The city once called Madras evokes memories of its stately monuments, soulful music and the lingering glow of Marina sunsets. Yet on this Madras Day, it is worth recalling a story less often told—how a Madras lawyer’s idea travelled to Delhi, rewired the Constitution, and still shapes some of the fiercest debates between the legislature and the judiciary.
In the early years after independence, few issues burned hotter than the demand to dismantle the zamindari system. Born of colonial land settlements, it left a small class of intermediaries holding vast tracts, while millions of cultivators tilled without ownership. The Congress had long promised its abolition, and state governments moved quickly to enact sweeping reform laws. These aimed not just to redistribute land but to reorder rural power structures, clearing the ground for a more egalitarian society.
The backlash was immediate. Zamindars and intermediaries challenged the reforms, and the courts—bound to interpret and apply constitutional provisions as they stood—arguably proved sympathetic. The Patna High Court, for instance, struck down the Bihar Land Reforms Act, 1950, holding it inconsistent with the right to property under what were then Articles 19(1)(f) and 31 of the Constitution (Kameshwar Singh, 1951).
This was no ordinary constitutional tussle. Land reform was a political promise with immense social stakes. Without it, economic inequality and feudal control would persist. But the rulings revealed a deep cleavage in the constitutional order—between the promise of individual rights on one side and the democratic mandate to dismantle centuries-old hierarchies on the other.
It was at this impasse that V K Thiruvenkatachari, the then advocate general of Madras state, wrote a letter to the Union law secretary proposing a constitutional innovation. His simple yet radical idea suggested the creation of a separate schedule to the Constitution where certain laws could be placed, shielding them from challenge under the Fundamental Rights chapter.
The plan took a two-pronged form. Article 31A would specifically protect land laws on agrarian reform and abolition of intermediaries from being struck down for violating rights such as those to property or equality. Article 31B went further—any law placed in a new Ninth Schedule would be completely beyond the courts’ reach. Parliament adopted this idea wholesale into the Constitution (First Amendment) Act, 1951, thus inaugurating Articles 31A, 31B and the Ninth Schedule.
As the American constitutional historian Granville Austin observed in Working a Democratic Constitution, this was an extraordinary assertion of parliament’s will to push social policy past the courts’ barricades—and a vivid example of the founding generation’s struggle to balance social revolution with constitutional restraint. Indian historian Tripurdaman Singh, in Sixteen Stormy Days: The Story of the First Amendment to the Constitution of India , calls the Ninth Schedule one of the most divisive elements of Nehru’s first constitutional amendment, a live test of how far a democracy could insulate bold policy from judicial review without corroding the very liberties it sought to uphold.
For decades, the arrangement held. In Sankari Prasad Singh Deo (1951), the Supreme Court upheld the Ninth Schedule’s immunity, effectively creating a political-judicial truce. Reformist laws could be protected from litigation, giving the legislature room to pursue a redistributive and regulatory agenda, while the court’s larger interpretive authority over the Constitution remained formally undisturbed. Through the 1950s and 60s, the Ninth Schedule became an impregnable vault for laws on land reforms, industrial regulation and social welfare.
But the balance shifted in the 1970s. In Kesavananda Bharati (1973), where a 13-judge bench articulated the now-foundational ‘basic structure’ doctrine, holding that parliament’s amending power under Article 368 could not be used to alter the Constitution’s essential framework. This principle eventually came home to the Ninth Schedule, most squarely in I R Coelho (2007), where the court ruled that post-1973 entries could be struck down if they violated the Constitution’s basic structure.
Thiruvenkatachari’s ‘impregnable armour’ now bore apertures: the shield still stood, but judicial review had found a way to penetrate its walls.
Today, the same questions that may have haunted the 1950s have returned. Legislatures still reach for the armour of insulation when passing contentious laws. The Maharashtra (Socially and Educationally Backward Classes) Act attempted to exceed the 50 percent reservation ceiling, only to be struck down in 2021. Expansive welfare schemes are ring-fenced to escape fiscal scrutiny. Most recently, the 103rd Constitutional Amendment creating the economically weaker sections quota was defended in Janhit Abhiyan(2022) partly on the claim that affirmative action must be shielded from judicial review.
The old dilemma refuses to die: does placing a law beyond review fortify the march of social justice, or does it erode the promise of equality, federalism and fundamental rights on which the Constitution stands?
As Justice Rohinton Nariman notes in The Basic Structure Doctrine: Protector of Constitutional Integrity, the survival of our constitutional order depends not on the absence of conflict between the legislature and the judiciary, but on the fidelity of each to the boundaries that the Constitution has drawn.
On this Madras Day, that is more than a legal truism—it is a tribute to a city whose legal imagination once bent the arch of India’s constitutional history, and a reminder that the spark lit by Thiruvenkatachari continues to illuminate India’s journey.
Debarshi Chakraborty | Advocate, Delhi High Court
(Views are personal)