Last verified: July 2026
When Dr. B.R. Ambedkar rose in the Constituent Assembly on 9 December 1948, he was asked which article of the draft Constitution he valued most. His answer has echoed for three-quarters of a century: Article 32, the right to move the Supreme Court itself, was “the very soul of the Constitution and the very heart of it.” He wasn’t talking about a right to speak, or to worship, or to be treated equally. He was talking about the right to enforce all the others.
That single remark tells you what Part III of the Constitution really is. It is not a wish-list of noble sentiments. It is a set of enforceable guarantees, Articles 12 to 35, that a citizen can carry straight into a courtroom and hold up against the most powerful actor in the country: the State itself.
Here’s the thing most summaries miss. These rights have never sat still. The Constitution came into force in 1950 with a right to property as a fundamental right; by 1978 that right had been quietly moved out of Part III. Parliament tried to place whole categories of law beyond the reach of the courts, and the Supreme Court, in a run of Constitution Bench rulings from the 1960s onward, drew a line no majority could cross. Even now the boundaries keep shifting. In November 2024, a nine-judge bench reopened one of the oldest questions in the book, how far the State may go in redistributing private property in the name of the common good.
So a reader in 2026 is looking at a living body of law, not a museum piece. The rights are guaranteed, but they are not absolute. They bind the State, but not always private citizens. They can be amended, but not destroyed. And the last word on what they mean is still being written, judgment by judgment.
This guide walks through Part III the way a constitutional lawyer actually thinks about it. Not article by article in a flat list, but through the nine questions that decide real cases: who is bound by these rights, whether Parliament can change them, what “equality” actually forbids, how far freedom of speech and religion stretch, how a citizen enforces any of it, and whether the State’s social-welfare goals can ever override a fundamental right. Each answer is anchored in the statute and the case that settled it.
The fundamental rights are the guarantees set out in Part III of the Constitution of India, spread across Articles 12 to 35 and enforceable against the State. They fall into six groups: the right to equality (Articles 14 to 18), the right to freedom (Articles 19 to 22), the right against exploitation (Articles 23 to 24), the right to freedom of religion (Articles 25 to 28), cultural and educational rights (Articles 29 to 30), and the right to constitutional remedies (Article 32). Originally there were seven groups; the right to property was removed from Part III by the 44th Amendment in 1978.
Get those six groups clear and the rest of Part III stops looking like a jumble of article numbers. What follows is each of the load-bearing ideas, in the order a lawyer would build them.
What the fundamental rights in Part III actually are
Every democracy has to answer one uncomfortable question: what stops the government from doing whatever it wants to the people it governs? In India, the first answer is Part III. It is the chapter of the Constitution that converts abstract ideals, liberty, equality, dignity, into rights a court can enforce on the day they are breached.
Part III runs from Article 12 to Article 35. The rights themselves live mostly in Articles 14 to 32; the articles on either side either define key terms (Article 12 defines “the State”, Article 13 tells you what happens to laws that violate a right) or deal with enforcement and Parliament’s power to modify these rights for special groups. That structure matters, because you cannot understand the rights without first understanding who they bind and how they are protected.
Why call them “fundamental”? Because they sit above ordinary law. A statute passed by Parliament or a state legislature that collides with a fundamental right is, to the extent of the conflict, void. No other category of legal right in India carries that automatic trumping power against the legislature.
The six groups of fundamental rights
The rights fall into six neat families. The right to equality (Articles 14 to 18) guarantees equality before the law, bars discrimination on grounds like religion, race, caste, sex and place of birth, and abolishes untouchability and titles. The right to freedom (Articles 19 to 22) protects speech, assembly, movement, profession and personal liberty, and builds in safeguards against arbitrary arrest and conviction.
The right against exploitation (Articles 23 to 24) prohibits human trafficking, forced labour and the employment of children under fourteen in hazardous work. The right to freedom of religion (Articles 25 to 28) protects conscience and religious practice. Cultural and educational rights (Articles 29 to 30) protect the interests of minorities. And the right to constitutional remedies (Article 32) lets a citizen approach the Supreme Court directly when any of the others is breached.
You’ll notice there is no separate “right to property” in that list. There used to be, under the old Article 19(1)(f) and Article 31. Both were deleted in 1978, and property now survives as a bare constitutional right under Article 300A, outside Part III. We’ll come back to why that happened, because it is one of the clearest illustrations of how Part III has changed over time. (For the full story, iPleaders has a dedicated piece on whether the right to property is still a fundamental right.)
Four features that define a fundamental right
Four features separate a fundamental right from an ordinary legal right, and every one of them shows up in litigation. First, fundamental rights are justiciable: a court can enforce them, and Article 32 makes that enforcement itself a fundamental right. Second, most of them run only against the State, not against private individuals, though there are exceptions like Article 17 (untouchability), Article 23 (trafficking and forced labour) and Article 24 (child labour), which bind everyone.
Third, they are not absolute. Almost every right carries built-in limits, “reasonable restrictions” in the case of Article 19, “public order, morality and health” in the case of Article 25. Fourth, they are amendable but not destructible: Parliament can amend Part III under Article 368, but it cannot use that power to damage the Constitution’s basic structure.
