AMBIKA PRASAD MISHRA Vs. STATE OF UTTAR PRADESH

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This judgment deals with a flood of cases from Uttar Pradesh relating to limitation on agricultural land holdings, and specifically disposes of the writ petitions, civil appeals and petitions for special leave listed below.

(2.) The prevasive theme of this litigative stream is not anti-land-reform as such but the discriminatory flaws in the relevant legislation which make it 'unlaw' from the constitutional angle.

(3.) The march of the Indian nation to the Promised Land of Social Justice is conditioned by the pace of the process of agrarian reform. This central fact of our country's progress has made land distribution and its inalienable ally, the ceiling on land holding the cynosure of legislative attention. And when litigative confrontation with large holders has imperiled the implementation of this vital developmental strategy, Parliament, in exercise of its constituent power, has sought to pre-empt, effectively and protect impregnably such statutory measures by enacting Art. 31A as the very first amendment in the very first year after the Constitution came into force. Consequent on the Constitution (First Amendment) Act, 1951, this court repelled the challenges to land reform laws as violative of fundamental rights in State of Bihar v. Kameshwar Singh, AIR 1952 SC 252 but the constant struggle between agrarian reform legislation and never-say-die litigation has led to a situation where every such enactment has been inevitably accompanied by countless writ petitions assailing its vires despite Art. 31A, not to speak of the more extensive Chinese walls like Arts. 31B, 31C and 31D. The forensic landscape is cluttered up in this court with appeals and writ petitions and petitions for leave to appeal, the common feature of each of which is a challenge to the validity of one or other of the State laws imposing ceiling on land holding in an inegalitarian milieu of the landed few and the landless many. Of course, the court is bound to judge the attack on the legislative projects for acquisition and distribution, on their constitutional merits and we proceed to easy the task with special reference to the Uttar Pradesh Imposition of Ceiling on Land Holdings Act, 1960 (abbreviated hereafter as the Act). Several counsel have argued and plural objections have been urged but we will grapple with only those contentions which have been seriously pressed and omit others which have either been only formally mentioned or left to lie in silent peace, or but feebly articulated. In this judgment, we side-step the bigger issue of the vires of the constitutional amendments in Arts. 31A, 31B and 31C as they are dealt with in other cases disposed of recently. Indeed, the history of land reform, in its legislative dimension has been a perennial race between judicial pronouncements and constitutional amendments.