The Dialectic of Sovereign Preservation and Individual Freedom: Deconstructing the Suspension of Fundamental Rights through the Prisms of Public and National Interest

DOI

https://www.doi.org/10.59256/ijrtmr.20260605058

Published In

Volume 6, Issue 5 (2026)

Published Online

September-October 2026

Pages

509-516

Article Type

Original Article

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The constitutional architecture of a democratic republic confronts its sharpest conceptual strain when the existential preservation of the state collides with the entrenched liberties of the individual. Under the Indian constitutional matrix, Part III guarantees fundamental rights as mandatory negative covenants and structural fetters upon sovereign power, an entrenchment fortified by the judicial invalidation mechanism of Article 13(2).Conversely, Part XVIII arms the Union Executive with extraordinary crisis mechanisms under Articles 352 through 360, permitting the automatic derogation of basic freedoms under Article 358 and the presidential suspension of judicial enforcement under Article 359.This study presents a doctrinal, comparative, and critical examination of the suspension of fundamental rights, specifically deconstructing the frequent conceptual conflation between "public interest" and "national interest". Tracing the domestic constitutional trajectory from the formalist, compartmentalized approach in A.K. Gopalan through the procedural and judicial capitulation of A.D.M. Jabalpur, v. Shivakant Shukla, this paper evaluates the corrective rights. framework established in Maneka Gandhi and institutionalized by the Forty-Fourth Constitutional Amendment. This historical and doctrinal analysis is situated alongside a comparative assessment of crisis governance across the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Finally, the paper subject’s preventive detention frameworks, subjective executive satisfaction, and the normalization of emergency regimes into statutory law to critical scrutiny. It argues that national interest cannot legitimately swallow public interest or extinguish the core of human dignity, asserting that modern constitutionalism requires non-derogable procedural minima, unhindered judicial review over ultra vires or mala fide exercises of power, and strict adherence to the structured four-prong test of proportionality.