The Right to Property

In one line

Property is the only right the Constitution ever took out of Part III, and what is left is a promise that the State will not take your land except by a law, which is worth more than it sounds.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: article 19(1)(f), the right to acquire, hold and dispose of property, and article 31, the right against compulsory acquisition without compensation, were both omitted by the Constitution (Forty-fourth Amendment) Act 1978, with effect from 20 June 1979. The same amendment inserted article 300A in Part XII, under a new Chapter IV headed Right to Property: "No person shall be deprived of his property save by authority of law." The right is therefore a constitutional right and not a fundamental right, and cannot be enforced under article 32; but on K.T. Plantation Pvt Ltd v. State of Karnataka a public purpose is a pre-condition of deprivation, the obligation to pay is inferred in the article, and the depriving law must be just, fair and reasonable.

Why the law has this at all

The Constitution of 1950 guaranteed property twice, in article 19(1)(f) and article 31, and the States immediately set about abolishing the zamindari system. The two things could not both happen. Compensation provisions and the equality guarantee made agrarian reform slow and expensive, and courts struck down or delayed reform statutes.

Parliament's answer was not to argue about the guarantee but to move the legislation out of its reach. That is the history of articles 31A and 31B, taken in full in [Saving of Laws: Articles 31A, 31B and 31C]. After twenty-eight years of amendments and a Schedule of protected statutes, the guarantee protected almost nothing that mattered, and the Forty-fourth Amendment deleted it.

So this chapter is about a demolition and what was left standing, which is the question the syllabus is really asking: what is a constitutional right that is not a fundamental right worth?

The dismantling, in the Constitution's own footnotes

Do not date these from memory. The Constitution's own footnotes record each step.

• Article 31A, saving laws for the acquisition of estates, was "Ins. by the Constitution (First Amendment) Act, 1951, s. 4, (with retrospective effect)", and its clause (1) was substituted by the Fourth Amendment 1955, also with retrospective effect. A second proviso, protecting land within the ceiling limit under personal cultivation, was added by the Seventeenth Amendment 1964, from 20 June 1964.
• Article 31B, validating the Acts listed in the Ninth Schedule, was "Ins. by the Constitution (First Amendment) Act, 1951, s. 5 (w.e.f. 18-6-1951)".
• The Forty-fourth Amendment 1978 then did four things on the same day, 20 June 1979: it omitted sub-clause (f) of article 19(1) by section 2; it omitted the sub-heading "Right to Property" by section 5; it omitted article 31 by section 6; and by section 34 it inserted article 300A.
• The same amendment tidied article 31A by section 7, substituting "article 14 or article 19" for "article 14, article 19 or article 31", because article 31 no longer existed.