z:\ ambedkar\vol-02\vol2-03.indd MK SJ+YS 21-9-2013/YS-8-11-2013 185
ON INDEPENDENCE OF JUDICIARY 185
namely, whether there was any justification which the House could accept as reasonable for suspending the sentence passed upon the two convicts. The Honourable the Home Minister might say that the High Court does not possess the powers of suspension and therefore it is quite irrelevant to urge whether the High Court wisely or unwisely refused to suspend the sentence. That is not the question. The question is whether the authority, the prerogative, vested in the Government for suspending, commuting or reducing sentences on prisoners who have been lawfully convicted has been properly exercised. The question is whether the discretion has been properly exercised. Now, Sir, in order to find out whether the exercise on the part of the Honourable the Home Minister of this prerogative has been properly exercised, it is necessary to eliminate certain probabilities. First of all, on the facts as they appear from newspaper reports, it is clear that these people, who indulged in this act of gambling on a vast and a colossal scale, were certainly not poverty-stricken people who were driven to these nefarious acts of gambling for the purpose of earning their bread. That certainly is not the case. From the facts as reported, these people were rich Banias. They possessed enormous capital ; they had several companies or head offices in different parts of the city, in different parts of India, and they were carrying on their trade on a colossal scale. There could be, therefore, no justification in this particular case that they were unfortunate people who, by reason of their poverty, by reason of their adverse circumstances, were compelled to resort to acts of gambling. That is not the excuse that one can find, because the facts are totally opposed to that kind of inference. Secondly, there has been nothing suggested, at any rate in the reports that have appeared and in the application that was made in the High Court, that there was any other ground for this suspension. There is nothing to show that these two convicts were ill or suffering from any disease ; there is nothing to show that there was any domestic calamity befalling their families which needed their freedom. That also we do not know from the facts before us, and that inference, again, has to be eliminated. Thirdly, the possibility that might be suggested was that they wanted to make an appeal to a higher tribunal. As against that hypothesis, it is quite well known, and the Home Minister knows it far better than I do—he is a much greater lawyer than I can pretend to be—that the Privy Council has laid down in hundreds of cases that they shall not admit any appeal from a criminal court in India unless it is shown that in the course of the trial, not the ordinary provisions of the Criminal Procedure Code, but the principles of natural justice have been violated. They have, in their own judicious way, absolutely limited the scope and the authority for entertaining criminal appeals. And there is not the ghost of a suggestion in this case that either the Chief Presidency Magistrate or the High Court, before whom the trial and the appeal respectively were conducted, was in