Individual Freedom and Collective Welfare

In one line

Almost every constitutional case is a contest between what one person may do and what everyone else needs, and the Constitution supplies the machinery for deciding it rather than an answer.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the Constitution reconciles individual freedom and collective welfare through four devices. The rights in Article 19(1) are subject to the reasonable restrictions in Articles 19(2) to 19(6). Article 14 permits classification for a legitimate object. Part IV, the directive principles, states collective goals which are used to give content to individual rights and to justify restrictions on them. And the courts apply proportionality, asking whether a restriction is suitable, necessary and balanced. The reconciliation is therefore structural: the Constitution does not rank the two, it provides a method for weighing them case by case.

The four devices

1. Reasonable restrictions. Article 19(1) grants six freedoms; clauses (2) to (6) permit restrictions in the interests of sovereignty and integrity, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, contempt of court, defamation, incitement to an offence, and the general public interest. The word doing the work is "reasonable", and it is for the court to decide.

2. Classification under Article 14. A law may treat people differently if the classification rests on an intelligible differentia with a rational nexus to a legitimate object, and, after E.P. Royappa v. State of Tamil Nadu, AIR 1974 SC 555, provided it is not arbitrary.

3. The directive principles. Part IV states collective goals: distribution of resources to subserve the common good, public health, the environment, education. Minerva Mills Ltd. v. Union of India, AIR 1980 SC 1789, holds that the balance between Parts III and IV is itself a basic feature.

Facts. A sick textile undertaking was taken over and nationalised, and the Act placed in the Ninth Schedule. The petitioners challenged sections 4 and 55 of the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act 1976. Section 55 inserted clauses (4) and (5) into Article 368; section 4 widened Article 31C so that any law giving effect to any directive principle was immune from challenge under Articles 14 and 19.

Held. Both were void. Clause (5) removed all limitations on the amending power and demolished the pillars on which limited government rests; clause (4) removed the courts' power to decide whether a limitation had been exceeded, and a limited power cannot be made unlimited by removing the means of enforcing the limit. The widened Article 31C destroyed the balance between fundamental rights and directive principles, which is itself a basic feature.

Why it matters here. It is the constitutional answer to the whole question. Parliament had tried to make collective welfare, in the form of any directive principle, automatically prevail over Articles 14 and 19. The Court held that a total subordination of individual freedom to collective goals is itself unconstitutional, and so is the reverse.