a less and not more need to ensure that the election of the holder of such a high office to a Parliamentary seat had been free from any corrupt practice. It was urged that the test and the procedure for determining whether the holder of such an exalted, responsible, and important office was duly elected as a Member of Parliament could not, logically or reasonably, be different from that which ordinary Members of the Parliament had to go through. It was pointed out that in a case covered by this clause, there could be no consideration at all, if the amendment is upheld, of the validity of a past election by any authority in the future as all elections in this very special and exceptional class had been validated without any qualification and quite unconditionally. The effect was, it was urged , that the present Prime Minister was placed in a very privileged and exalted position which was not enjoyed by a past Prime Minister and which was not meant to be occupied by any future Prime Minister. Such a procedure and such a result, it was contended, made a mockery of the concept of free and fair elections under a democratic system. Furthermore, it was urged that it was destructive of the concepts of rule of law, of equality before law, and of just determination of judically triable disputes. Taking away of even the supervisory jurisdiction of superior Courts in elections of a certain class of dignitaries was characterised as a gross violation of a basic principle of our Constitution. It was also submitted that, if what was intended to be conveyed by the amendment was that Parliament had withdrawn the case before us from the sphere of judicial scrutiny and determination and had decided in itself, as was stated in his opening address by the learned counsel for the original respondent, not merely was the basic constitutional principle of separation of powers set at naught but the primordial rule of natural justice, that no one should be a judge in his own cause, had been infringed inasmuch as the dispute was really between a majority party and the numerically minority groups or parties in the Houses of Parliament. No hearing could be given to leaders of the numerically minority groups of parties in Parliament because they were, it was submitted, illegally detained under Preventive Detention laws after a declaration of emergency by the President of India, with the result that members of Parliament who did not support the ruling party were denied access to Courts so as to secure their release from detention and could not take part in proceedings which produced the Acts amending the Act of 1951, and, the 39th Amendment. I have already dealt with and rejected the objection to the proceedings of the Houses of Parliament, on the collateral ground of allegedly illegal detentions of opposition leaders. 515. All the contentions of learned Counsel for the election petitioners, apart from the alleged procedural defect in amending the Act of 1951 and the Constitution when a number of opposition Members of Parliament are detained under the Preventive Detention laws, already dealt with by me, seemed directed towards producing two results either simultaneously or alternatively; firstly, to persuade us to hold that the constituent power had been exceeded or sought to be utilised for extraneous purposes falling outside the purview of Article 368 of the Constitution altogether; and, secondly, to