The Madras High Court has recently ruled that once a provision of a Central Law or a Rule is declared unconstitutional by a High Court, it becomes invalid across the entire nation. The ruling was made by Justices R Subramanian and L Victoria Gowri of the Madurai Bench while hearing a case involving two notifications issued by the Tamil Nadu government.
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“The law is settled to the effect that once a provision of the Central Law or a Rule is held to be unconstitutional by a High Court, the same would stand effaced from the statute book in respect of the entire Nation and it cannot be said that it would not be valid within the jurisdiction of the particular High Court and it would be valid in other areas.”
The notifications in question, issued in July 2022, invited applications from eligible candidates for appointment to the District and the State Consumer Disputes Redressal Commissions. They were based on the Consumer Protection (Qualification for Appointment, Method of recruitment, Procedure of Appointment, Term of Office, Resignation and Removal of President and Member of the State Commission and District Commission) Rules, 2020, notified by the Central government. These Rules had been declared unconstitutional by the Bombay High Court in a judgment pronounced in September 2021.
The petitioner, V Sundararaj, argued that the Rules, particularly those related to the requirement of experience and the sweeping powers given to the Selection Committee, had been held as unconstitutional by the Bombay High Court. The Tamil Nadu government, however, argued that its notifications had been issued in accordance with the law and in compliance with a previous judgment of the Supreme Court, which had called for all vacancies in consumer fora across states to be filled up.
The High Court noted that while the Supreme Court’s judgment was delivered in 2021, the State government had issued its notifications much later in July 2022, almost 10 months after the Bombay High Court judgment. The court agreed with the petitioner’s submission that once any Rules framed by the Central government were held as unconstitutional by a High Court, they became invalid across the country and not just within the territorial jurisdiction of such High Court.
The court concluded, “If the said position is accepted, we have to necessarily conclude that the impugned notifications are bad and they have to be accordingly quashed. If the notifications are bad and they are liable to be quashed, the subsequent selection procedure that has been undertaken would also suffer from the same vice.” The court’s decision underscores the nationwide impact of a High Court’s ruling on the constitutionality of a Central Law or Rule.