Listen to this article:

In Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, the trial of Charles Darnay at the Old Bailey begins as a fatal foregone conclusion. Accused of treason against the British Crown, trapped in a cage of circumstantial state dossier and bloodthirsty public opinion, Darnay stands entirely helpless. His salvation comes not from his own mouth, but from the sharp, detached eye of his legal counsel, Sydney Carton. By orchestrating a brilliant cross-examination that exposes a startling case of mistaken identity, Carton tears through the state’s “airtight” prosecution. Dickens’s timeless scene was not merely dramatic flair; it was a profound testament to a structural truth – that when an individual faces the immense, crushing apparatus of the state, an independent legal advocate is the only shield between life and the meat-grinder of unchecked power.

It is this foundational shield that has been aggressively dismantled by the West Bengal Assembly with the passage of The West Bengal Public Safety and Control of Anti-Social Activities Bill, 2026. Such laws are commonly called “Goonda Acts” across India. Under the guise of maintaining public order, the law empowers the executive to detain individuals for up to a year on the subjective assessment that they are “desperate and dangerous to the community.” Most alarming, however, is Section 10(4) of the Bill, which mandates that a detained person “shall not be ordinarily represented by a legal practitioner before an advisory board.” By effectively stripping away the right to legal counsel, the state has resurrected an archaic, pre-constitutional arbitrariness that fundamentally subverts the rule of law.

Also read: Why Are Criminals Called ‘Goonda’, ‘Mafia’ or ‘Don’?

 The defenders of the Bill point to Article 22(3)(b) of the Constitution, which provides a textual exception to the right to counsel for persons arrested under preventive detention laws. Yet, to rely on a literal, hyper-technical reading of this exception to completely banish lawyers from Advisory Boards is to ignore seven decades of constitutional evolution. A harmonious and common-sense reading of Articles 21 and 22 reveals that the right to legal........

© The Wire