How a landowner challenged Rajasthan's land ceiling law to protect his 175 acres — and lost

About 70 km from Jodhpur, in Pali district's Deoli village, was Sajjan Singh's 175 acres of agricultural land. In 1964, he was a khatedar tenant, a landholder who paid a nominal annual rent to the Rajasthan government when the state introduced a new law that capped land holdings. The land ceiling meant that a family of five could not own more than 25 acres.
Singh had to challenge the Rajasthan Tenancy Act and the crucial Seventeenth constitutional Amendment that backed such ceilings and kept them out of the purview of judicial review. The case — Sajjan Singh v State of Rajasthan raised a question that we continue to debate even in the 75th year of the Constitution — what is the extent of Parliament's power to amend the Constitution and the role of the judiciary to guard against encroachment of fundamental rights.
On October 30, 1964, a five-judge Bench of the Supreme Court reaffirmed its view that Parliament has the power to amend any part of the Constitution, and upheld the Amendment and the consequent laws. 'It appears unreasonable to suggest that the Constitution-makers wanted to provide that fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution should never be touched by way of Amendment,' then Chief Justice PB Gajendragadkar wrote.
Singh and the sanctity of fundamental rights were on the losing side. However, two judges — Justices R Mudholkar and M Hidayatullah — expressed doubts on Parliament's power to abrogate rights. The dissenting view would in later cases shape the course of constitutional history.
The case
Since the Constitution came into force in 1950, the Jawaharlal Nehru government's land and agrarian reforms laws were met with resistance from the Supreme Court on the grounds that they breached fundamental rights. In the First Amendment itself, Parliament had introduced Articles 31A and 31B, the first provision stated that no land acquisition law would be deemed void because it violated any of the fundamental rights. In 1954, Parliament brought in the Fourth Constitutional Amendment, expanding Article 31A, which then stated that laws providing for 'the acquisition by the State of any estate or of any rights therein or the extinguishment or modification of any such rights' cannot be deemed void because they were inconsistent with Articles 14 (the right to equality), 19 (rights from speech to practicing trade) or 31 (right to property, which was later repealed and replaced by Article 300A in 1978).
In the Seventeenth Amendment, Parliament sought to expand the definition of estate to include any jagir, inam or muafi (in the States of Madras and Kerala, any janmam right) and any land held under ryotwari settlement. The widening of the definition was to undo the effect of the SC striking down the Kerala land ceiling law in 1961 on the grounds that the term 'estate' did not include the lands of ryotwari pattadars.
On May 27, 1964, a special session of Parliament was called in to introduce the crucial Seventeenth Amendment. The Amendment was passed with 318 ayes to 31 noes, and the Lok Sabha was adjourned. Incidentally, just minutes later, it was announced that Nehru was dead.
Sajjan Singh's son, Virendra Singh. Special Arrangement
Sajjan Singh, an influential Rajput landowner born in 1921, was the first to move the Supreme Court. His father, Thakur Madho Singh, was the aide-de-camp (a personal assistant of sorts) to Maharaja Umaid Singh of Jodhpur and was granted the thikana (estate) of Deoli in Pali. The 175 acres included land in Tikhi village, Jalore, and Deoli in Pali. In search of a male heir, Sajjan Singh had married thrice and in his twilight years, he had adopted his nephew Virendra Singh.
Associated with the Swatantra Party and the Congress, Virendra Singh was a pradhan, a zila pramukh and in 1972, a Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) from Pali's Sumerpur. He died in an accident in 1987.
In the 1951 Sankari Prasad case, the Supreme Court had upheld the First Amendment and said that there was a clear demarcation between ordinary law, which is made in exercise of legislative power, and constitutional law, which is made in exercise of constituent power. Therefore, a constitutional amendment had to be treated differently even if it violated fundamental rights.
Sajjan Singh's case was an opportunity for the Supreme Court to relook at Sankari Prasad's case. The First Amendment, after all, was brought in by the provisional Parliament, which at that time had no Rajya Sabha and therefore did not follow the due procedure prescribed by Article 368 for amending the Constitution.
Chief Justice Gajendragadkar and two other judges disagreed that Sankari Prasad must be reconsidered. 'In the present case, if the arguments urged by the petitioners were to prevail, it would lead to the inevitable consequence that the Amendments made in the Constitution both in 1951 and 1955 would be rendered invalid and a large number of decisions dealing with the validity of the Acts included in the Ninth Schedule which have been pronounced by different High Courts ever since the decision of this court in Sankari Prasad's case was declared, would also be exposed to serious jeopardy,' the majority opinion said.
However, two judges opened a window. Justice Hidayatullah's opinion, even while upholding the Amendment, wondered how far Parliament could go. 'The Constitution gives so many assurances in Part III (that deals with fundamental rights) that it would be difficult to think that they were the playthings of a special majority.'
Justice Mudholkar, in his opinion, wrote about harmonising a parliamentarian's duty of allegiance to the Constitution with the power to make an amendment to it. He also cited a judgment of the Pakistan Supreme Court, which did not allow its President to make 'an alteration in a fundamental feature of the Constitution'.
Although Sajjan Singh lost the case that bears his name, it paved the way to the landmark 1973 Kesavananda Bharati ruling that established the 'basic structure' test to balance Parliament's power to amend the Constitution.
The difference of opinion among the five judges in Sajjan Singh's case echoes even today.
Just last month, Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankhar said Parliament is supreme and that elected representatives are the final arbiters of the Constitution. He was speaking in the context of the April 8 Supreme Court ruling that set timelines for Governors and the President to grant assent to Bills.
In the past, Dhankhar and several other legal scholars have criticised the Supreme Court for striking down the constitutional Amendment setting up the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) and have argued that the judiciary ought to have recognised Parliament's power to amend the Constitution.
Senior advocate Raju Ramachandran, a 'qualified critic' of the basic structure doctrine, says 'a constant creative tension' between Parliament and the judiciary is good for democracy.
A later part of the series will focus on the 1967 case, I C Golaknath v State of Punjab, that reversed the Sajjan Singh ruling. The debate on the right to property, perhaps the most contested fundamental right, was settled only in 1973, with the Kesavananda ruling. But the larger questions continue.
'No generation has a monopoly on wisdom. As long as the critique is well articulated, these are issues to be revisited in every generation,' Ramachandran says.
1964 Sajjan Singh v State of Rajasthan
The case: Sajjan Singh, an influential Rajput landowner from Rajasthan, challenged the state's land ceiling law to protect his 175 acres of agricultural land. He also challenged the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, brought in 1964, which protected land ceiling laws from judicial scrutiny on the grounds that it violated fundamental rights. A five-judge Bench of the Supreme Court reaffirmed its view that Parliament has the power to amend any part of the Constitution and upheld the Amendment and the consequent laws.
Relevance today: The central question that divided judges 3:2 in Sajjan Singh's case remains relevant even today — what is the extent of Parliament's power to amend the Constitution and the role of the judiciary to guard against encroachment of fundamental rights.

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