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NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court has broadened the ambit of right of life to bring in a citizen’s right to sleep peacefully under it. A citizen has a right to sound sleep because it is fundamental to life, the Supreme Court said on Thursday while ruling that the police action on a sleeping crowd at Baba Ramdev’s rally at Ramlila Maidan amounted to violation of their crucial right.

"Sleep is essential for a human being to maintain the delicate balance of health necessary for its very existence and survival. Sleep is, therefore, a fundamental and basic requirement without which the existence of life itself would be in peril," the court said, terming it as a basic human right.

Authorities have taken steps to protect citizens from being disturbed while they are asleep, like placing curbs on the playing of music late at night. But Tuesday’s order elevates right to sleep in the hierarchy of rights and may goad the authorities to protect it.

A bench of Justices B S Chauhan and Swatanter Kumar was unanimous that the police erred gravely by clamping prohibitory orders under Section 144 of Criminal Procedure Code on the night of June 4 when the gathering at Ramdev’s yoga camp was sleeping peacefully.

Though Justice Kumar wrote the lead judgment, Justice Chauhan elaborated on sleep as a fundamental right crucial to life and put it on the same plane as right to privacy and right to food, consistently held by the Supreme Court as an inviolable right which was part of right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution.

"Right of privacy and the right to sleep have always been treated to be a fundamental right like a right to breathe, to eat, to drink, to blink etc," he said while slamming Delhi Police for using unwarranted force on the sleeping crowd, thereby breaching fundamental right to privacy.

But no citizen could claim sleeping to be his fundamental right. "Undoubtedly, reasonable regulation of time, place and manner of the act of sleeping would not violate any constitutional guarantee, for the reason that a person may not claim that sleeping is his fundamental right, and therefore, he has a right to sleep in the premises of the Supreme Court itself or within the precincts of Parliament," Justice Chauhan said.

He said sleep for a human being was a basic necessity and not a luxury. "If this sleep is disturbed, the mind gets disoriented and it disrupts the health cycle. If this disruption is brought about in odd hours preventing an individual from getting normal sleep, it also causes energy misbalance, indigestion and also affects cardiovascular health," the judge said.

"Sleep, therefore, is a self-rejuvenating element of our life cycle and is, therefore, part and parcel of human life. The disruption of sleep is to deprive a person of a basic priority, resulting in adverse metabolic effects," he said.

"To arouse a person suddenly brings about a feeling of shock and numbness. The pressure of a sudden awakening results in almost a void of sensation. Such an action, therefore, does affect the basic life of an individual," Justice Chauhan said.

Rejecting the justification given by the police that the crowd was planning to disrupt peace, the judge said, "To presume that a person was scheming to disrupt public peace while asleep would be unjust and would be entering into the dreams of that person."

Quoting a US court judgment, Justice Chauhan said, "The citizens/persons have a right to leisure; to sleep; not to hear and to remain silent. The knock at the door, whether by day or by night, as a prelude to a search without authority of law amounts to be police incursion into privacy and violation of fundamental right of a citizen."

He said because of this, many countries have clamped complete night curfews at airports (that is, ban on landing and take-off at late night hours), for the reason that the concept of sound sleep had been associated with sound health which is an inseparable facet of Article 21 (right to life) of the Indian Constitution.