Underline the significance of the first constitutional amendment. (150 words) (2021, 10 Marks)
The Constitution (First Amendment) Act, 1951, moved by Jawaharlal Nehru in May and assented to on 18 June 1951, came under seventeen months after the Constitution began. It was passed by the Provisional Parliament, the Constituent Assembly sitting as a legislature before any general election: the framers revised their own text. Its significance lies less in any single clause than in the method it inaugurated.
The Judicial Obstacles
- Free speech. In Romesh Thappar v. State of Madras and Brij Bhushan v. State of Delhi (both May 1950) the Supreme Court held that “public safety” measures fell outside the original Article 19(2), which allowed restriction only where speech undermined the security of the State.
- Communal reservation. State of Madras v. Champakam Dorairajan (1951) voided the Madras Communal G.O. under Article 29(2) and treated the Directive Principles as subsidiary to Fundamental Rights.
- Zamindari abolition. The Patna High Court in the Kameshwar Singh litigation (1951) struck down the Bihar Land Reforms Act 1950 under Article 14.
What It Changed
- Article 15(4): special provision for socially and educationally backward classes, SCs and STs (Article 16(4) on posts already existed).
- Article 19(2) recast, with retrospective effect: new grounds of “public order”, “friendly relations with foreign States” and “incitement to an offence”, and the qualifier “reasonable” before restrictions.
- Article 19(6): state trading and state monopoly placed beyond challenge under Article 19(1)(g).
- Articles 31A and 31B and the Ninth Schedule, shielding thirteen land laws from Part III.
Significance
- Social justice made constitutional. Article 15(4) founded reservation in education; Articles 31A–31B made zamindari abolition possible, reconciling Part III with Part IV.
- A narrower liberty. Tripurdaman Singh, in Sixteen Stormy Days (2020), argues that the episode subordinated the founding liberal promise to an interventionist state; Syama Prasad Mookerjee led the opposition. The new grounds still anchor curbs on expression, though “reasonable” gave courts a test.
- Parliament as constituent power. Shankari Prasad v. Union of India (1951) upheld the amendment, holding that Article 368 reaches Fundamental Rights. This opened the Parliament–Court duel that ran to Golaknath (1967) and Kesavananda Bharati (1973).
- The Ninth Schedule’s drift. Built for land reform, it grew from 13 entries to 284, sheltering even Tamil Nadu’s 69 per cent reservation law, until I. R. Coelho v. State of Tamil Nadu (2007) opened post-1973 entries to basic-structure review.
Conclusion
The First Amendment set the pattern of the next quarter-century: when courts obstructed the social programme, Parliament amended the Constitution. It secured redistribution and reservation at the cost of liberty and judicial scrutiny, and the correction came only when the Court discovered limits to the amending power itself.