Waman Rao v Union of India

Facts

• The petitioners challenged Maharashtra legislation imposing ceilings on agricultural landholdings, which had been placed in the Ninth Schedule and so protected by Art.31B from challenge for inconsistency with fundamental rights.
• They also challenged Art.31A, which saves laws providing for the acquisition of estates and related matters from challenge under Arts.14 and 19, and Art.31C, which gave primacy to certain Directive Principles.
• Article 31C in its amended form, giving primacy to all Directive Principles over Arts.14 and 19, had already been struck down in Minerva Mills Ltd v Union of India (1980), so the question here concerned its unamended form, which extended only to Arts.39(b) and 39(c).
• The wider difficulty was that if the basic structure doctrine applied retrospectively to every amendment since 1950, a vast number of completed transactions in land, and the settled rights arising from them, would be reopened.
• Article 31B and the Ninth Schedule had by then been used for a very large number of statutes over three decades.

Issue

1. From what date does the basic structure doctrine apply to constitutional amendments; and were Arts.31A and 31C, in their unamended form, valid?

Held

• The Court fixed the date at 24 April 1973, the date of the judgment in Kesavananda Bharati. Amendments made on or after that date are open to challenge on the ground that they damage or destroy the basic structure. Amendments made before it, and the laws placed in the Ninth Schedule before it, are immune from such challenge and are to be treated as valid. Article 31A was upheld, on the reasoning that it had been part of the constitutional scheme from the first year and that the whole programme of agrarian reform had proceeded on its footing. The unamended Art.31C, confined to laws giving effect to Arts.39(b) and 39(c), was likewise upheld, being consistent with the balance between Parts III and IV; only its amended form, which extended to the whole of Part IV, had been struck down in Minerva Mills.

Ratio Decidendi

The reasoning is one of certainty and settled expectations rather than of principle. Before Kesavananda it was understood, on the authority of Shankari Prasad and Sajjan Singh, that the amending power was unlimited in substance, and legislatures, administrations and private parties had acted on that understanding for over two decades. To apply a newly declared limitation retrospectively would unsettle titles and transactions on an unmanageable scale. Fixing the date of the declaration as the point from which the doctrine operates gives effect to the doctrine prospectively while preserving what has been done in reliance on the earlier view.