India, Nov. 10 -- An organisation cannot escape constitutional scrutiny merely because the government set it up as a society rather than as a department or a statutory body, the Supreme Court has held, ruling that what counts is the depth of government control and not the legal form adopted.

A bench of Justices Prashant Kumar Mishra and Augustine George Masih made the observation in a November 6 judgment dismissing an appeal by the National Book Trust and upholding a 2012 Delhi High Court ruling that declared the trust an instrumentality of the government and therefore "State" under Article 12 of the Constitution.

"Registration as a society does not place a body mandatorily beyond Article 12 of the Constitution," the bench said. The tes...