infractions. The only case I can find that shows that the Court has moved away from its earlier position is Ashok Kumar Pandey v. State of West Bengal where the Court says:

A person acting bona fide and having sufficient interest in the proceeding of public interest litigation will alone have a locus standi and can approach the Court to wipe out violation of fundamental rights and genuine infraction of statutory provisions

To prove this point, I did a search for the term `public interest litigation' on Manupatra and then a search for the same term applying the field as 'Constitution'. If all PILs were relating to Fundamental Rights, then all PILs should fall within the Constitution field. But the number of search hits for the two are different with the first being greater, showing that PILs are not necessarily for the enforcement of Fundamental Rights.

This raises some important questions? Is there a connection between Fundamental Rights and PIL at all? The answer to this seems to be that there was a connection that somehow eroded with time. It would be interesting to see when the Court changed its perspective and how this has influenced the volume of PIL the Court handles.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Kaushik Krishnan's Blog