Golaknath v. State of Punjab (1967)

Golaknath v. State of Punjab, decided on 27 February 1967, is a landmark judgment of the Supreme Court of India that addressed whether Parliament's amending power under Article 368 of the Constitution extends to the abridgement of fundamental rights guaranteed under Part III. The case arose when the Golak Nath family of Jalandhar, Punjab, challenged the Punjab Security of Land Tenures Act, 1953, which had been placed in the Ninth Schedule by the Constitution (Seventeenth Amendment) Act, 1964, thereby insulating it from judicial review under Article 31B. The petitioners contended that the amendment violated their fundamental rights to property (then Article 19(1)(f) and Article 31) and to equality (Article 14). The eleven-judge bench, the largest convened to that date, delivered a 6:5 verdict that overturned two earlier precedents and reshaped the constitutional understanding of the amending power.

The core procedural question turned on the meaning of the word "law" in Article 13(2), which provides that the State shall make no law that takes away or abridges the rights conferred by Part III, and that any law made in contravention shall be void. Chief Justice K. Subba Rao, writing for the majority, held that a constitutional amendment enacted under Article 368 is "law" within the meaning of Article 13(2), and therefore an amendment that abridges fundamental rights is itself void. The majority reasoned that Article 368 merely laid down the procedure for amendment and did not, by itself, confer a substantive power; that power was located in the residuary legislative entries. Since amendments were a species of legislative law, they were subject to the constraint of Article 13(2). The practical consequence was that Parliament was stripped of competence to amend Part III to curtail any guaranteed right.

To avoid the disruption that retrospective invalidation would cause, the majority deployed the doctrine of prospective overruling, imported from American jurisprudence and applied for the first time in Indian constitutional law. Under this device, the new principle would operate only from the date of judgment onward. Consequently, the First, Fourth, and Seventeenth Amendments, though they had abridged fundamental rights, were held valid because they were enacted before 27 February 1967; only future amendments encroaching on Part III would be struck down. The five dissenting judges, led by Justices K.N. Wanchoo and M. Hidayatullah, held that Article 368 contained both the power and the procedure to amend, that an amendment was an exercise of constituent power distinct from ordinary legislative law, and that Article 13(2) therefore did not control it.

Golaknath expressly overruled Shankari Prasad v. Union of India (1951) and Sajjan Singh v. State of Rajasthan (1965), both of which had upheld Parliament's power to amend fundamental rights and had treated constitutional amendments as outside the scope of Article 13. The decision provoked a direct political response from the Government of India. Parliament enacted the Constitution (Twenty-fourth Amendment) Act, 1971, which amended both Article 13 and Article 368 to declare unambiguously that Article 13 shall not apply to any amendment made under Article 368, and that Parliament may amend "any provision of this Constitution" by way of addition, variation, or repeal. This legislative reversal set the stage for the next great constitutional confrontation.

Golaknath must be distinguished from the doctrine it ultimately yielded to: the basic structure doctrine announced in Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala (1973). Whereas Golaknath imposed an absolute bar—Parliament could not amend fundamental rights at all—Kesavananda overruled Golaknath on that point and held instead that Parliament may amend any provision, including Part III, provided it does not destroy or damage the basic structure or essential features of the Constitution. The basic structure doctrine thus replaced Golaknath's rigid, rights-specific prohibition with a flexible but unbreachable core limitation. Golaknath is also distinct from the question of judicial review of ordinary legislation; it concerned the reviewability of the constituent act of amendment itself.

The judgment remains controversial for its analytical premises. Critics argued that the majority conflated constituent power with legislative power, and that treating an amendment as ordinary "law" ignored the supermajority and special procedure prescribed by Article 368. The invention of prospective overruling, while pragmatically necessary, was criticised as a judicial innovation without textual mooring. The ruling's short life—six years before Kesavananda—and its formal overruling on the central holding mean that Golaknath no longer states good law on the amenability of fundamental rights. Yet its enduring legacy lies in establishing the principle that the amending power is not unlimited, a proposition the Court would refine rather than abandon.

For the working practitioner—the civil-services aspirant, the constitutional lawyer, or the policy analyst—Golaknath is indispensable as the doctrinal hinge between the unrestricted amendment regime of Shankari Prasad and the basic-structure equilibrium of Kesavananda. It is examined in the UPSC General Studies Paper II syllabus on Indian polity, Article 368, and the evolution of fundamental rights. Understanding Golaknath clarifies why the Twenty-fourth Amendment was passed, how the Court first asserted limits on constituent power, and why the basic structure doctrine emerged as the durable settlement governing the relationship between Parliament's amending authority and the inviolable core of the Constitution.