Kesavananda Bharati v State of Kerala

Kesavananda Bharati v State of Kerala, decided by a thirteen judge bench of the Supreme Court of India in 1973, the largest bench in the Court's history, is the case that established the basic structure doctrine. The named petitioner, Swami Kesavananda Bharati, head of a religious institution in Kerala, challenged state land reform legislation affecting his institution's property, but the case grew into a direct test of whether Parliament's power under Article 368 to amend the Constitution was unlimited, following earlier decisions on the same question that Parliament had responded to with further constitutional amendments. By a narrow 7 to 6 majority, the Court held that Parliament may amend any part of the Constitution, including fundamental rights, but may not alter or destroy its basic structure, a set of core features the Court itself would identify case by case, later understood to include judicial review, the rule of law, democracy, secularism, and the separation of powers. The doctrine has no textual basis in the Constitution itself; the Court read it as implicit in the nature of a written constitution granting Parliament a power to amend rather than a power to remake. It has since been invoked to strike down constitutional amendments and is widely regarded across comparative constitutional scholarship as one of the most influential judicially created limits on legislative power anywhere in the world, cited by courts in Bangladesh, Pakistan and elsewhere.