Karnataka HC Refuses to Strike Down Section 5(ii) of Hindu Succession Act, Holds Gaddi Succession Distinct from Private Property
Petitioners from the Mysore and Sandur royal families sought deletion of Section 5(ii) of the Hindu Succession Act as unconstitutional; the Karnataka High Court dismissed the challenge, relying on Supreme Court precedent that distinguishes private property from impartible estate.
Three writ petitions filed by members of the erstwhile royal families of Mysore and Sandur, seeking a declaration that Section 5(ii) of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 is unconstitutional and a direction to the Union of India to delete it from the statute, were dismissed by Justice M.G.S. Kamal of the High Court of Karnataka on 16 July 2026. The petitioners argued that the provision had become arbitrary and redundant after the Constitution (Twenty-Sixth Amendment) Act, 1971 deleted Articles 291 and 362 and inserted Article 363-A, stripping erstwhile rulers of their special constitutional status. The court held that Section 5(ii) retains independent relevance as a rule of succession to impartible estate such as the Gaddi, and that the petitioners failed to demonstrate any violation of Article 14 of the Constitution warranting the drastic relief of annulling a legislative provision.
The Dispute Before the Court
Two writ petitions, WP No.53075 of 2015 and WP No.3221 of 2022, were filed by Chaduranga Kantharaj Urs, who claims to be the son of Smt. Gayathri Devi, herself a daughter of Sri Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar, the last Ruler of the Princely State of Mysore. His uncle, Sri Srikantadatta Narasimharaja Wadiyar, died issueless on 10 December 2013. The petitioner had filed a civil suit, OS No.25185 of 2015, in the City Civil Court, Bengaluru, seeking partition of joint family properties. In that suit, applications under Order VII Rule 11(d) of the CPC were filed by two respondents—the widow of the deceased ruler and another defendant—contending that the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 did not apply to the properties in question because of Section 5(ii). The writ petitions were filed in response to those applications.
The third petition, WP No.35524 of 2018, was filed by Venkatrao Y. Ghorpade and his daughter Gayatri Ghorpade, members of the family of the erstwhile Maharaja of Sandur, Sri Yeshwantrao Ghorpade. They had filed OS No.25958 of 2017 before the Civil Court, Bengaluru, seeking partition of joint family properties. Respondent No.2, the Shiva Vilas Trust, filed an application under Order VII Rule 11 of the CPC contending that the Hindu Succession Act did not apply to the estate of the late Maharaja by virtue of Section 5(ii).
In all three petitions the common relief sought was: a declaration that Section 5(ii) of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 is otiose, repugnant and unconstitutional, and a direction to the Union of India to delete it from the statute.
What Section 5(ii) Does, and How It Came to Be
The Hindu Succession Act, 1956, which codifies and amends Hindu intestate succession law, contains in Section 4 an overriding effect clause. Section 5 carves out categories of property to which the Act does not apply. Section 5(ii) excludes from the Act's operation “any estate which descends to a single heir by the terms of any covenant or agreement entered into by the Ruler of any Indian State with the Government of India.”
The court traced the origins of the provision to the integration of Princely States with the Dominion of India following the Indian Independence Act, 1947. Upon integration, rulers entered into Instruments of Merger. These instruments provided for three distinct matters: payment of Privy Purse, personal rights and privileges, and succession to the Gaddi according to law and custom. Articles 291 and 362 of the Constitution gave constitutional backing to the Privy Purse and personal privileges commitments. When the Eleven-Judge Bench of the Supreme Court, in H.H. Maharajadhiraja Madhav Rao Jivaji Rao Scindia Bahadur of Gwalior v. Union of India, (1971) 1 SCC 85, struck down a Presidential order withdrawing those guarantees, Parliament responded with the Constitution (Twenty-Sixth Amendment) Act, 1971, which deleted Articles 291 and 362 and inserted Article 363-A, abolishing the Privy Purse and formal recognition of rulership altogether. A Constitution Bench in Raghunath Rao v. Union of India, 1994 Supp (1) SCC 191, upheld the Twenty-Sixth Amendment.
