Hans Raj Khanna, Indian lawyer, judge, and politician, Indian Minister of Law and Justice (b. 1912)
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 upheld 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 eulogized for his minority judgement in the highly publicized Habeas corpus case during the 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 and submission that even the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution of India like the right to life and liberty stood abrogated during the period of national emergency. Khanna's was the lone dissenting vote, and his opinion, claiming that the 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 and the existence of these rights cannot be subjugated to any executive decree even during the period of national emergency for these are inalienable to one's life and dignified existence, is praised for its 'fearlessness' and 'eloquence'.In January 1977, nine months after delivering his venerated dissent in the ADM Jabalpur v. Shiv Kant Shukla (Habeas Corpus) case, Khanna was superseded to the office of the Chief Justice of India by Justice M. H. Beg, contrary to the convention of appointing the senior-most puisne judge as the next Chief Justice of India on the superannuation of the incumbent, at the behest of the then Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi, despite him being the senior-most puisne judge in the Supreme Court at the time of superannuation of A. N. Ray, the incumbent Chief Justice of India. As a result of this, he promptly resigned from the court which was effected in March.
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 judgements 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 on getting superseded by Justice M. H. Beg to the office of the Chief Justice of India, 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 honour given by the Government of India.