So are your fundamental rights a fixed guarantee or a moving target? The honest answer is both. The core is protected against Parliament itself; the edges are defined and redefined by the Supreme Court, decade after decade.
Article 12: what counts as “the State”
Before you can claim a fundamental right, you have to answer a deceptively boring question: who are you claiming it against? Because most fundamental rights run only against “the State”, the definition of that word in Article 12 is the gateway to the whole of Part III. Get it wrong and your petition fails at the threshold, no matter how strong the rights argument behind it.
Article 12 says that, for the purposes of Part III, “the State” includes the Government and Parliament of India, the Government and Legislature of each state, and “all local or other authorities within the territory of India or under the control of the Government of India.” The first three are obvious. The battleground, for seventy years, has been those two words at the end: “other authorities.”
Why the definition decides every case
Think of it this way. If a government department denies you a job on grounds of caste, that’s a clean Article 16 violation, because a department is plainly the State. But what if the denial comes from a company the government owns, or a society it funds and controls, or a private body discharging a public function? Whether you have a fundamental rights remedy at all turns entirely on whether that body is “the State” under Article 12.
That is why so much constitutional litigation is really a fight about classification, not about the right itself. The mistake we see most often is a petitioner racing to the rights argument while ignoring the prior question of whether the respondent is even bound by Part III.
“Other authorities” and the instrumentality test
The courts built the meaning of “other authorities” case by case. In Rajasthan State Electricity Board v. Mohan Lal, AIR 1967 SC 1857, the Supreme Court held that a statutory body carrying out functions under a statute is an “authority” and therefore the State, even if it also carries on commercial activity. In Sukhdev Singh v. Bhagatram, AIR 1975 SC 1331, statutory corporations like the LIC and ONGC were held to be the State, and their regulations were held to have the force of law.
The real workhorse came in Ajay Hasia v. Khalid Mujib Sehravardi, (1981) 1 SCC 722. There the Court laid down a six-factor “instrumentality or agency of the State” test: things like whether the entire share capital is government-held, whether the body enjoys a State monopoly, whether there is deep and pervasive State control, and whether its functions are of public importance. On that test, even a society registered under the Societies Registration Act can be the State.
Two decades later, a seven-judge bench tidied the whole doctrine in Pradeep Kumar Biswas v. Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, (2002) 5 SCC 111. The test, the Court held, is not how the body was born or what it does, but whether it is functionally, financially and administratively under the “deep and pervasive” control of the government. On that basis the CSIR was held to be the State, and an earlier ruling to the contrary was overruled. If you want the granular treatment of these two definitional articles, see the iPleaders explainer on Articles 12 and 13 as the basis of the fundamental rights.
What is not the State: BCCI and the courts
The line has to stop somewhere, and two rulings show where. In Zee Telefilms Ltd. v. Union of India, (2005) 4 SCC 649, a five-judge bench held, by 3:2, that the Board of Control for Cricket in India is not the State under Article 12. The BCCI was not created by a statute, and the government held no share capital and exercised no pervasive control, so it failed the Pradeep Kumar Biswas test, even though it enjoys a near-monopoly over Indian cricket. (It can still be answerable in a High Court writ under Article 226 for its public functions, which is a different gateway.)
And the courts themselves? In Rupa Ashok Hurra v. Ashok Hurra, (2002) 4 SCC 388, the Supreme Court held that superior courts of justice, when they exercise their judicial functions, are not “the State” or an “authority” under Article 12, so no Article 32 writ lies against a judicial order. The judiciary is bound by fundamental rights in its administrative and rule-making capacity, but a judgment you disagree with is challenged by appeal or review, not by a fundamental rights petition. So is every public-looking body the State? Clearly not. The test is control and function, and it is applied one respondent at a time.
Can Parliament change the fundamental rights? Article 13 and the basic structure
Here is the question that produced the most important constitutional litigation in Indian history: if Parliament can amend the Constitution, can it amend away your fundamental rights? The answer took three decades and a thirteen-judge bench to settle, and the doctrine it produced, the basic structure, is now India’s single most significant contribution to constitutional law worldwide.
The starting point is Article 13. It provides that any law inconsistent with the fundamental rights is, to the extent of that inconsistency, void. That covers both pre-Constitution laws (Article 13(1)) and laws made after 1950 (Article 13(2)). The whole fight was about one word: does “law” in Article 13 include a constitutional amendment?
Article 13: void laws, eclipse and no waiver
Before we get to amendments, Article 13 has three doctrines worth knowing, because they come up constantly. A pre-Constitution law that clashes with a fundamental right is not wiped off the books; it is merely eclipsed. The Supreme Court explained this “doctrine of eclipse” in Bhikaji Narain Dhakras v. State of M.P., AIR 1955 SC 781: the inconsistent law goes dormant against citizens, but it is not dead, and it springs back to life the moment the inconsistency is removed (for example, by a constitutional amendment). Related to this is severability: only the offending portion of a statute falls, and the rest survives if it can stand on its own.
