BEHIND BARS, BUT NOT BARRED FROM FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS

Two Supreme Court judgements this year extended the rights of the disabled in prison. Such intervention is essential in a country where jail before trial or conviction is routine

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LEGAL scholar Upendra Baxi has often said that the term social action litigation (SAL) is more appropriate for what is commonly known as public interest litigation (PIL).

This is because these cases aim at social uplift and don't merely reflect public interest. Yet, more than the change in nomenclature, there must be a qualitative transformation in the very idea of SAL. Constitutional morality must take centre-stage in such cases and SAL judgements should reflect the ideals of the nation's fundamental document.

Two such judgements have recently come from the Supreme Court, both touching the lives of an extremely vulnerable group of society-the disabled inmates of Indian jails. In L Muruganantham (2025) the court issued a slew of directives to the Tamil Nadu government to ensure systemic changes that meet the specific needs of disabled prisoners in the state. In the more recent Sathyan Naravoor (2025) judgement, the court expanded the Muruganantham directives' scope to the whole country and added another set of directives.

The facts of the Muruganantham case are unique. L Muruganantham, a lawyer from Tamil Nadu, suffered degenerative locomotive disability. A civil dispute in his family led to the registration of a crime that was later quashed by the Madras High Court. Meanwhile, he was remanded to the Central Prison in Coimbatore by a magistrate. Though he was released on bail after 9 days, this period of incarceration demonstrated the fragility of Indian prison ecology in terms of the rights of the disabled.