Zamindari system, its abolition
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The abolition of the zamindari system
1950-1987
Santosh Singh, Partha Paul, Apurva Vishwanath, February 13, 2025: The Indian Express
Two small coal mines and a run-down European-style palace built in 1913 by its former zamindars outline Kashipur, a grimy village in West Bengal’s Purulia district. It is from here, in 1951, that India’s most consequential constitutional case began.
Sankari Prasad Singh Deo, the zamindar from Kashipur, moved the Supreme Court challenging the new nation’s first plank for social revolution — the abolition of the zamindari system.
Barely five months into the working of the new Constitution, on June 5, 1950, the Patna High Court had struck down the Bihar State Management of Estates and Tenures Act, 1949, as unconstitutional. Chief Justice J G Shearer, an Englishman who had stayed back after Independence, and two other judges had said the law violated the zamindars’ right to equality since their land was taken without a “just” compensation. “Any law that would fall foul of fundamental rights is unconstitutional,” they had said.
The zamindars had won the first round.
In response, then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, even before challenging the ruling, brought in the First Amendment to the Constitution. “If the Constitution itself comes in our way, then surely it is time to change that Constitution,” Nehru had written in a letter to Chief Ministers before introducing the amendment.
Changes under the First Amendment
Among other changes — restricting free speech and providing for caste-based reservations — the First Amendment also introduced Articles 31A and 31B. The first provision stated that no land acquisition law would be deemed void on the grounds that it violated any of the fundamental rights. In one swoop, the zamindars could not claim that any of their fundamental rights were violated when their estate was expropriated by the state. The second provision brought in the Ninth Schedule and the Bihar Land Reforms Act, 1950, was added to it. Laws placed in the Ninth Schedule cannot be challenged for reasons of violating any fundamental right protected under the Constitution.
Sankari Prasad’s arguments were not directly against the land reform law but the wider implications of the First Amendment. First, did the provisional Parliament, pending the first Lok Sabha elections, have the competence to amend the Constitution? Even if it did, could Parliament violate Article 13(2) of the Constitution, which prohibited making “laws” that would derogate fundamental rights? The provision also essentially provides for judicial review where a court can strike down law that is deemed unconstitutional.
On October 5, 1951, a five-judge Bench of the Supreme Court, in a textual interpretation, decided in favour of the government. The Supreme Court said, “There is a clear demarcation between ordinary law, which is made in exercise of legislative power, and constitutional law, which is made in exercise of constituent power.”
This meant, while the Parliament cannot make a statutory law that violates fundamental rights, no such restriction would apply to it, when amending the Constitution.
Who was Sankari Prasad
Born in 1919, Raja Sankari Prasad was the son of Raja Kalyani Prasad Singh Deo, the erstwhile zamindars of the estate of Panchkote. The estate was a part of Manbhum, a district in east India during the British Raj and later became Purulia in West Bengal.
His descendants, who spoke to The Indian Express, said the estate was spread over 2,800 square miles before abolition. While Sankari Prasad was the lead petitioner, similar laws applied to other zamindaris in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, the Panch Mahals Mehwassi system in Gujarat; the Paragana and Kulkarni Watan system in Maharashtra and the Jagir system in Hyderabad.
Veteran lawyer Prafulia Ranjan Das, the brother of Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, advised the zamindars of Panchkote. While he appeared for Sankari Prasad before the Supreme Court, Das, as per family accounts, also advised him to distribute the estate among family members as “maintenance” to avoid being expropriated by the state.
“So long as you can keep them together, you can enjoy everything. My grandfather also created religious trusts anyway,” Bhagwati Prasad Singh Deo, 84, Sankari Prasad’s cousin, tells The Indian Express.
“Kashipur village is still home to 23 extended families of the Panchkote rajas. The Panchkote raj families still have enough landholdings, not warranting them to take up any other jobs besides some business,” he adds.
PM Nehru, perhaps aware of how legal loopholes were exploited, had said while introducing the First Amendment, “Somehow, we have found that this magnificent Constitution that we had framed was later kidnapped and purloined by lawyers.”
Land reforms and voices of dissent
Even as popular support for land reforms continued, voices of dissent on the First Amendment and the urgency with which it was introduced grew louder. The implication of the Sankari Prasad ruling was that fundamental rights are not inalienable and can be tinkered with through constitutional amendments.
Granville Austin, the author of the political history of the Indian Constitution, wrote in his book, Working a Democratic Constitution, that a newspaper editorial had said the “changes seemed animated more by a desire to conserve the power of the executive than the rights of the individuals”.
In a 2022 lecture, Justice Rohinton Nariman, a former Supreme Court judge, had put into context the impact of this ruling. “We had just had the World War II before us, we had just had the Weimar Constitution trampled by foot by Hitler and then the new German Constitution made them (fundamental rights) something which (the) legislature cannot touch.”
Speaking to The Indian Express, Justice Ravindra Bhat, a former Supreme Court judge, said that though land reforms was an exigent need of a new nation to achieve a semblance of equality, it never really took off. “Despite the legislative intent, the reforms were never fully implemented. The satraps of power did not let that happen. Even the Supreme Court in some ways impeded the process by bringing in the idea of ‘just compensation’ to a zamindar whose land was taken. The Court looked at the way we now look at land acquisition by the state. But the same court was later very supportive when it came to land acquisition for modernisation and infrastructure,” he said. Buoyed up by this interpretation, more constitutional amendments and litigation involving land reforms and property continued for over 14 years. Legislation played catch up for every attempt to evade land reforms — bringing in more laws on land ceiling, redistribution of expropriated land to the tiller and prohibiting zamindars from buying back land from the tiller. In 1964, another five-judge Bench of the Supreme Court, in Sajjan Singh v State of Rajasthan, agreed with the 1951 ruling. However, two judges — Justices M Hidayatullah and J R Mudholkar — expressed doubts over whether the Sankari Prasad ruling was rightly decided, and a larger bench eventually reversed it in 1967. A later part of the series, will focus on the 1967 case I C Golaknath v State of Punjab. The debate on right to property, perhaps the most contested fundamental right, settled only in the next decade. The tinkering with fundamental rights, not just property but also the sacrosanct right to life and personal liberty came under threat during the Emergency.
What began with Sankari Prasad’s case, eventually ended with the 1974 Kesavananda Bharati ruling, establishing the basic structure doctrine. The ruling held that even constitutional amendments cannot violate the “basic structure” which includes fundamental rights. But land reforms passed the test, since the right to property itself was not deemed to be part of that basic structure.
Sankari Prasad died in 1956, before this debate was settled, leaving his estate to his son. Back in Kashipur, his grandson Anshul Rajawat is looking to convert the palace into a hotel and conserve it for his next generation.