The second doctrine is timing. In Keshavan Madhava Menon v. State of Bombay, AIR 1951 SC 128, the Court held that Article 13(1) operates prospectively, so fundamental rights do not wipe out things already concluded under a pre-Constitution law. The third is the most practically important: you cannot waive a fundamental right. In Basheshar Nath v. Commissioner of Income Tax, AIR 1959 SC 149, the Court held that fundamental rights are a matter of public policy and a citizen cannot contract out of them, not even Article 14. You can’t sign your equality away.
From Shankari Prasad to Kesavananda: the basic structure is born
Now the amendment saga. It opened calmly. In Shankari Prasad v. Union of India, AIR 1951 SC 458, the Court upheld the First Amendment and held that “law” in Article 13(2) does not include a constitutional amendment under Article 368, so Parliament could amend fundamental rights. Sajjan Singh v. State of Rajasthan, AIR 1965 SC 845 followed the same line.
Then came the reversal. In I.C. Golak Nath v. State of Punjab, AIR 1967 SC 1643, a bench of eleven judges held, by 6:5, that Parliament could not amend or abridge the fundamental rights at all, treating Article 368 as laying down only a procedure, not a power. Parliament hit back with the 24th Amendment in 1971, inserting Article 13(4) to say expressly that Article 13 does not apply to constitutional amendments.
The collision was resolved in the most famous case in Indian law: Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, (1973) 4 SCC 225. Thirteen judges, the largest bench ever assembled, held by the narrowest of margins, 7:6, that Parliament can amend any part of the Constitution, including the fundamental rights, but it cannot alter or destroy the “basic structure” of the Constitution. Golak Nath was overruled, and a new, court-enforced outer limit on the amending power was born. What sits inside that basic structure has been filled out ever since: the supremacy of the Constitution, the rule of law, judicial review, secularism, federalism, free and fair elections, and the balance between rights and directive principles.
After Kesavananda: Minerva Mills to I.R. Coelho
The basic structure was tested almost immediately. In Indira Nehru Gandhi v. Raj Narain, AIR 1975 SC 2299, the Court struck down a constitutional amendment that tried to place the Prime Minister’s election beyond judicial scrutiny, the first time an amendment was voided for breaching the basic structure. Five years later came the definitive statement in Minerva Mills Ltd. v. Union of India, AIR 1980 SC 1789: a limited amending power, judicial review, and the harmony between fundamental rights and directive principles are all part of the basic structure. Parliament cannot give itself unlimited power to amend, because that would let it destroy the very Constitution from which the power flows.
That still left the Ninth Schedule, the constitutional cupboard where Parliament had stashed laws it wanted immune from fundamental rights challenge. In Waman Rao v. Union of India, (1981) 2 SCC 362, the Court fixed 24 April 1973, the date Kesavananda was decided, as the cut-off: laws added to the Ninth Schedule after that date are open to basic-structure challenge. And in I.R. Coelho v. State of Tamil Nadu, (2007) 2 SCC 1, a unanimous nine-judge bench confirmed it: any law placed in the Ninth Schedule after 24 April 1973 can be tested against the fundamental rights, and struck down if it damages the basic structure. The cupboard, in other words, no longer has a lock. So can Parliament change your fundamental rights? Yes, within limits, and the courts, not Parliament, guard the limit.
Rule of law and Article 14: from Dicey to arbitrariness
Article 14 is nine words long: “The State shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws.” Those nine words carry more constitutional weight than almost any other provision in Part III, because the Supreme Court has read into them the entire idea of the rule of law, and a prohibition on arbitrary State action that reaches far beyond simple discrimination.
Notice the two limbs. “Equality before the law” is a negative concept borrowed from the English common law and from A.V. Dicey: no person is above the law, and everyone is subject to the ordinary law of the land. “Equal protection of the laws” is a positive concept borrowed from the American Fourteenth Amendment: like should be treated alike. Article 14 fuses both.
Dicey’s rule of law and how Article 14 absorbs it
Dicey’s rule of law had three elements: the absence of arbitrary power (a person can be punished only for a breach of law, not for anything else), equality before the law, and the idea that constitutional principles are the result of judicial decisions. Indian constitutional law absorbed the first two almost wholesale into Article 14, and treats the rule of law itself as part of the basic structure, which is why it cannot be amended away.
But India departed from Dicey in one crucial respect. Dicey distrusted a separate body of administrative law and special tribunals; India embraced them. The Indian rule of law is therefore not a museum copy of the Victorian original. It is the principle that State power, however it is dressed up, must be exercised through law and never arbitrarily. Where does a court draw the line between a legitimate policy choice and arbitrary State action? That question is the whole modern life of Article 14.
The classic test: reasonable classification
Equality does not mean the State must treat everyone identically. A tax law that treats millionaires differently from daily-wage earners is not unconstitutional; it is sensible. So the courts developed the doctrine of reasonable classification. A law that classifies people into groups survives Article 14 if it clears two tests: the classification must rest on an “intelligible differentia” (a real, identifiable difference), and that differentia must have a “rational nexus” to the object the law is trying to achieve.
The Court struck down a law for flunking exactly this test in State of West Bengal v. Anwar Ali Sarkar, AIR 1952 SC 75, where a statute let the government pick which cases went to a special court with a stripped-down procedure, with no guiding principle for the choice. Unguided discretion, the Court held, is the enemy of equality. The classic restatement of the test, the one every law student memorises, came in Ram Krishna Dalmia v. Justice S.R. Tendolkar, AIR 1958 SC 538.
