Madhya Pradesh High Court calls reckless use of NSA an abuse of extraordinary power

In a decision delivered on September 11 and made public on October 5, the Madhya Pradesh High Court quashed the three-month preventive detention of brothers Rajendra and Rajesh Thakur, ruling that the authorities had not satisfied the constitutional requirements for invoking the National Security Act. Justice Vivek Agarwal’s bench said the detention order, issued by the Jabalpur district collector on January 6, was based on an alleged threat to public order but lacked substantive evidence, and that the officials had not applied their minds to the matter.

The court pointed out that the brothers, named in fourteen cases, had already been acquitted in eleven, suggesting that correct facts were not presented to the detaining authority. It criticized the rapid, single-day processing of the proposal by the city SP and the collector, and urged use of the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems for basic background checks. Citing the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Ameena Begum vs State of Telangana, the bench emphasized the need to uphold constitutional safeguards under Articles 14, 19 and 21. The judgment follows similar judicial rebukes of NSA detentions in Uttar Pradesh, where courts have warned against treating preventive detention as a substitute for ordinary criminal law.