Legal scholar Upendra Baxi described Justices V.R. Krishna Iyer, P.N. Bhagwati, O. Chinnappa Reddy, and D.A. Desai—all former Supreme Court Justices in the 1980s—as the “Four Musketeers”.
These judges shared a people-centric approach. Their judgments advanced the Court’s progressive jurisprudence. During the post-Emergency period, their judicial activism favoured the poor and underprivileged, restoring the Court’s credibility that had declined after its failure to defend citizens’ fundamental rights during the Emergency.
In subsequent years, progressive judges of the Court favoured these Four Musketeers. However, soon they were replaced by other Judges who did not always share their judicial philosophy or values, which led to scales of justice being shifted to suit the emerging neo-liberalist atmosphere of the 1990s and 2000s.
It seems this ideological shift has now culminated in a direct challenge to their legacy. On November 5, the Supreme Court’s nine-judge Constitution Bench delivered a judgement that denounced Justice Krishna Iyer’s contribution, specifically his concurring opinion in State of Karnataka v. Ranganatha Reddy (1977).
The majority comprised seven judges: outgoing Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud and Justices Hrishikesh Roy, J.B. Pardiwala, Manoj Misra, Rajesh Bindal, Satish Chandra Sharma, and Augustine George Masih. Justices B.V. Nagarathna and Sudhanshu Dhulia wrote dissenting opinions.
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In Ranganatha Reddy, the Court examined the validity of the Karnataka Contract Carriages (Acquisition) Act, 1976. Four of seven judges upheld the Act on its merits. Justice Iyer, speaking for three judges including himself, upheld it on different grounds: its nexus with Article 39(b), which protected the legislation under Article 31C.
Article 39(b)—a non-justiciable Directive Principle of State Policy—mandates that the state shall direct its policy toward ensuring the ownership and control of the community’s material resources are distributed to serve the common good.
Article 31C, inserted through the Constitution (Twenty-fifth Amendment) Act, 1971, states that no law implementing State policy principles in Part IV shall be void for inconsistency with rights under Articles 14 and 19. Parliament added Article 31C to override R.C. Cooper, where the Court had struck down bank nationalisation as violative of Article 14.
Justice Iyer interpreted “material resources of the community” in Article 39(b) to include both privately owned and state-owned resources.
Though Justice Krishna Iyer wrote for the minority, a subsequent five-judge Constitution Bench endorsed his reasoning in Sanjeev Coke Manufacturing Co. v. Bharat Coking Coal Ltd. (1983). This judicial error persisted until 2002, when a seven-judge Bench referred it to a nine-judge Bench. The Supreme Court took 22 years to form a nine-judge Bench to reconsider its Ranganatha Reddy (1977) decision.
In Property Owners Association v. State of Maharashtra, decided on November 5, the majority (7:2) examined the Constituent Assembly debates. They found Article 39(b)‘s language deliberately flexible, designed to adapt to changing constitutional and social values. The Bench explicitly rejected what it called a “Marxist reading” of the Constitution, critiquing Justice Iyer’s reasoning.
Paragraph 213 of the judgment states: “To declare that Article 39(b) includes the distribution of all private resources amounts to endorsing a particular economic ideology and structure for our economy. Justice Krishna Iyer’s judgment in Ranganatha Reddy... was influenced by a particular school of economic thought. The interpretation of Article 39(b) adopted in Sanjeev Coke (Justice Chinnappa Reddy) and Ranganatha Reddy and Bhimsinghji (Justice Krishna Iyer) is rooted in a particular economic ideology and the belief that an economic structure which prioritises the acquisition of private property by the state is beneficial for the nation.”
The majority held that the Constitution’s framers did not intend to prescribe a specific social structure or economic policy. Rather, they drafted the Constitution broadly, allowing future governments to experiment with economic governance structures while remaining accountable to voters.
Two dissenting judges strongly defended Krishna Iyer’s legacy and questioned the majority’s emphasis on elected governments’ wisdom, warning against conflating electoral majority with constitutional values. | Photo Credit: A.M. Faruqui
The majority identified Justice Krishna Iyer’s doctrinal error: positing that rigid economic theory, advocating state control over private resources, serves as the sole basis for constitutional governance.
The majority’s problematic equation of constitutional interpretation with electoral majority appears in Paragraph 216: “India’s economic trajectory indicates that the Constitution and the custodians of the Constitution—the electorate—have routinely rejected one economic dogma as being the exclusive repository of truth.”
Treating the electorate as constitutional custodians may yield troubling results in practice. While the electorate should ideally safeguard the Constitution, reality often differs. Voters frequently respond to emotional or parochial appeals.
The majority relied on the Union Government’s Economic Survey 2023-24 (published July 2024) to justify trusting elected governments’ wisdom. They cited the framers’ vision of “economic democracy”—a term they left undefined. This wisdom, they claimed, drove India’s high growth rate and its position among the world’s fastest-growing economies.
One questions whether the Bench should have endorsed elected governments so completely, elevating their decisions to constitutional vision merely to avoid a single economic theory favouring state acquisition of private property.
The majority ruled that Article 39(b) does not automatically include all private property. They clarified that while no blanket ban exists on including private property, such inclusion requires meeting two tests: qualifying as a “material resource” and having a “community” element. These qualities, they noted, must be assessed case by case, not in abstraction.
They reasoned that sometimes government control serves the “common good,” while in other instances, distribution among private players achieves this aim. The Court declined to address broader economic and social policy questions or to rule that distribution must exclude private resource vesting. Such a ruling, they warned, would repeat Justice Krishna Iyer’s doctrinal error.
Resources falling under Article 39(b) require context-specific analysis considering several factors: The resource’s nature and characteristics; its impact on community welfare; its scarcity; and the consequences of such a resource being concentrated in the hands of private players.
Significant dissents
In his dissent, Justice Dhulia upheld the broad, inclusive interpretation of “material resources of the community” established by Justices Krishna Iyer and O. Chinnappa Reddy in Ranganatha Reddy and Sanjeev Coke. He maintained that this interpretation retains its relevance and jurisprudential value, along with its appreciative audience.
Justice Dhulia strongly disapproved of the majority’s remarks on the Krishna Iyer Doctrine. “The criticism is harsh, and could have been avoided,” he wrote.
Justice Nagarathna held that “material resources of the community” encompasses privately owned resources, excepting “personal effects”. She challenged the majority’s critique of Justices Iyer and Chinnappa Reddy’s observations in Ranganatha Reddy and Sanjeev Coke as unjustified and unwarranted.
She questioned their criticism, which stemmed merely from evolving state socio-economic policies and shifting paradigms. Constitutional interpretation, she reminded the majority, demands consideration of its historical context.
Justice Nagarathna offered a clear definition of “common good”: preventing the concentration of community resources and means of production in few hands—a principle enshrined in Article 39(c).
As smaller benches prepare to apply these majority principles to specific cases, future historians might question the necessity of the majority’s attack on two of the Four Musketeers and their disproportionate support for elected regimes’ policies—support based solely on electoral victory.
V. Venkatesan is an independent legal journalist based in New Delhi. Formerly Senior Associate Editor with Frontline, he has been reporting and commenting on legal issues.
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