The Right to Live with Human Dignity

In one line

Life in article 21 was held not to mean mere animal existence but to include the right to live with human dignity and all that goes with it, namely the bare necessaries of life and the facilities for expressing oneself in diverse forms, and that holding is the source of everything else in this module.

The proposition

The right to life includes the right to live with human dignity and all that goes along with it, namely the bare necessaries of life such as adequate nutrition, clothing and shelter, and facilities for reading, writing and expressing oneself in diverse forms, freely moving about and mixing and commingling with fellow human beings.

Three elements are doing work in that formulation.

Life is more than existence. A construction confining life to physical survival would make article 21 a prohibition on killing and nothing else.

Dignity is the standard. Not comfort, not welfare, but the conditions without which a person cannot live as a person.

And the bare necessaries are named. Nutrition, clothing and shelter are identified as content rather than left as inference, which is what allows the later cases to proceed.

Why dignity rather than some other standard

Four reasons, and they are what makes the move defensible rather than arbitrary.

The Preamble names it. The Constitution resolves to secure to all its citizens the dignity of the individual.

The Universal Declaration names it twice. The preamble recognises the inherent dignity of all members of the human family, and article 1 provides that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

Article 23's minimum wage construction had already used it. Payment below the statutory minimum was held to be forced labour because a person driven by hunger to accept it is not acting freely, which is a dignity argument.

And Part IV supplies its content. Article 39(a) livelihood, article 41 public assistance, article 42 humane conditions of work, article 43 a living wage, article 47 nutrition and public health. A court asking what dignity requires had sixteen directive principles telling it.

What follows, and how

The reasoning has the same four steps in every case, and stating them once is more useful than reciting a list of rights.

Article 21 protects life.

Life includes the right to live with human dignity.

A person cannot live with dignity without the thing claimed, whether livelihood, shelter, health, food, education or a clean environment.

Therefore the thing claimed is within article 21 and is enforceable by writ.

[The Rights Read into Article 21] is the resulting list, and the value of holding the reasoning rather than the list is that a candidate can apply it to a claim the list does not contain.