Consider the following statements regarding 'Kesavanand Bharati' Case :
(A) This case was heard by the Constitution Bench of 13 judges headed by Chief Justice of India A.N. Ray.
(B) In Seven - Six maj

Question

Consider the following statements regarding 'Kesavanand Bharati' Case :
(A) This case was heard by the Constitution Bench of 13 judges headed by Chief Justice of India A.N. Ray.
(B) In Seven - Six majority, the bench outlined the basic structure doctrine.
(C) This case changed the decision of Golaknath case.
(D) This case seems to be the instance of judicial activism.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct ?

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2), '(B), (C) and (D)'. Three of the four printed statements hold and the first does not. Statement (A) is the false one: the case was indeed heard by a bench of thirteen judges, the largest the Supreme Court has ever assembled, but it was headed by Chief Justice S. M. Sikri, not by A. N. Ray. Justice Ray sat on that bench and was among the dissenters; he was appointed Chief Justice of India two days after the judgment was delivered on 24 April 1973, superseding three judges senior to him — Justices Shelat, Hegde and Grover — who thereupon resigned. The paper's placing of Ray at the head of the bench inverts one of the best-known episodes in the Court's history, in which the majority judgment and the supersession that followed it are always narrated together. Statement (B) is correct: the bench divided seven to six, and the majority propounded the doctrine that Parliament's power to amend under Article 368 is wide but not unlimited, since it cannot be used to damage or destroy the basic structure of the Constitution. Statement (C) is correct as well: the decision overruled Golak Nath, in which a bench of eleven judges had held in 1967 that Parliament could not abridge or take away a fundamental right by constitutional amendment at all. Kesavananda replaced that flat prohibition with a different and more flexible limit — Parliament may amend any part of the Constitution, fundamental rights included, provided the basic structure survives. Statement (D) is an evaluative one, and the standard commentary supports it: in reading into Article 368 a restriction that the text does not spell out, the Court went beyond the words of the Constitution to protect its core, and the case is universally cited as the leading instance of judicial creativity or activism in Indian constitutional law.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This option keeps the two true statements about the majority and about Golak Nath but adds the false statement about the composition of the bench. The number thirteen in statement (A) is right and the name is wrong, which is exactly the kind of half-truth this format is built on; a candidate who checks only the size of the bench will accept the statement and lose the mark. Chief Justice S. M. Sikri presided, delivered the leading judgment of the majority, and retired the day after it was pronounced.  (c) Restricting the answer to the seven-six majority ignores two statements that are equally true. The case did change the position laid down in Golak Nath, which had held fundamental rights to be beyond the amending power altogether, and it is the standard example of judicial activism in Indian constitutional law. A candidate choosing this option has usually been over-cautious, treating any statement that involves interpretation — such as the characterisation in statement (D) — as unsafe. In a question of this kind an evaluative statement is graded as the settled commentary grades it, not discarded because it is a judgment rather than a date.  (d) Accepting all four requires accepting that A. N. Ray headed the bench, which he did not. This is the option chosen by a candidate who knows the case in outline — thirteen judges, seven to six, basic structure, Golak Nath overruled — and does not pause on the name attached to the bench. The supersession of the three senior judges immediately after the judgment is the very reason Ray's name is associated with Kesavananda in most accounts, so the paper's distractor is drawn from a real connection made at the wrong point in the story.

Concept: Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, decided in 1973, is the case in which the Supreme Court settled the limits of Parliament's power to amend the Constitution. The petitioner, the head of a mutt in Kasaragod in Kerala, had challenged State land reform legislation affecting the property of his religious establishment, and the proceedings widened into an examination of the Twenty-fourth, Twenty-fifth and Twenty-ninth Amendments. A bench of thirteen judges — the largest ever constituted — heard the matter under Chief Justice S. M. Sikri, and by a majority of seven to six held that Article 368 confers a wide power of amendment which nevertheless stops short of altering the basic structure or framework of the Constitution. The doctrine was not defined exhaustively; the judges offered illustrative features such as the supremacy of the Constitution, the republican and democratic form of government, its secular character, the separation of powers and the federal character of the union, and later benches have added to the list case by case, including free and fair elections, judicial review and the rule of law. The decision overruled Golak Nath, which had denied Parliament any power to abridge fundamental rights by amendment, and it became the shield against which the Thirty-ninth Amendment was struck down in the Indira Nehru Gandhi case in 1975 and parts of the Forty-second Amendment in Minerva Mills in 1980. The immediate political consequence — the supersession of three senior judges and the appointment of A. N. Ray, a dissenter, as Chief Justice — is inseparable from the case in every account of it.

State PCS 2024 Q73 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q73 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer