Pandit Nehru had no desire 'to add to the list'

NEW DELHI: The Ninth Schedule, which was denied judicial impunity on Thursday, was woven into the Indian Constitution by the Constitution (First Amendment) Act, 1951, along with Article 31 B.

It was seen as a countervailing force to the principle of the supremacy of fundamental rights, as the only objective of the schedule was to keep certain acts and regulations beyond the purview of judicial scrutiny.

While introducing the Constitution (First Amendment) Bill in 1951, the then Prime Minister Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru asserted that its basic intention was to prevent judicial intervention in legislative action intended to promote social change geared towards egalitarian constitutional goals. Thus, laws enacted to bring about agrarian and land reforms were incorporated into the schedule.

The schedule came into existence with 13 items, and Pandit Nehru warned against expanding its ambit, asserting that “there was no desire to add to the list”. The schedule today contains 284 Acts, most of them having no relation to agrarian or land reforms.

The most prominent among them is the Tamil Nadu Backward Classes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Act, 1993 (Tamil Nadu Act 45 of 1994), which took the quota net beyond the 50% ceiling imposed by the Supreme Court.