The new test: arbitrariness
Then the doctrine leapt forward. In E.P. Royappa v. State of Tamil Nadu, (1974) 4 SCC 3, Justice Bhagwati reframed equality itself: “equality is antithetic to arbitrariness.” Article 14, on this reading, is not just about classification; it strikes at any arbitrary State action, because arbitrariness is the opposite of equality. Four years later, Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, (1978) 1 SCC 248 welded Articles 14, 19 and 21 into an interlinked “golden triangle” and held that any procedure that deprives a person of liberty must be just, fair and reasonable, not arbitrary or oppressive.
The arbitrariness doctrine reached its sharpest expression in Shayara Bano v. Union of India, (2017) 9 SCC 1, where the Court struck down the practice of instant triple talaq by 3:2 and held that a law can be void under Article 14 for “manifest arbitrariness”, meaning something done capriciously, irrationally, or without adequate determining principle. The reach of this idea keeps growing. In its November 2024 guidelines against so-called “bulldozer justice” (In Re: Directions in the matter of demolition of structures, 2024 INSC 866), the Supreme Court held that demolishing an accused person’s home as a punishment, without due process, offends the rule of law, the separation of powers and Article 21, and it laid down binding safeguards nationwide. The practical reality is that Article 14 has become the general-purpose weapon against arbitrary government, which is exactly why it is pleaded in almost every constitutional challenge.
The welfare articles: Part III’s social-justice engine
It is tempting to think of fundamental rights as purely negative, as fences that keep the State out. But Part III also carries a powerful positive, redistributive charge. Read alongside Article 14, the articles on non-discrimination and personal liberty have been used to pursue social justice: to justify reservation, to abolish untouchability, and to convert the right to life into a guarantee of the basic conditions of a dignified existence. These are, in a real sense, the welfare articles of Part III.
The tension here is genuine. Formal equality (treat everyone the same) can entrench existing disadvantage, while substantive equality (level the playing field) requires treating some groups differently. Indian constitutional law has consistently chosen substantive equality, and the case law shows the cost and the controversy of that choice.
The equality code: Articles 15, 16 and 17
Articles 15 and 16 form the constitutional basis of India’s reservation system. Article 15 bars discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, but expressly permits special provisions for women and children, and for socially and educationally backward classes. Article 16 guarantees equality of opportunity in public employment, while permitting reservation for backward classes inadequately represented in State services. Article 17 abolishes untouchability outright and makes its practice an offence, binding not just the State but everyone.
The reservation story runs through a line of landmark cases. It effectively began with State of Madras v. Champakam Dorairajan, AIR 1951 SC 226, where a caste-based reservation order in education was struck down for violating Article 15(1), a ruling that prompted the very First Amendment to insert the enabling clause in Article 15(4). The modern framework was set in Indra Sawhney v. Union of India, 1992 Supp (3) SCC 217, the Mandal case, where a nine-judge bench upheld 27 percent reservation for Other Backward Classes, capped total reservation at 50 percent, and held that the “creamy layer” of the backward classes must be excluded.
Two recent rulings have reshaped this terrain, and neither appears in older guides. In Janhit Abhiyan v. Union of India, (2023) 5 SCC 1, decided in November 2022, a five-judge bench upheld by 3:2 the 103rd Amendment, which added Articles 15(6) and 16(6) to allow up to 10 percent reservation for Economically Weaker Sections, holding that reservation on purely economic criteria does not by itself violate the basic structure. And in State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh, 2024 INSC 562, decided on 1 August 2024, a seven-judge bench held by 6:1 that states may sub-classify Scheduled Castes to give the most disadvantaged sub-groups a preferential slice of the quota, overruling the earlier view in E.V. Chinnaiah that the Scheduled Castes are a single homogenous group. Several judges also observed that the creamy-layer principle should extend to the Scheduled Castes and Tribes, a point that will drive the next round of litigation.
Article 21 as a welfare right, and Articles 21A, 23 and 24
The most dramatic expansion in all of Part III has been of Article 21, the right to life and personal liberty. Once read narrowly as mere protection against physical deprivation, it has become, since Maneka Gandhi, a fountainhead of welfare rights. In Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation, (1985) 3 SCC 545, the Court held that the right to livelihood is part of the right to life, so pavement dwellers could not be evicted without a fair procedure. Over the following decades, Article 21 was read to include the right to health, to a clean environment, to shelter, to dignity, and to privacy.
Education followed the same path. In Unni Krishnan v. State of A.P., (1993) 1 SCC 645, the Court held that the right to education for children flows from Article 21, and that reasoning was later written into the Constitution as Article 21A by the 86th Amendment in 2002, guaranteeing free and compulsory education for children aged six to fourteen. (iPleaders has a full treatment of whether and how education is a fundamental right.) Rounding out the welfare cluster, Articles 23 and 24, the right against exploitation, prohibit human trafficking and forced labour and bar the employment of children under fourteen in factories, mines and other hazardous work. If a fundamental right can compel the State to provide, and not merely to refrain, this is where you see it most clearly.
