When I think about the Basic Structure Doctrine, it doesn’t unfurl in my head as a tidy legal concept—more like a memory, half-lit and necessary, shaped from a story I heard and argued about late at night, maybe in a law classroom, maybe on a train cutting through the Kerala monsoon. The Indian Constitution, for me and for so many of us, was never “just” a book; it was a strange and tender attempt at belonging—an effort to stitch together languages, fights, bitterness and hope, into something that would hold, even when we didn’t.
Back in 1973—a thicket of years I never lived through but can only imagine through borrowed words—the courtroom where Kesavananda Bharati turned up wasn’t shielded from politics or fate. My parents weren’t even born. The judges weren’t making new law as much as clutching at the last defence they could find. What happens when power tastes blood and wants more? When Parliament thinks it can change everything, uncaring of what those changes mean for people like us, on the margins, the ordinary and unnamed?
It is easy to tell the story in clean strokes: a religious leader fights land acquisition, Parliament stretches its fingers across the Constitution, judges argue for 68 days in the echo of ceiling fans and shuffling feet. But history is never clean. It drips, it bruises. The amendments passed in those years—First, Fourth, Seventeenth, Twenty-fifth—weren’t colourless events. They shook up lives: property rights went under, laws escaped review, and suddenly the power to amend felt absolute, untethered to restraint or memory.
The Supreme Court’s bench was huge—thirteen judges, a kind of impromptu Parliament inside the court, decisions teetering on a razor-thin split. Seven to six. The Basic Structure Doctrine came out of that fracture, struggling to balance on words like “democracy,” “rule of law,” and “secularism.” In real life, these aren’t just constitutional lingo; they’re the last whispers left when the shouting stops, the walls that keep the worst at bay, when governments try swallowing the keys to our common home.
Afterwards, India became a country that stood for more than sheer majoritarian will. The Constitution wasn’t Parliament’s plaything. People—people like us, like my grandmother with her faded voting card, like my queer friends fighting to be recognised—could hope that Parliament could not bulldoze the deepest foundations: dignity, equality, the right to dissent. Even as a law student reciting these lines, I know: real protection is always fragile, always needing another defence, another reimagining.
And then the Emergency slammed down—my mentors call it darkness at noon. Fundamental rights collapsed, opposition vanished, and books grew thinner with censorship. In those seasons of fear, the Basic Structure Doctrine didn’t shout. It quietly blocked amendments that tried to silence the judiciary forever. Chandrachud’s line about balancing rights and directive principles? He didn’t intend it as poetry, but as law’s heartbreak—reminding us that a real Constitution is torn between impossible opposites, and survives only when it chooses not to discard either.
Years ran on, judges found new meanings—federalism, free elections, the dignity of individual life. Secularism became crucial in Bommai. Dignity found a home in I.R. Coelho. These cases weren’t just in reports; they were breath to students, caution to activists, hope to those of us whose lives are permanently out of sight but never outside the sweep of the law.
But outside classrooms and textbooks, the doctrine isn’t just legal scaffolding. I see it in the way a crowd waits for judgment, or in the small conversations about identity and safety beyond the reach of headlines. The Constitution feels closer in those moments, almost like an old promise or a favourite poem read in secret—a safeguard for the fragile, the divided, the ones India cannot afford to forget.
People sometimes say judges have too much power, that the doctrine lets courts override our elected representatives, that it’s undemocratic. Maybe. But sometimes democracy is the name we give to the machinery that forgets its own soul. The doctrine doesn’t mistrust people—it mistrusts shortcuts, majorities that forget how easy it is to lose justice in the noise. In the end, the Constitution is the memory we keep; the doctrine is the refusal to erase it when power turns impatient.
I hold to this doctrine not as a trophy or shield, but as an ongoing effort—protection, not perfection. India’s story is untidy; it’s written in newsprint and midnight debates, in laws that change too slowly, in dissent that risks everything. The Basic Structure Doctrine endures because silence sometimes outlasts slogans, and resilience sometimes depends on the ones who refuse to surrender memory.
As new questions confront us—surveillance, privacy, belonging, the ordinary ache of dissent—the doctrine reminds me that the soul of the Constitution is intimate, never finished. Even as the world alters and falters, some things, some promises, some basic structures are worth holding together, quietly, stubbornly, for everyone who’s ever needed law to mean protection. That is where I find myself, somewhere between law and longing, learning again and again that revolutions can whisper as they endure, and that sometimes the most radical thing a country can do is simply to remember what it promised itself, and refuse to let that promise be rewritten.