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On June 29, the West Bengal Legislative Assembly passed the West Bengal Public Safety and Control of Anti-Social Activities Bill, 2026, along with the Maintenance of Public Order (Amendment) Bill, 2026 fundamentally redrawing the boundaries of state power. The administration argues that existing penal frameworks are inadequate to confront the organised syndicates behind illegal sand mining, extortion, and political violence.

The administration maintains that witnesses are intimidated, evidence is destroyed, and investigations often face serious obstruction. Yet, a close legal reading of the statutory text raises grave constitutional concerns over executive overreach, the bypassing of due process, and the possible weaponisation of the law against democratic dissent.

The measure of a civilised state lies not in the coercive strength of its police force, but in the independence of its courts. That distinction marks the fundamental dividing line between a democracy governed by the rule of law and an authoritarian state governed by executive command.

The core controversy does not lie in the state’s stated objective to curb organised crime, but in the statutory architecture chosen to achieve it. For legal practitioners, the first point of scrutiny is always the evidentiary threshold and the precision of statutory definitions.

On both counts, the Public Safety Bill raises serious concerns. It adopts an extraordinarily expansive definition of “anti-social activity” and permits an individual to be branded a “goonda” merely on the subjective premise that they are “generally reputed to be desperate and dangerous to the community.”

The most serious concerns arise from the operational powers created by the Public Safety Bill. The Bill empowers the state government, acting through senior executive officials such as district magistrates, commissioners of police, or police officers not below the rank of deputy inspector general, to issue orders for the preventive detention of an individual. Section 10(4) of the draft Bill explicitly mandates that “a detained person shall not ordinarily be entitled to be represented by a legal practitioner before the advisory board.”

Also read: Bengal’s New ‘Anti-Social Activities’ Law Is Alarming and Erodes Due Process

The denial of legal counsel in a preventive detention hearing creates an acute and devastating asymmetry of power. Preventive detention is not ordinary imprisonment following conviction by a court. Its jurisprudence is highly technical, hinging on complex concepts such as the subjective satisfaction of the detaining authority, the proximity and nexus of the alleged acts to........

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