Right to freedom: Article 19
If Article 21 is the heart of Part III, Article 19 is its voice. It guarantees the freedoms that make a democracy function, and it is the article under which the great free-speech battles of the past decade have been fought. But it comes with a design feature that trips up newcomers: every freedom it grants is immediately qualified by a power to restrict it.
Article 19(1) guarantees six freedoms to citizens: freedom of speech and expression; to assemble peaceably and without arms; to form associations or unions; to move freely throughout India; to reside and settle anywhere in India; and to practise any profession or carry on any occupation, trade or business.
The six freedoms
You may be counting and wondering where the seventh went. The original Article 19(1)(f) guaranteed the freedom to acquire, hold and dispose of property, but it was deleted by the 44th Amendment in 1978, at the same time property was demoted out of the fundamental rights entirely. So the list has been six, not seven, since 1979.
Each freedom has generated its own jurisprudence. Freedom of speech under Article 19(1)(a) has been read to include the freedom of the press, the right to receive information, the right to fly the national flag, and, in the digital age, the right to access the internet as a medium of expression. The right to form associations under 19(1)(c) has shaped the law on trade unions and political parties. The right to trade under 19(1)(g) underpins a huge volume of economic-regulation litigation.
Reasonable restrictions and the free-speech cases
Here’s the design feature. Clauses (2) to (6) of Article 19 let the State impose “reasonable restrictions” on each freedom, but only on the specific grounds listed and only if the restriction is reasonable. For free speech, Article 19(2) allows restrictions in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign states, public order, decency or morality, contempt of court, defamation, and incitement to an offence. The word doing the heavy lifting is “reasonable”, and it is the courts, not the government, who decide what qualifies. (For the full framework, see the iPleaders guide to reasonable restrictions on the fundamental rights.)
The case law is a running argument about where that line sits. In Romesh Thappar v. State of Madras, AIR 1950 SC 124, one of the earliest free-speech rulings, the Court struck down a ban on the circulation of a journal, and the decision prompted the First Amendment to recalibrate the grounds in Article 19(2). Decades later, in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, (2015) 5 SCC 1, the Court struck down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 as unconstitutionally vague and overbroad, in the most important online-speech judgment India has produced. In Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India, (2020) 3 SCC 637, the Court held that an indefinite suspension of internet services is impermissible and that access to the internet is protected under Article 19(1)(a) and 19(1)(g). And in Kaushal Kishor v. State of U.P., (2023) 4 SCC 1, a five-judge bench held by 4:1 that the grounds of restriction in Article 19(2) are exhaustive: the State cannot invent additional restrictions on speech beyond the eight listed. The freshest reaffirmation came in March 2025, when the Court in Imran Pratapgarhi v. State of Gujarat, 2025 INSC 410, quashed a criminal case over a recited poem and insisted that courts must protect expression even when they personally dislike its content. Freedom of speech, in other words, is still very much a live and contested right. (The right to know has its own dedicated treatment in the iPleaders piece on the right to information as a fundamental right.)
Right to freedom of religion: Article 25
India is constitutionally secular, but Indian secularism is not the American wall of separation between church and state. It is a more entangled arrangement in which the State keeps a principled distance from all religions while retaining the power to reform religious practice in the name of social justice. Article 25 is where that delicate balance is struck, and it is one of the most litigated provisions in the Constitution.
Article 25(1) guarantees to all persons, not just citizens, the freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion. But the guarantee opens with a crucial qualifier: it is “subject to public order, morality and health and to the other provisions of this Part.” Religious freedom in India has never been unconditional.
What Article 25 protects, and its limits
Three verbs define the scope of the right: to profess (to declare your faith openly), to practise (to perform religious duties and rituals), and to propagate (to spread and communicate your faith, though the Court has held this does not include a right to forcibly convert). The word “conscience” also protects the non-religious and the atheist, since freedom of conscience is broader than freedom of religion.
Then come the limits, and they are extensive. Article 25(2) expressly preserves the State’s power to regulate secular activity associated with religious practice, and, more strikingly, to throw open Hindu religious institutions to all classes and sections of Hindus, the constitutional hook for temple-entry reform. So the State cannot tell you what to believe, but it can regulate a great deal of what religious institutions do. Where is the boundary between protected religious practice and regulable secular activity? That question has generated a doctrine all its own.
The essential religious practices doctrine
To draw the line, the Court invented the “essential religious practices” test. The idea, first developed in Commissioner, Hindu Religious Endowments, Madras v. Sri Lakshmindra Thirtha Swamiar of Sri Shirur Mutt, AIR 1954 SC 282, is that Article 25 protects only those practices that are essential and integral to a religion, while the State may regulate everything that is merely secular, commercial or ancillary. The practice must be so fundamental that the religion itself would change without it.
