The Shankari Prasad Case & Kesavananda Bharati Case

The Shankari Prasad case, officially known as “Shankari Prasad Singh Deo v. Union of India,” is a landmark judgment in the history of Indian constitutional law. It was a significant case that established the supremacy of the Parliament of India in amending the Constitution and set the initial foundation for the doctrine of Parliament’s amending power.

The Shankari Prasad (now overrules) case has an important place in the constitutional history of India. It was the first case that was initiated against the first amendment which added Article 31A, B, to the Constitution.¹Read more on the Lawmatics page 2 June 2022 article ²In original Constitution, under the rainbow of rights in Article 19 and Article 31 Indian citizens also had the ‘right to property’ which was deleted later by 44^th constitutional amendment in 1978.

The case arose in 1951 when the Parliament passed the First Amendment to the Indian Constitution. This amendment was introduced to overcome the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of “State of Madras v. Champakam Dorairajan,” where the court held that the state’s power to make reservations based on religion was unconstitutional. The First Amendment, among other things, allowed the government to make special provisions for the advancement of socially and educationally backward classes, including granting reservations.

Shankari Prasad Singh Deo, the ruler of the princely state of Bonai in Odisha (now Odisha state in India), challenged the validity of the First Amendment, arguing that it violated his fundamental rights under Articles 14 (right to equality) and 19 (right to freedom) of the Indian Constitution.

The Supreme Court, in a landmark judgment in 1951, upheld the validity of the First Amendment and dismissed Shankari Prasad’s petition. The court held that the Parliament’s power to amend the Constitution under Article 368 was absolute and unlimited. It stated that the Constitution itself did not place any express restrictions on the Parliament’s amending power and, therefore, the amendment was valid.

The Shankari Prasad case set the precedent that the Parliament of India possesses the plenary power to amend the Constitution and that there are no inherent or implied limitations on that power. This judgment was significant as it firmly established the principle of parliamentary supremacy in the matter of amending the Constitution, which was later questioned and redefined to some extent in the Kesavananda Bharati case in 1973

Read about the Kesavananda Bharati case.