Twenty-Fourth Amendment Act, 1971

The Twenty-Fourth Amendment Act, 1971 was enacted by Parliament under its constituent power in direct response to the Supreme Court's decision in I.C. Golak Nath v. State of Punjab (1967), in which an eleven-judge bench held by a 6:5 majority that Parliament could not abridge or take away fundamental rights through a constitutional amendment, treating an amendment under Article 368 as "law" within the meaning of Article 13(2). That ruling reversed the earlier positions in Shankari Prasad v. Union of India (1951) and Sajjan Singh v. State of Rajasthan (1965), which had upheld amendments to fundamental rights, and it placed Part III of the Constitution beyond the reach of the amending power. The Indira Gandhi government, returned with a substantial majority in the 1971 general election on a socialist reform platform, sought to neutralise Golak Nath and reassert legislative supremacy over the constitutional text. The Bill received presidential assent on 5 November 1971.

The amendment operated through three principal textual changes. First, it inserted a new clause (4) into Article 13, declaring that nothing in that Article shall apply to any amendment of the Constitution made under Article 368. This severed amendments from the definition of "law" that Article 13(2) uses to invalidate state action abridging fundamental rights. Second, it substituted the marginal heading of Article 368 to read "Power of Parliament to amend the Constitution and procedure therefor," expressly characterising the amending function as a power rather than a mere procedure—a deliberate rebuttal of the Golak Nath reasoning that Article 368 contained only procedure while the substantive power lay elsewhere. Third, it recast the body of Article 368, adding clause (1) to vest in Parliament a "constituent power" to amend "by way of addition, variation or repeal any provision of this Constitution," and adding clause (3) to state that nothing in Article 13 shall apply to any such amendment.

The procedural mechanics of amendment were also tightened. Where the unamended Article 368 had required the President to give assent in language that the Supreme Court's Sajjan Singh dicta treated as discretionary, the amendment made presidential assent mandatory by substituting "it shall be presented to the President who shall give his assent to the Bill." The President was thereby stripped of any choice to withhold or return a constitutional amendment Bill, distinguishing it sharply from the ordinary legislative process under Articles 111 and 200. The ratification requirements for entrenched provisions—ratification by the legislatures of not less than one-half of the States for amendments touching the federal structure, the distribution of legislative powers, or Article 368 itself—were preserved unchanged.

The amendment formed part of a concentrated package of constitutional engineering in the early 1970s. It was followed almost immediately by the Twenty-Fifth Amendment Act, 1971, which curtailed the right to property under Article 31 and inserted Article 31C, and by the Twenty-Sixth Amendment abolishing the privy purses of former rulers. The constitutional validity of the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Amendments was tested before a thirteen-judge bench in Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, decided on 24 April 1973. The bench upheld the Twenty-Fourth Amendment in full, accepting that Article 368 does confer a constituent power and that fundamental rights can be amended, thereby overruling Golak Nath. However, the same judgment propounded the basic structure doctrine, holding that the amending power, however wide, cannot be used to destroy or abrogate the essential features of the Constitution.

The Twenty-Fourth Amendment must be distinguished from the doctrine it provoked. The amendment settled the competence question—whether Parliament may touch fundamental rights at all—answering it affirmatively. The basic structure doctrine, by contrast, addresses the limits of that competence, supplying an implied substantive restraint that the amendment itself never contained. It should also be distinguished from the Forty-Second Amendment Act, 1976, which attempted to insert clauses (4) and (5) into Article 368 to make amendments wholly immune from judicial review and to declare the amending power unlimited; those clauses were struck down in Minerva Mills v. Union of India (1980) precisely because they offended the basic structure that Kesavananda had erected upon the foundation the Twenty-Fourth Amendment laid.

A persistent controversy concerns whether the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, by labelling the power "constituent," intended to place amendments beyond all judicial scrutiny. Kesavananda accepted the constituent characterisation while denying the immunity inference, a distinction that several dissenting judges in that case found unstable. The amendment's drafting also raised the question of whether inserting a clause into Article 13 that exempts amendments was strictly necessary, given that the recast Article 368 already contained an identical exemption in clause (3)—a redundancy that critics read as evidence of the government's anxiety to foreclose every avenue Golak Nath might have left open.

For the working practitioner, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment remains a fixed reference point in any analysis of the scope of constitutional amendment in India. It is the textual source of the express phrase "constituent power" in Article 368(1) and the mandatory-assent rule that constrains the President during amendment. Policy analysts, civil-service aspirants, and constitutional lawyers cite it to mark the moment the amending power was statutorily reasserted, while recognising that the practical ceiling on that power was set not by the amendment but by the judicially created basic structure doctrine that survives as the operative limit today.