The doctrine has protected genuine belief and constrained it in equal measure. In Bijoe Emmanuel v. State of Kerala, (1986) 3 SCC 615, the Court protected three Jehovah’s Witness children who were expelled for silently declining to sing the national anthem, holding that standing up respectfully was enough and that forcing them to sing violated Articles 19(1)(a) and 25. In Indian Young Lawyers Association v. State of Kerala, (2019) 11 SCC 1, the Sabarimala case, the Court held by 4:1 that barring women of menstruating age from the temple was unconstitutional. The broader questions raised by that ruling, about the reach of the essential-practices test and the relationship between Article 25 and the group rights in Article 26, were referred to a larger bench, and as of mid-2026 a nine-judge Constitution Bench has been hearing that reference, with judgment awaited. Article 25, plainly, is a settlement that each generation renegotiates.
Right to constitutional remedies: Article 32
A right you cannot enforce is a promise, not a guarantee. Ambedkar understood this better than anyone, which is why he called Article 32 the heart and soul of the Constitution. Every other fundamental right in Part III ultimately depends on this one, because Article 32 is the machinery that lets a citizen convert a paper right into a court order.
Article 32(1) guarantees the right to move the Supreme Court directly for the enforcement of fundamental rights, and Article 32(2) empowers the Court to issue directions, orders or writs to enforce them. Crucially, the right to this remedy is itself a fundamental right, which means Parliament cannot ordinarily take it away. The Supreme Court thus becomes the guarantor and protector of the fundamental rights.
The heart and soul, and the five writs
The Court’s main tools under Article 32 are the five writs, all borrowed from English law. Habeas corpus (“produce the body”) tests the legality of a detention and secures the release of anyone unlawfully held. Mandamus (“we command”) orders a public authority to perform a duty it is refusing to perform. Prohibition stops a lower court or tribunal from exceeding its jurisdiction, while certiorari quashes an order already passed without jurisdiction. And quo warranto (“by what authority”) challenges a person’s right to hold a public office.
There is an important overlap to keep straight. The same five writs can be issued by the High Courts under Article 226, and in one respect Article 226 is wider, because it covers not only fundamental rights but “any other purpose”, meaning ordinary legal rights too. So why is Article 32 special? Because it is itself a guaranteed fundamental right, whereas the Article 226 remedy, though broader in scope, is discretionary. For the fuller treatment of the writ jurisdiction and the limits on it, see the iPleaders explainer on the right to constitutional remedies under Articles 32 to 35.
Judicial review as basic structure, and when rights are suspended
The power of judicial review that flows through Articles 32 and 226 is not an ordinary power that Parliament can switch off. In L. Chandra Kumar v. Union of India, (1997) 3 SCC 261, a seven-judge bench held that judicial review by the High Courts and the Supreme Court is part of the basic structure, so even tribunals created by constitutional amendment cannot oust it. The darkest chapter came in ADM Jabalpur v. Shivkant Shukla, AIR 1976 SC 1207, where, during the Emergency, the Court held by 4:1 that even habeas corpus was unavailable while fundamental rights stood suspended, with only Justice H.R. Khanna dissenting. That ruling was formally buried in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 1, the nine-judge privacy judgment, which expressly overruled ADM Jabalpur and recognised the right to privacy as part of Articles 21 and Part III.
It’s worth flagging that fundamental rights can be suspended, but only in the narrow circumstances of a National Emergency under Article 359, and even then Articles 20 and 21 can no longer be suspended, a safeguard added precisely because of the Emergency experience. (iPleaders covers the mechanics of this in its piece on the suspension of fundamental rights.) The same jurisdiction has also powered public interest litigation, the device by which the Court relaxed standing rules so that the poor and the voiceless could reach it. Article 32, in short, is not one remedy among many. It is the reason the rest of Part III has teeth.
Can the Directive Principles override the fundamental rights?
The Constitution contains a second, quieter charter of goals: the Directive Principles of State Policy in Part IV, which tell the State to build a welfare society by securing a living wage, distributing resources for the common good, providing free legal aid, and much else. Here is the puzzle that has occupied the courts for seventy years: what happens when a law passed to fulfil a Directive Principle collides with a fundamental right? Which one wins?
The starting point is Article 37, which makes the Directive Principles expressly non-justiciable: they “shall not be enforceable by any court”, yet they are “fundamental in the governance of the country” and it is the State’s duty to apply them in making laws. So the Directive Principles are meant to guide legislation, but a citizen cannot sue to enforce them. That asymmetry is the root of the whole conflict.
Article 37 and the original conflict
In the earliest phase, the fundamental rights simply won. In Champakam Dorairajan, back in 1951, the Court held that the Directive Principles have to “conform to and run subsidiary to” the fundamental rights, so where the two clashed, Part III prevailed. That was a clean answer, but a politically unstable one, because it left the State’s welfare agenda at the mercy of the rights of the propertied.
The Court soon softened the confrontation. In In re Kerala Education Bill, 1957, AIR 1958 SC 956, it introduced the doctrine of harmonious construction: courts should try to read the fundamental rights and the Directive Principles together, giving effect to both as far as possible, and treating them as supplementary and complementary rather than as rivals. The relationship, on this view, is not a hierarchy but a partnership. (The competing academic and judicial views are traced in the iPleaders analysis of the conflict between the fundamental rights and the DPSP, and in its companion piece on the relationship between the two.)
