Article 142 (Power to do Complete Justice)

Article 142 of the Constitution of India confers on the Supreme Court an extraordinary jurisdiction to "do complete justice" in any cause or matter pending before it. Article 142(1) provides that the Court may pass such decree or make such order as is necessary for doing complete justice, and that any such decree or order is enforceable throughout the territory of India in the manner prescribed by or under any law made by Parliament, or until such provision is made, in the manner prescribed by Presidential order. Article 142(2) supplements this by granting the Court, subject to any law made by Parliament, the power to secure the attendance of persons, the discovery or production of documents, and to investigate or punish any contempt of itself. The provision was drawn from the recommendations of the Drafting Committee and reflects the framers' intent, articulated during the Constituent Assembly debates, that the apex court possess plenary residuary authority to fill gaps where existing law proved inadequate to the demands of justice.

Procedurally, Article 142 is not invoked as an independent cause of action but is exercised in aid of a matter already before the Court under its appellate jurisdiction (Articles 132–136), its original jurisdiction (Article 131), or its writ jurisdiction (Article 32). A litigant cannot file a petition "under Article 142"; rather, having properly seized the Court of a dispute, the Court draws upon Article 142 at the remedial stage to mould relief. The power is curative and supplementary: it allows the Court to dispense with statutory procedural requirements, to issue directions binding on parties and authorities, to transfer cases, to grant compensation, and to craft orders that no statute expressly authorises. Critically, the order so passed acquires nationwide enforceability without requiring separate execution proceedings of the ordinary kind.

The contours of the power have been progressively defined through judicial self-restraint. In Supreme Court Bar Association v. Union of India (1998), the Court held that Article 142 cannot be used to override express statutory provisions or to build a new edifice where none exists in law; it supplements, but does not supplant, substantive statutory rights. This corrected the earlier expansive reading in Union Carbide Corporation v. Union of India (1991), the Bhopal gas tragedy settlement, where the Court had suggested that Article 142 prevails even over inconsistent statutory provisions. In Prem Chand Garg v. Excise Commissioner (1963) and later in A.R. Antulay v. R.S. Nayak (1988), the Court clarified that orders under Article 142 must not contravene the fundamental rights guaranteed in Part III nor the express prohibitions in substantive statutes. The accepted modern doctrine permits departure from procedural law and from non-fundamental statutory provisions, but not from the basic features of substantive legislation or constitutional guarantees.

Contemporary applications demonstrate the breadth of the power. The Supreme Court invoked Article 142 to grant divorce by dissolving marriages that had irretrievably broken down, despite "irretrievable breakdown" not being a statutory ground under the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955—a practice settled by the Constitution Bench in Shilpa Sailesh v. Varun Sreenivasan (2023), which also held the Court could waive the six-month cooling-off period under Section 13B(2). In the Ayodhya title dispute, M. Siddiq v. Mahant Suresh Das (2019), the Bench used Article 142 to direct the allotment of five acres for a mosque. The Court has employed it to ban the sale of liquor along national highways, to cancel 214 coal block allocations in Manohar Lal Sharma v. Principal Secretary (2014), and to release convicts who had served sentences exceeding the maximum prescribed. The power has thus become a principal instrument of the Court's remedial creativity.

Article 142 must be distinguished from adjacent constitutional mechanisms. Unlike Article 32, which guarantees an enforceable right to move the Supreme Court for the protection of fundamental rights and is itself a fundamental right, Article 142 confers a discretionary power on the Court rather than a right on the citizen. It differs from Article 136, which concerns the discretionary grant of special leave to appeal—the gateway through which many matters reach the Court—whereas Article 142 governs the remedial outcome once the matter is admitted. It is broader than Article 141 (which makes the Court's declared law binding on all courts) because Article 142 enables order-making, not merely law-declaring. The analogous High Court power flows from Article 226 and the inherent powers under Section 482 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, neither of which carries the "complete justice" mandate.

The provision remains contested. Critics, including sections of the executive and legal academia, argue that Article 142 invites judicial overreach and erodes the separation of powers when the Court legislates through directions—as alleged in the highway liquor ban and in directions on environmental regulation. The Vice-President and several parliamentarians publicly criticised the power in 2025 following its use in State of Tamil Nadu v. Governor of Tamil Nadu, where the Court fixed timelines for gubernatorial and presidential assent to bills and deemed certain bills assented to. Defenders respond that the power addresses genuine governance vacuums and that judicial self-imposed limits—non-derogation from statute and fundamental rights—provide adequate restraint. The absence of an external check, however, leaves its exercise dependent on judicial discipline.

For the working practitioner—the civil servant, the law officer, the policy researcher—Article 142 is indispensable to understanding why Supreme Court orders sometimes transcend the four corners of existing legislation and bind administrative authorities directly. A desk officer drafting compliance memoranda must recognise that an Article 142 direction is immediately enforceable nationwide. For UPSC GS-II preparation, the provision exemplifies the tension between judicial activism and separation of powers, and connects directly to debates on basic structure, contempt jurisdiction, and the institutional balance among the organs of the Indian state.