Sajjan Singh v. State of Rajasthan (1965)

Sajjan Singh v. State of Rajasthan is a 1965 Constitution Bench decision of the Supreme Court of India, reported as AIR 1965 SC 845, that examined the scope of Parliament's amending power under Article 368 of the Constitution of India. The case arose from a challenge to the Constitution (Seventeenth Amendment) Act, 1964, which expanded the Ninth Schedule by inserting forty-four additional state land-reform statutes—including Rajasthan tenancy and zamindari abolition laws—thereby insulating them from judicial review under Article 31B. The petitioner contended that because such amendments curtailed the fundamental right to property guaranteed under Article 31 and Article 19(1)(f) as then in force, they required ratification by state legislatures under the proviso to Article 368. The five-judge bench, headed by Chief Justice P. B. Gajendragadkar, was thus called upon to revisit the foundational question first settled in Shankari Prasad Singh Deo v. Union of India (1951): whether constitutional amendments are "law" within the meaning of Article 13(2), and therefore void if they abridge Part III rights.

The procedural posture turned on a clean statutory question. Article 13(2) provides that the State shall not make any "law" that takes away or abridges fundamental rights, and any law in contravention is void to the extent of the inconsistency. Article 368, as it stood in 1965, prescribed a special majority—a two-thirds majority of members present and voting in each House, with an absolute majority of total membership—for amendments to most provisions, and added a proviso requiring ratification by not less than half the state legislatures for amendments touching enumerated entrenched provisions such as the election of the President, the distribution of legislative powers, and Article 368 itself. The Seventeenth Amendment had been passed by the requisite special majority but without state ratification. The petitioner's argument therefore had two prongs: that an amendment abridging fundamental rights was caught by Article 13(2), and alternatively that the amendment fell within the proviso because it affected the powers of the High Courts under Article 226.

The Court, by a majority, rejected both contentions and affirmed Shankari Prasad. Gajendragadkar C.J. held that the word "law" in Article 13(2) refers to ordinary legislation enacted under the State's legislative power, not to a constituent act of amending the Constitution under Article 368. Because amending power is a distinct, higher constituent power, amendments are not subject to the Article 13(2) prohibition, and Parliament could validly abridge or take away fundamental rights through the prescribed procedure. On the proviso point, the majority held that the Seventeenth Amendment did not directly affect Article 226 powers; any effect on the High Courts' jurisdiction was merely incidental, and incidental effects did not attract the ratification requirement. The Court accordingly upheld the validity of the amendment and dismissed the challenge.

The decision is historically significant less for its result than for the doubts two concurring judges recorded, which seeded the next decade of constitutional litigation in New Delhi. Justice M. Hidayatullah and Justice J. R. Mudholkar, while concurring in the outcome, questioned whether fundamental rights could be left perpetually at the mercy of a transient parliamentary majority. Mudholkar J. expressly raised whether the basic features of the Constitution—a phrase that anticipated the later doctrine—could be altered at all, and whether the framers intended the Preamble's commitments to be amendable. These reservations, voiced in the Supreme Court in 1965, were cited directly when an eleven-judge bench in I. C. Golak Nath v. State of Punjab (1967) overruled Sajjan Singh and Shankari Prasad, holding that Parliament could not abridge fundamental rights through amendment.

Sajjan Singh must be distinguished from the cases that bracket it. It reaffirmed Shankari Prasad (1951) on identical reasoning but with a larger doctrinal awareness; it was overruled by Golak Nath (1967), which deployed the device of prospective overruling to invalidate the orthodox position without unsettling past amendments; and it was indirectly resurrected and then transcended by Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala (1973), which restored Parliament's power to amend fundamental rights while subjecting that power to the basic structure doctrine. The conceptual line separating Sajjan Singh from Kesavananda is precisely the distinction between an unlimited amending power and a power limited by implied substantive restraints. Sajjan Singh represents the high-water mark of parliamentary supremacy in the Indian constitutional scheme before judicial review of amendments crystallised.

The controversy at the heart of the case—property rights versus agrarian redistribution—frames its enduring relevance. The Seventeenth Amendment, like the First and Fourth before it, was a response to High Court decisions striking down zamindari abolition and tenancy reform on Article 31 grounds. The political imperative of land reform drove the executive to repeatedly amend Part III, and Sajjan Singh validated that strategy. The eventual repeal of the fundamental right to property by the Forty-fourth Amendment (1978), and the Supreme Court's holding in I. R. Coelho v. State of Tamil Nadu (2007) that even Ninth Schedule laws inserted after 24 April 1973 are testable against the basic structure, complete the arc the dissents in Sajjan Singh foreshadowed.

For the working practitioner—the UPSC aspirant, the desk officer, or the constitutional researcher—Sajjan Singh is a fixed point in the polity syllabus and a case study in incremental doctrinal change. It demonstrates how concurring reservations, rather than holdings, can redirect constitutional development, and it anchors the standard examination sequence of Shankari Prasad–Sajjan Singh–Golak Nath–Kesavananda that maps the evolution of Article 368 and the basic structure doctrine.