Q.What if Machal was rich/powerful? What if construction workers were engineers? Would their rights have been violated?

This question asks us to imagine the same set of facts happening to a person with more power or

status, to see how much of what happened to Machal Lalung depended on his own powerlessness rather …

Machal Lalung's Fundamental Rights -- to a fair, speedy legal process and to personal liberty under

Article 21 -- existed in the Constitution the entire time he was in custody. What was missing was not

the legal guarantee itself, but any effective way for a poor, powerless, and largely forgotten

individual to actually invoke it. A person with money, connections, or public visibility would almost

certainly have had a lawyer pursuing their case, family members raising the alarm, or media coverage

drawing attention to the delay -- any of which could have brought the matter before a court far

sooner through the Right to Constitutional Remedies.

The same reasoning applies to the construction workers in the second scenario: manual labourers

often have far less access to legal recourse, union support, or public sympathy than professionals

like engineers would in an equivalent dispute over safety, wages, or working conditions. If the

workers were engineers, a violation of their rights (say, unsafe conditions or unpaid dues) would be

far more likely to attract legal notice, media coverage, or professional-body intervention.

This comparison illustrates a broader and important point about rights: having a right on paper is …