ADM Jabalpur: The top court’s fall and redemption

The judgment is a cautionary tale of how legal formalism and deference to executive authority can gut the soul of a liberal constitutional democracy

Fifty years after the Emergency, the memory of that period continues to haunt the conscience of India’s constitutional democracy. Central to that collective reckoning is the Supreme Court’s judgment in ADM Jabalpur Vs Shivkant Shukla case in 1976, famously dubbed the “Habeas Corpus case”.

People take out a demonstration against the imposition of Emergency in 1975. (HT Archive)

At a time when the judiciary was expected to act as the guardian of civil liberties, the apex court chose to