The following discussion is an attempt to chart the waters of that period rendered turbulent by the power struggle between the legislative and the judicial arms of the State.Īccording to the Constitution, Parliament and the state legislatures in India have the power to make laws within their respective jurisdictions. Much of the public debate has been a victim of partial amnesia as even literate circles of urban India are unsure of the ramifications of this concept, which was hotly debated during the 1970s and 1980s. Several political parties - notably the Congress (I) and the two Communist parties which are in the opposition - have made it clear that the review exercise was the government's ploy to seek legitimacy for its design to adopt radical constitutional reforms thus destroying the basic structure of the document. Venkatachalaiah, Chairman of the Commission, has emphasised on several occasions that an inquiry into the basic structure of the Constitution lay beyond the scope of the Commission's work. The debate on the 'basic structure' of the Constitution, lying somnolent in the archives of India's constitutional history during the last decade of the 20th century, has reappeared in the public realm.While setting up the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution (the Commission), the National Democratic Alliance government (formed by a coalition of 24 national and regional level parties) stated that the basic structure of the Constitution would not be tampered with.

This paper provdes a legal analyses of the Basic Structure doctrine of the Indian Constitution

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