Article 31C, Minerva Mills and the balance as basic structure
Parliament was not content to leave it to harmonious construction. Through the 25th Amendment it inserted Article 31C, which protected laws giving effect to the Directive Principles in Article 39(b) and (c), on the distribution of material resources and the prevention of wealth concentration, from challenge under Articles 14 and 19. In Kesavananda Bharati, the Court upheld this narrower version of Article 31C but struck down a further part that would have barred courts from even asking whether a law genuinely served those principles.
Then Parliament overreached. The 42nd Amendment expanded Article 31C to protect laws giving effect to any Directive Principle, in effect subordinating the fundamental rights to the whole of Part IV. In Minerva Mills, the Court struck that expansion down. Its reasoning is the settled position today: the fundamental rights and the Directive Principles are like two wheels of a chariot, and the balance and harmony between them is itself part of the basic structure. Parliament cannot give the Directive Principles blanket primacy over the fundamental rights, because destroying that balance would destroy the Constitution’s core. Article 31C survives, but only in its original, pre-42nd-Amendment form, shielding laws that give effect to Article 39(b) and (c) from Articles 14 and 19.
The 2024 reset: Property Owners Association
Which brings us to the freshest chapter, and the reason older guides on this topic are now out of date. In Property Owners Association v. State of Maharashtra, 2024 INSC 835, decided on 5 November 2024, a nine-judge bench revisited the meaning of Article 39(b) and the status of Article 31C. It settled two things. First, unanimously, it confirmed that Article 31C, in its Kesavananda-approved form, survived the striking down of the 42nd Amendment in Minerva Mills and continues to operate. Second, by an 8:1 majority (Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia dissenting), it held that not every privately owned resource is a “material resource of the community” that the State may redistribute under Article 39(b); whether a given resource qualifies depends on factors like its nature, scarcity, and the consequences of leaving it in private hands.
In doing so, the majority overruled the expansive interpretation offered by Justice Krishna Iyer in an earlier case and followed in Sanjeev Coke, which had read Article 39(b) to cover practically all private property. The significance is hard to overstate: the Court pulled back from a socialist-era reading of the Directive Principles that would have handed the State sweeping redistributive power over private assets, while carefully preserving the constitutional device (Article 31C) that lets genuine welfare laws survive a fundamental rights challenge. So can the Directive Principles override the fundamental rights? No. But through Article 31C, a narrow, carefully policed class of welfare laws can still be immunised from Articles 14 and 19, and the courts, as always, hold the pen that defines “narrow.”
Frequently asked questions
1. What are the fundamental rights under the Indian Constitution?
The fundamental rights are the guarantees in Part III of the Constitution, Articles 12 to 35, that are enforceable against the State. They fall into six groups: the right to equality (Articles 14 to 18), the right to freedom (Articles 19 to 22), the right against exploitation (Articles 23 to 24), the right to freedom of religion (Articles 25 to 28), cultural and educational rights (Articles 29 to 30), and the right to constitutional remedies (Article 32).
2. How many fundamental rights are there in India?
There are six categories of fundamental rights today. There were originally seven; the right to property was removed from Part III by the 44th Amendment in 1978 and now exists as an ordinary constitutional right under Article 300A, outside the fundamental rights.
3. Can Parliament amend or take away the fundamental rights?
Parliament can amend the fundamental rights under Article 368, but it cannot damage the “basic structure” of the Constitution. This limit was laid down in Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala (1973) by a thirteen-judge bench and has been applied ever since, most recently reaffirmed in the reasoning of Property Owners Association v. State of Maharashtra (2024).
4. What is Article 12 and why does it matter?
Article 12 defines “the State” for the purposes of Part III to include the government, Parliament, state legislatures, and all local or “other authorities” under government control. It matters because most fundamental rights can be enforced only against the State, so whether a body is the State under Article 12 decides whether a rights petition against it can even be heard.
5. What is the difference between the rule of law and Article 14?
The rule of law is the broader principle that everyone is subject to the ordinary law and no one is above it, drawn largely from A.V. Dicey. Article 14 is the constitutional provision that guarantees equality before the law and equal protection of the laws, and the Supreme Court has read the rule of law and a bar on arbitrary State action into it. The rule of law is also treated as part of the basic structure.
6. Are fundamental rights absolute?
No. Almost every fundamental right is subject to limits. Article 19 freedoms are subject to “reasonable restrictions” on specified grounds, and Article 25 is subject to public order, morality and health. Only a few rights, such as the bar on untouchability under Article 17, operate as near-absolute prohibitions.
7. Do fundamental rights apply against private individuals or only the State?
Most fundamental rights run only against the State as defined in Article 12. But some bind private parties too: Article 15(2) (access to public places), Article 17 (untouchability), Article 23 (trafficking and forced labour) and Article 24 (child labour). The Supreme Court in Kaushal Kishor (2023) also recognised that certain rights under Articles 19 and 21 can be enforced horizontally against non-State actors.
8. What is Article 32 and why did Ambedkar call it the heart and soul of the Constitution?
Article 32 gives every person the right to move the Supreme Court directly to enforce the fundamental rights, and empowers the Court to issue five writs (habeas corpus, mandamus, prohibition, certiorari and quo warranto). Ambedkar called it the heart and soul of the Constitution because without a guaranteed remedy the other rights would be unenforceable promises.
9. Can the Directive Principles of State Policy override the fundamental rights?
No. The Directive Principles in Part IV are not enforceable in court (Article 37), and the balance between them and the fundamental rights is part of the basic structure, as held in Minerva Mills (1980). Through Article 31C, a narrow class of laws giving effect to Article 39(b) and (c) is shielded from Articles 14 and 19, and Property Owners Association (2024) confirmed Article 31C survives while narrowing the reach of Article 39(b).
10. What is the basic structure doctrine?
The basic structure doctrine holds that Parliament’s power to amend the Constitution does not extend to altering or destroying its essential features. Established in Kesavananda Bharati (1973), the basic structure has been held to include the supremacy of the Constitution, the rule of law, judicial review, secularism, federalism, free and fair elections, and the balance between the fundamental rights and the Directive Principles.
11. Which fundamental right was removed from the Constitution?
The right to property. It was originally guaranteed under Article 19(1)(f) and Article 31, but both were deleted by the 44th Amendment in 1978. Property is now protected only as a constitutional and legal right under Article 300A, which means a law depriving a person of property no longer has to satisfy the fundamental rights tests.
12. Can fundamental rights be suspended?
Yes, but only during a National Emergency, and only through the machinery of Article 359. Even then, the rights under Article 20 (protection in respect of conviction) and Article 21 (life and personal liberty) cannot be suspended, a safeguard introduced after the abuses of the 1975 Emergency.
References
Case law
- ADM Jabalpur v. Shivkant Shukla, AIR 1976 SC 1207
- Ajay Hasia v. Khalid Mujib Sehravardi, (1981) 1 SCC 722
- Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India, (2020) 3 SCC 637
- Basheshar Nath v. Commissioner of Income Tax, AIR 1959 SC 149
- Bhikaji Narain Dhakras v. State of M.P., AIR 1955 SC 781
- Bijoe Emmanuel v. State of Kerala, (1986) 3 SCC 615
- Commissioner, Hindu Religious Endowments, Madras v. Sri Lakshmindra Thirtha Swamiar of Sri Shirur Mutt, AIR 1954 SC 282
- E.P. Royappa v. State of Tamil Nadu, (1974) 4 SCC 3
- I.C. Golak Nath v. State of Punjab, AIR 1967 SC 1643
- I.R. Coelho v. State of Tamil Nadu, (2007) 2 SCC 1
- Indra Sawhney v. Union of India, 1992 Supp (3) SCC 217
- Indira Nehru Gandhi v. Raj Narain, AIR 1975 SC 2299
- Indian Young Lawyers Association v. State of Kerala, (2019) 11 SCC 1
- Janhit Abhiyan v. Union of India, (2023) 5 SCC 1
- Kaushal Kishor v. State of U.P., (2023) 4 SCC 1
- In re Kerala Education Bill, 1957, AIR 1958 SC 956
- Keshavan Madhava Menon v. State of Bombay, AIR 1951 SC 128
- Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, (1973) 4 SCC 225
- L. Chandra Kumar v. Union of India, (1997) 3 SCC 261
- Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India, (1978) 1 SCC 248
- Minerva Mills Ltd. v. Union of India, AIR 1980 SC 1789
- Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation, (1985) 3 SCC 545
- Pradeep Kumar Biswas v. Indian Institute of Chemical Biology, (2002) 5 SCC 111
- Property Owners Association v. State of Maharashtra, 2024 INSC 835
- Rajasthan State Electricity Board v. Mohan Lal, AIR 1967 SC 1857
- Ram Krishna Dalmia v. Justice S.R. Tendolkar, AIR 1958 SC 538
- Romesh Thappar v. State of Madras, AIR 1950 SC 124
- Rupa Ashok Hurra v. Ashok Hurra, (2002) 4 SCC 388
- Sajjan Singh v. State of Rajasthan, AIR 1965 SC 845
- Shankari Prasad v. Union of India, AIR 1951 SC 458
- Shayara Bano v. Union of India, (2017) 9 SCC 1
- Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, (2015) 5 SCC 1
- State of Madras v. Champakam Dorairajan, AIR 1951 SC 226
- State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh, 2024 INSC 562
- State of West Bengal v. Anwar Ali Sarkar, AIR 1952 SC 75
- Sukhdev Singh v. Bhagatram, AIR 1975 SC 1331
- Unni Krishnan v. State of A.P., (1993) 1 SCC 645
- Waman Rao v. Union of India, (1981) 2 SCC 362
- K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 1
- Zee Telefilms Ltd. v. Union of India, (2005) 4 SCC 649
- In Re: Directions in the matter of demolition of structures, 2024 INSC 866
- Imran Pratapgarhi v. State of Gujarat, 2025 INSC 410
Statutes
- The Constitution of India, 1950. Provisions cited: Part III (Articles 12 to 35), and Articles 37, 39(b) and (c), 300A and 368; the 1st, 24th, 25th, 42nd, 44th, 86th and 103rd Constitution Amendment Acts.
This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. For specific legal guidance on any fundamental rights or constitutional matter, consult a qualified advocate.