In the Mysore matter, the merger agreement of 23 January 1950 (Annexure-D) contained Article IV, which guaranteed succession according to law and custom to the Gaddi and personal rights. Article II guaranteed full ownership of private properties as distinct from State properties. In the Sandur matter, the agreement of 1 April 1949 (Annexure-F) contained a substantively identical structure: Article 5 guaranteed succession to the gadi and personal rights, while Article 3 covered private properties.
The Arguments
Senior Counsel Sri Sriranga, appearing for the petitioners, argued that Section 5(ii) was introduced in 1956 as a legislative recognition of the guarantees under Articles 291 and 362. Since those Articles have been deleted, Section 5(ii) has lost its constitutional underpinning and its nexus with the object it was meant to serve. By passage of time it has become arbitrary and discriminatory, violating Article 14. The petitioners relied on Motor General Traders v. State of Andhra Pradesh, (1984) 1 SCC 222, for the proposition that legislation valid at inception may become unconstitutional with changed circumstances, and on Satyawati Sharma v. Union of India, (2008) 5 SCC 287, for the principle that a law losing its rational classification with lapse of time may be struck down.
Senior Counsel Sri Jayakumar S. Patil, appearing for respondent No.2 in the Mysore petition, argued that the merger agreements were entered into between two sovereign entities and carry the status contemplated by Article 253 of the Constitution. The deletion of Articles 291 and 362 affected only Privy Purse and personal privileges; it had no bearing on the terms of the covenants relating to private properties and Gaddi succession. He relied on paragraphs from the Madhav Rao Scindia judgment and on State of Andhra Pradesh v. McDowell and Co., (1996) 3 SCC 709, and Rajbala v. State of Haryana, (2016) 2 SCC 445, for the position that a statute can be invalidated only on grounds of legislative incompetence or violation of fundamental rights.
Senior Counsel Sri Pramod Nair, appearing for respondent No.4, submitted that the Supreme Court's judgment in Tikka Shatrujit Singh v. Sukjith Singh, 2026 SCC Online SC 971, had already read down Section 5(ii) and clarified its applicability, making a constitutional challenge unnecessary. The Central Government counsel, Sri M.N. Kumar, submitted that Section 5(ii) applies only to estates descending to a single heir under a covenant, and in any event the Tikka Shatrujit Singh ruling confined its operation to the Gaddi and not to private properties. Sri Vivek Holla, appearing for the Shiva Vilas Trust, contended that the petitioners had not shown how Section 5(ii) adversely affected them, and that constitutional questions cannot be decided in a vacuum.
The Court's Reasoning
The court addressed three points in sequence.
On whether the Twenty-Sixth Amendment rendered Section 5(ii) otiose: Justice Kamal examined the text of Articles 291 and 362 carefully and concluded that those Articles dealt only with Privy Purse and personal rights, privileges and dignities—not with private properties or succession to the Gaddi. The merger agreements themselves bore this out. Article II of Annexure-D and Article 3 of Annexure-F guaranteed full ownership of private properties but contained no guarantee as to succession to those properties. Article IV of Annexure-D and Article 5 of Annexure-F guaranteed succession according to law and custom specifically to the Gaddi.
The court relied on the Supreme Court's observation in Raghunath Rao that the source of the obligation to pay Privy Purse after the Constitution was not the covenants but Article 291 itself, meaning the deletion of Articles 291 and 362 did not erase the terms of the covenants on other subjects. It also extracted the Supreme Court's observation in Veerendra Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh, (1995) 1 SCR 415, as quoted in Raghunath Rao, that after integration “every vestige of sovereignty was abandoned” and all became citizens owing allegiance only to the Republic.
Drawing on Talat Fathima Hasan v. Syed Murtaza Ali, (2020) 15 SCC 655, and Maharani Deepinder Kaur v. Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, (2022) 9 SCC 658, the court noted that the Supreme Court had consistently held that private properties of a ruler devolve under the personal law applicable to the parties, while succession to the Gaddi follows the rule of primogeniture—subject to pleading and proof of customs to the contrary.
