Golaknath v. State of Punjab (1967)

Golaknath v. State of Punjab, decided by the Supreme Court of India on 27 February 1967, arose from a challenge to land-ceiling legislation and produced a landmark holding that Parliament's amending power under Article 368 could not be used to abridge or take away the fundamental rights enshrined in Part III of the Constitution. The case concerned the Golak Nath family of Jalandhar, Punjab, whose holdings were affected by the Punjab Security of Land Tenures Act, 1953, placed in the Ninth Schedule by the Seventeenth Amendment (1964). The family invoked Articles 19(1)(f) and 19(1)(g) — the rights to property and to practise any profession — and asked the Court to declare the amendment void to the extent it infringed those guarantees. An eleven-judge bench, the largest convened to that date, heard the matter under Chief Justice K. Subba Rao, who authored the lead opinion. The decision overruled two prior precedents, Shankari Prasad v. Union of India (1951) and Sajjan Singh v. State of Rajasthan (1965), both of which had upheld Parliament's unfettered competence to amend fundamental rights.

The procedural posture turned on the interpretation of three constitutional provisions read together: Article 13(2), which forbids the State from making any "law" that abridges fundamental rights; Article 368, which prescribes the amendment procedure; and Article 245, which confers legislative power. The majority of six judges, in a 6–5 split, reasoned that a constitutional amendment is "law" within the meaning of Article 13(2), and therefore falls under the same prohibition as ordinary legislation. From this premise it followed that any amendment offending Part III was void to the extent of the infringement. Subba Rao further located the amending power not in Article 368 itself — which the Court read as merely laying down procedure — but in the residuary or legislative entries, reinforcing the conclusion that amendments were a species of ordinary law subject to Article 13(2).

To avoid the chaos of invalidating the First, Fourth, and Seventeenth Amendments, all of which had already abridged property and other rights and on which extensive land reform rested, the majority deployed the doctrine of prospective overruling, imported from American constitutional practice. Under this device the Court declared that its new interpretation would operate only for the future: the amendments already passed and the transactions completed under them would remain valid, but Parliament was put on notice that from the date of the judgment it lacked competence to enact any further amendment curtailing fundamental rights. This was the first occasion on which the Supreme Court of India expressly invoked prospective overruling, and it remains a frequently cited instance of the technique in Indian jurisprudence.

The political reaction was immediate and consequential. The Government of India, under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, regarded Golaknath as an obstacle to its programme of agrarian reform, bank nationalisation, and abolition of privy purses. Parliament responded with the Twenty-fourth Amendment (1971), which amended both Article 13 and Article 368 to declare explicitly that nothing in Article 13 would apply to amendments made under Article 368, and that Parliament's constituent power included the power to add, vary, or repeal any provision, including the fundamental rights. The constitutionality of the Twenty-fourth Amendment was itself tested in Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala (1973), where a thirteen-judge bench overruled Golaknath on the question of amendability but simultaneously evolved the basic structure doctrine, holding that while Parliament could amend fundamental rights, it could not destroy the Constitution's essential framework.

Golaknath must be distinguished carefully from the basic structure doctrine it ultimately gave way to. The 1967 ruling imposed an absolute substantive bar — fundamental rights were beyond the reach of amendment in their entirety. Kesavananda replaced that categorical immunity with a more flexible standard: amendments to fundamental rights are permissible provided they do not abrogate the basic structure. The distinction matters because Golaknath protected the text of Part III as such, whereas the basic structure doctrine protects only those features the Court identifies as foundational. The two should also be separated from the narrower Shankari Prasad and Sajjan Singh line, which treated amendment power as plenary and unreviewable on substantive grounds.

The legacy of Golaknath is mixed and contested. Critics, including several of the dissenting judges, argued that equating constitutional amendments with ordinary law conflated constituent power with legislative power and ignored the distinct status of Article 368. The resort to prospective overruling was itself controversial, seen by some as judicial legislation. Yet the decision is rightly credited with crystallising the constitutional confrontation between Parliament and the judiciary that culminated in Kesavananda, and the right to property it sought to protect was eventually removed from Part III altogether by the Forty-fourth Amendment (1978), which relocated it to Article 300A as a constitutional but non-fundamental right.

For the working practitioner — particularly the UPSC aspirant and the constitutional researcher — Golaknath is indispensable as the doctrinal hinge between two eras of amendment jurisprudence. It is the case in which the Supreme Court first asserted that the amending power has limits, and although its specific holding no longer governs, its underlying anxiety about unchecked majoritarian amendment survives in the basic structure doctrine that anchors Indian constitutionalism today.