Articles 19(1)(b) and 19(1)(c) of the Indian Constitution protect the fundamental rights to assemble and associate, which are the basis of democratic and civic involvement. These rights, through which citizens acquire the ability to demonstrate dissent and to create collective organizations and to monitor institutional operations, are the rights of citizens. There are constitutional rights behind confines. Articles 19(3) and 19(4) of the Constitution allow restrictions on freedoms when they are in the interest of sovereignty, integrity, public order and morality. For this reason, the legal provision has become more and more frequently used to establish broad limitations on these rights, the proper constitutional limits of which are a matter of high importance. This paper analyses whether contemporary Indian legal and judicial methods of assembly and association restrictions conform to constitutional principles and international democratic standards. This paper makes use of a doctrinal approach to study constitutional articles along important court decisions as well as important legislations such as the Criminal Procedure Code (Cr PC), the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA). The methodological analysis combines First Amendment principles of US law as well as Article 11of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) as interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).The research framework shows that the basic doctrinal shortcoming in the Indian jurisprudence is the absence of an organized proportionality test. Indian courts’ reliance on the unstandardized "reasonableness" standard produces arbitrary executive powers with dissimilar outcomes in different cases based solely on the judge’s discretion. The article shows how India’s regulatory system limits the associational autonomy and protest rights through legal restrictions and administrative secrecy. And the meaningful civic space has gone because of indiscriminate internet shutdowns, licensing regimes and of civil society organizations being put under surveillance on grounds of Section144 Cr PC. Traditional interpretations of the legal system are unable to address modern public assembly and association through digital platforms because they do not protect “virtual assemblies or on line organizing.” This article creates a doctrinal model based on the principle of proportionality, judicial oversight with procedural fairness and digital public sphere recognition, which defends individual rights. Rigid textual interpretation methods should be abandoned by constitutional democracies because they should adopt an interpretative frame work that would require states to prove that their actions are justified. This research applies Indian constitutional concepts to international best practices to protect assembly and association rights in the current century.
Debbarma et al. (Fri,) studied this question.