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Hans Raj Khanna

Hans Raj Khanna (3 July 1912 – 25 February 2008) was an Indian judge, jurist and advocate who propounded the basic structure doctrine in 1973 and attempted to uphold civil liberties during the time of Emergency in India in a lone dissenting judgement in 1976. He entered the Indian judiciary in 1952 as an Additional District and Sessions Judge and subsequently was elevated as a judge to the Supreme Court of India in 1971 where he continued till his resignation in 1977.

He is most notably remembered for his minority judgment in the highly publicized ADM Jabalpur v. Shiv Kant Shukla ''habeas corpus'' case during the 1975 - 1977 Indian Emergency, in which the remaining four judges of the five-member bench, Chief Justice A. N. Ray, Justice M. H. Beg, Justice Y. V. Chandrachud and Justice P. N. Bhagwati, agreed with the government's view that even the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution of India like the right to life and liberty stood abrogated during a period of national emergency. Khanna was the lone dissenting vote; his opinion, claimed that Article 21 of the Constitution could not possibly be the sole repository of the fundamental rights to life and liberty as these predate the Constitution itself. His view that these inalienable rights cannot be deprived by executive decree, even during a period of national emergency, is praised for his 'fearlessness' and 'eloquence'.

In January 1977, nine months after delivering his dissenting judgment in the ''Shiv Kant Shukla'' case, Justice Khanna was superseded for the position of Chief Justice of India by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who appointed Justice M. H. Beg instead. This decision broke the long-standing convention of appointing the senior-most judge of the Supreme Court of India as the Chief Justice upon the retirement of the incumbent. At the time, Khanna was the most senior judge on the bench. In response, he submitted his resignation, which took effect in March 1977.

Khanna had previously authored the basic structure doctrine of the Constitution of India in ''Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala'', which curtailed Parliament's seemingly unfettered amending power under article 368, restricting its scope of amendment in areas which were part of the Constitution's "basic structure". In addition, he delivered noted judgments in the Ahmedabad St. Xavier's College v. State of Gujarat (1974) and State of Kerala v. N. M. Thomas (1975) cases.

After resigning from the Supreme Court, he served as the central minister of law and justice for a very short period of three days in the Charan Singh Ministry after the fall of the Indira Gandhi Government, and was later made a combined opposition-sponsored candidate for election as President in 1982, losing to Zail Singh.

In 1999, he was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in recognition of his career in judicial service, the second-highest civilian honor given by the Government of India. Provided by Wikipedia