The Tikka Shatrujit Singh ruling was central to the court's analysis. Paragraphs 77 to 80 and 94 of that judgment were extracted at length. The Supreme Court had held in that case that after the merger agreement notified certain properties as the Maharaja's personal private properties, those properties ceased to be “Ruler's estate” and devolved under Hindu law, not by primogeniture. Section 5(ii) protects estates that descend to a single heir under a covenant, but only in respect of the perceived throne or Gaddi; private properties had already acquired the character of the personal property of an ordinary citizen before the Hindu Succession Act even came into force in 1956. The court concluded that the Twenty-Sixth Amendment had no bearing on the validity of Section 5(ii), which retains its independent existence rooted in the covenant terms themselves.
On whether Section 5(ii) had become arbitrary and unconstitutional over time: The petitioners did not challenge legislative competence. Their argument was confined to Article 14. The court held that Section 5(ii) employs an intelligible differentia: it is directed at a specific nature of estate, of a specific class of person, under specific circumstances. That classification had not been demonstrated to be arbitrary or irrational. The contention that the provision was valid when enacted but has since lost its rationale was rejected. The court observed that determination of succession to private properties and to impartible estate remains a live and relevant subject; whatever symbolic diminishment the concept of Gaddi may have undergone, from a customary and practical perspective it continues to matter.
The court distinguished the Article 14 precedents relied upon by the petitioners. In Motor General Traders the impugned provision had become discriminatory because of State reorganisation that left two different regimes operating in the same territory without any rational basis. No comparable situation was shown here. In Satyawati Sharma the rent control regime had demonstrably shifted from protecting tenants to being weaponised against them in changed economic conditions. No such factual demonstration was made in these petitions.
The court also applied the test from McDowell and Co. that a law can be struck down only on grounds of legislative incompetence or violation of fundamental rights, and that an enactment cannot be invalidated merely by characterising it as arbitrary. Since the petitioners had not discharged the burden of showing any violation of Article 14 in the constitutional sense, the challenge failed.
On the direction to delete Section 5(ii) from the statute: The court held that a constitutional court would not determine a constitutional question in a vacuum, citing Kusum Ingots and Alloys Ltd. v. Union of India, (2004) 6 SCC 254. A writ petition questioning the constitutionality of a statute requires a cause of action arising from the provision's actual application causing civil consequences to the petitioner. The petitioners had not demonstrated that Section 5(ii), as clarified by Tikka Shatrujit Singh, would operate to bar partition of their private properties. The apprehension that Section 5(ii) could be used against them in the pending suits stood substantially redressed by the Supreme Court's clarification that the provision covers only the Gaddi, not private properties.
The court also considered whether the doctrine of reading down, as explained in Authorized Officer, Central Bank of India v. Shanmugavelu, (2024) 6 SCC 641, required any intervention. It concluded that even on that approach there was no warrant to examine the provision through the lens of arbitrariness or discrimination, because the Supreme Court had already addressed the provision's scope in Tikka Shatrujit Singh. Unless the petitioners expressly demonstrated that the existence of Section 5(ii) would adversely affect their statutory or fundamental rights, a declaration of invalidity was not appropriate.
Outcome
Justice M.G.S. Kamal answered the three questions as follows: first, deletion of Articles 291 and 362 and insertion of Article 363-A has no bearing on the validity of Section 5(ii) of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956; second, the petitioners failed to make out a case that the provision had become arbitrary, discriminatory or unreasonable; third, no sufficient grounds were made out to direct its deletion from the statute. The court recorded that the Twenty-Sixth Amendment completely derecognised the legal sovereignty attached to the Gaddi, rendering it a historical and cultural artefact, but that Section 5(ii) retains relevance as a rule of succession to impartible estate in accordance with the covenants in the merger instruments. All three writ petitions were dismissed. No order as to costs was made.