The Directive Principles

In one line

Part IV lists the things the Constitution tells the State to do, and no court will make it do any of them; the list is not decorative, because those instructions decide what the enforceable rights in Part III mean.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: article 37 provides that "The provisions contained in this Part shall not be enforceable by any court, but the principles therein laid down are nevertheless fundamental in the governance of the country and it shall be the duty of the State to apply these principles in making laws." A directive principle therefore founds no cause of action. It works in three other ways: it supplies the content of a fundamental right, as in Unni Krishnan, J.P. v. State of Andhra Pradesh; it justifies a restriction on one as reasonable; and the balance between Parts III and IV is itself a basic feature, so neither may be given absolute primacy, as Minerva Mills Ltd v. Union of India held.

Why the law has this at all

A constitution can promise two kinds of thing: that the State will leave you alone, and that the State will provide for you. The first can be enforced by an order against an officer. The second needs money, administration and time, and a court that ordered a living wage for every worker would be ordering what no judgment can deliver. The Constituent Assembly wanted to promise both and would not pretend the second was the same as the first, so it wrote the social and economic programme into a separate Part and said in terms that no court would enforce it.

The consequence is the argument that runs through the next fifty years: if the goals are in Part IV and the enforceable rights in Part III, what happens when reaching a goal requires abridging a right?

The provision that governs the whole Part

Article 37, headed Application of the principles contained in this Part, is to be quoted exactly: "The provisions contained in this Part shall not be enforceable by any court, but the principles therein laid down are nevertheless fundamental in the governance of the country and it shall be the duty of the State to apply these principles in making laws."

Three limbs, and weak answers give only the first. Not enforceable by any court: no writ, no suit, no decree. Nevertheless fundamental in the governance of the country, a phrase MU has set as a long question: the principles are not aspirations of a lower order but the ends the Constitution exists to secure. And it shall be the duty of the State to apply these principles in making laws, a duty on the legislature and executive with no judicial sanction attached.