India@75: 10 key amendments that shaped India

A charya Kripalani is said to have remarked when lying ill in hospital: “I have no constitution. All that is left are amendments. ” He said this during the Emergency, at the time the 42nd Amendment to the Constitution of India was in the offing. This amendment, more like a mini-Constitution itself, changed large portions of the original constitutional text, including the Preamble and the powers of the Supreme Court.
Kripalani, like others, was apprehensive that with the amendments the Constitution would become a pale shadow of itself. However, with Indira Gandhi’s electoral defeat, the successor Janata Government enacted the 44th Amendment to undo much of the damage. These two amendments, in quick succession, demonstrated the power of the Constitution to fundamentally shape and reshape the lives of ordinary Indians.
Here are 10 constitutional amendments of the last seven decades that left their mark on democracy in India, restructured institutions of government and established the rights and responsibilities of citizens and their governments.
BACK AND FORTH ON CONSTITUTION
42nd Amendment | 1976
It was the Indira Gandhi government’s imprimatur on the Constitution of India. With lofty proclamations on the need for a “living” Constitution, it amended the Preamble to state that India would be “socialist” and “secular”. To project the image of a powerful nation, it stressed that the “integrity of the nation”, apart from its unity, would be assured. It also gave wide powers to the government to suspend fundamental rights during the Emergency, curtailed the power of high courts and set up tribunals to speed up the delivery of justice.
44th Amendment | 1978
The Morarji Desai government that succeeded Indira in 1977 moved to restore the Constitution to its pre42nd Amendment condition. It’s remarkable that the 44th Amendment, which added crucial safeguards against the deprivation of fundamental rights, curtailed the wide-ranging emergency powers of the Centre, and downgraded the right to property from a fundamental right to a constitutional right, passed despite the ruling Janata Party’s internal tensions.
52nd Amendment | 1985
Gaya Lal, an Independent MLA in Haryana, joined Congress, switched to the United Front, came back to Congress and on the same day went back to the United Front. All in the space of two weeks. The 52nd Amendment was enacted to stop such defections. It introduced the 10th Schedule disqualifying MPs and state legislators who hopped parties. Recent events, including in Maharashtra, however, have shown its limits.
61st Amendment| 1988
This amendment reduced the voting age from 21 to 18, and in one stroke added 5 crore voters for the next elections. In a speech in Parliament, PM Rajiv Gandhi declared it was “an expression of our full faith in the youth of the country”. The amendment changed India’s electoral landscape and the campaign strategies of parties for good.
FREE SPEECH LOST, EDUCATION GAINED
1st Amendment | 1951
The Constituent Assembly had to amend the Constitution within months of its coming into force after the Supreme Court severely restricted the government’s ability to restrict free speech. The SC overturned the censorship of two magazines – the left-leaning CrossRoads and the right-leaning Organiser. Under the guise of fixing the “moral problem” of “vulgarity and indecency and falsehood” which “poisoned the mind of the younger generation” Nehru supported the amendment that gave vast powers to governments to arrest citizens for expressing their views. The unfortunate legacy of this amendment lives on.
86th Amendment | 2002
The framers of the Constitution had not made education a fundamental right because they felt the State would not have the resources to uphold this right for every child. In 2002, with the economy booming, the right to education was made a fundamental right for children aged 6-14, which led to the Right to Education Act, 2009.
103rd Amendment | 2019
The original Constitution was against granting reservation in universities and jobs on economic criteria alone. Ambedkar was clear that backwardness would have to mean both social and educational backwardness. This logic was fundamentally changed by the 103rd Amendment that provided reservation on the basis of economic criteria. Later, the family income cut-off was set at Rs 8 lakh per annum.
PANCHAYATS ADVANCE, INSTITUTIONS EVOLVE
73rd and 74th Amendments | 1992
Mahatma Gandhi was a steadfast advocate of self-contained ‘village republics’ as the basic unit of governance in independent India. The Constituent Assembly had the opportunity to formalise this idea, but the opponents of this view, led by Ambedkar, emerged victorious. Ambedkar said Indian villages were a “sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism”. But 40 years on, in 1991, the Union government introduced and passed the 73rd and 74th Amendments mandating the creation of panchayats and municipalities in every state. These amendments decentralised governance and administration in India and increased the involvement of the community in planning and implementing schemes, at least on paper.
99th Amendment | 2014
On New Year’s Eve in 2014, the Modi government’s first major constitutional amendment changed the method of appointment of judges to the Supreme Court and high courts. The National Judicial Appointments Commission, a longstanding demand of all political parties, was brought in by consensus to bring to an end the opaque system of appointments led by a collegium of senior Supreme Court judges. In a controversial judgment, the SC struck down the amendment for violating the basic structure of the Constitution. With reasoning that was altogether tenuous, it underlined the need for judicial independence which could only be protected by judges themselves. Recent history has shown otherwise.
101st Amendment | 2016
Indian federalism espoused the principle that states and the Union were sovereign in their own respects. The 101st Amendment changed that fundamental understanding when the Union and the states pooled their sovereignty to enact the Goods and Services Tax – a single indirect tax for the entire country, bringing simplicity and ease of living for Indians. Addressing a joint session of Parliament to usher in GST, then finance minister Arun Jaitley described it as one of “India’s biggest and most ambitious tax and economic reforms in history” that would awaken India to “limitless possibilities”.
Sengupta is Research Director, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy