Thank you, Justice Jamdar

📌 Summary:

• Context: A single-judge bench of the Bombay High Court (Justice Madhav J Jamdar) set aside an externment order issued by Mumbai Police against Saeed Ahmad Abdul Wahid Chaudhary, general secretary of the Social Democratic Party of India, who had organised/participated in protests (allegedly without police permission) against government decisions on CAA/NRC, Babri Masjid and sealing at the Gyanvapi mosque

• Core argument: The editorial celebrates the order as the judiciary performing its true role — custodian of citizen freedoms and a bulwark against state overreach; the court asked why citizens cannot protest government decisions and stressed that police are servants of the people, not of top government functionaries

• Legal reasoning: In the absence of evidence that the protester posed a danger to public safety or property, the externment order violated his constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights

• Causal chain warned against: powerful governments label and criminalise dissent → institutions bend to power → democratic instruments are used to shrink democratic spaces → an architecture of distrust of the citizen is created and a chilling message strips citizens of freedom and dignity

• The court's question — whether citizens are being made "slaves of government" by slapping cases for opposing government decisions — highlights the danger of eroding separation between institutions and the space for checks and balances

• Solution proposed: the state must not challenge the order; it should treat it as an opportunity to correct course, and the judgment should "strike echoes in the system"

🎯 UPSC Relevance: GS2 Polity — Fundamental Rights (Articles 19, 21), judiciary as guardian of liberties, police accountability, dissent in a democracy; GS4 — voice of conscience in public institutions.

🔑 Key Term: Externment — a preventive policing power to expel a person from a defined territorial area to pre-empt threats to public order; courts require concrete evidence of danger, as it curtails fundamental rights of movement and expression.