Fundamental Duties were a Trojan horse

Part IVA of the Constitution did not exist on 25 January 1977. By 3 January 1977 it did. In the eight months between the Sardar Swaran Singh Committee submitting its report and the 42nd Amendment receiving Presidential assent, the Indira Gandhi government did something the Constituent Assembly had explicitly refused to do — it wrote a chapter of duties for citizens into the constitutional text. The standard story since 1980 has been that this chapter is harmless: a list of moral exhortations, unenforceable by mandamus, doing no work the rule of law was not already doing. I think that story is wrong. Part IVA was a Trojan horse — designed to subordinate Fundamental Rights to State-defined obligations — and the post-2014 jurisprudence that reads Article 51A into the substance of Part III rights is the original design finally completing its work.¹

Why this question matters now

For most of my time as a law student, the standard answer to a question on Fundamental Duties was a sentence and a half: Part IVA was added by the 42nd Amendment, the duties are not enforceable, move on. The Basu commentary devotes a few paragraphs to it. The leading constitutional law textbooks treat it as a footnote to the chapter on Directive Principles. Even the Khosla chapter on constitutional amendment in the Oxford Handbook, which surveys the entire 42nd Amendment crisis at length, mentions Part IVA only in passing. The legal profession has, in effect, treated Article 51A as a piece of constitutional bric-a-brac left behind by the Emergency — odd, slightly embarrassing, but inert.

That treatment has consequences. It has meant that a sustained body of post-2014 case law — Animal Welfare Board of India v. A. Nagaraja, the cattle-slaughter line in State of Gujarat v. Mirzapur Moti Kureshi Kassab Jamat, the curriculum decision in Aruna Roy v. UOI, the cleanliness-week directions in M.C. Mehta v. Union of India — has been allowed to use Part IVA as live constitutional tissue without the profession asking what kind of tissue it is. The duties chapter is no longer dormant. It is being used to expand the scope of regulatory restrictions on Article 19 trade rights, to read State-prescribed curricula into the discharge of citizen duties, and to convert what were previously discretionary executive choices into constitutional obligations the Court will enforce. The doctrine has caught up. The constitutional history has not.

The case I want to make in this essay is twofold. First, that Part IVA was not designed as moral instruction — it was designed as a counterweight to Part III, in a moment when the Indira Gandhi government had concluded that the Fundamental Rights chapter had become an obstacle to its political programme. Second, that the post-2014 revival of Article 51A as an interpretive aid in rights cases is not a benign re-discovery of an undervalued text — it is the original architecture working as intended, fifty years on.

This is a constitutional-history claim, not a doctrinal manifesto. I am not arguing that the duties listed in Article 51A are individually objectionable, or that environmental protection or compassion for animals or service in time of national need are bad ideas. They are not. I am arguing that the chapter as a whole — its drafting context, its placement in the text, the legislative history of the Swaran Singh proposal it shrank from, and the line of cases that has gradually given it teeth — does work that the Constituent Assembly explicitly refused to authorise, and that the work it does cuts the wrong way more often than the right way. The question is not whether duties are good. The question is whether the Constitution is the document that should write them and whether the Court is the institution that should enforce them by reading them into the rights chapter. To both questions, my answer is no.

What the Swaran Singh Committee actually proposed

The Sardar Swaran Singh Committee on Amendment of the Constitution was appointed in February 1976. It was not a committee of the Constituent Assembly type. It was a committee of the Congress Party — appointed by the President of the Congress, reporting to the Working Committee, with a mandate to recommend the constitutional amendments the government considered necessary. Its report ran to a few dozen recommendations, of which the chapter on Fundamental Duties was one. Most of the report was implemented by the 42nd Amendment in some form.

What the legal profession has forgotten — or never properly absorbed — is what the committee originally proposed. The Swaran Singh Committee did not propose an unenforceable, hortatory list of duties. It proposed a chapter of Fundamental Duties accompanied by a constitutional power for Parliament to legislate penalties for non-performance of those duties. That is a critical detail. A duty that Parliament can criminalise is not a moral exhortation — it is a regulatory standard with the State as enforcer. The committee further suggested that no law made for the purpose of enforcing the duties chapter should be open to challenge under Article 14, 19 or 31. The duties were to be a sword, and the rights chapter was not to be a shield against that sword.²

The penalty clause was dropped from the final draft. The blanket immunity from Article 14 and 19 challenge did not survive. But the underlying logic — that citizens owed duties to the State that could discipline the rights they otherwise held — was preserved. The 42nd Amendment inserted Part IVA, immediately after Part IV (Directive Principles), and styled the duties as a counter-text to Part III. The placement was deliberate. The Constituent Assembly had refused, in 1947-49, to insert a duties chapter on the German Weimar model, despite an explicit Sapru Committee proposal to that effect. Indira Gandhi's government did in 1976 what the framers had declined to do. That is not a footnote. That is a constitutional choice with a particular politics behind it.

Now read Part IVA itself with the original Swaran Singh proposal in mind. "To abide by the Constitution and respect its ideals and institutions." That phrase is doing more work than it appears. In 1976, "the Constitution" included the 42nd Amendment, which had attempted to place amendments themselves beyond judicial review. "Institutions" included the Prime Minister whose election the 39th Amendment had attempted to immunise. The duty to "abjure violence" sat in a constitutional text that had, weeks earlier, suspended habeas corpus and detained tens of thousands without trial. The duties were not addressed to a free citizenry. They were addressed to a citizenry being asked to internalise the Emergency.

The point about the Sapru Committee is worth dwelling on, because the Constituent Assembly's refusal of a duties chapter was deliberate and reasoned. The Sapru Committee Report of 1945 had recommended a chapter of fundamental rights and a parallel chapter of fundamental duties, drawing on the Weimar model. The Constituent Assembly's Sub-Committee on Fundamental Rights considered the proposal and rejected it. K.M. Munshi argued that duties were properly the subject of legislation, not constitutional drafting; B.R. Ambedkar took the view that a duties chapter would be either superfluous (because the rule of law already imposed the obligations the chapter would list) or dangerous (because it would license the State to discipline citizens for failing to live up to State-defined virtues). The Assembly took Ambedkar's view. The Constitution as adopted on 26 November 1949 contained no Part IVA. That was a choice, made consciously, by the people who drafted the document. The 42nd Amendment was the reversal of that choice, by an Emergency Parliament that had concluded the original choice was a mistake. Constitutional history does not require us to take that reversal at face value.

The first leg: a counterweight built into the text

The case for reading Part IVA as designed counterweight rests on three textual moves the 42nd Amendment made in tandem.

First, the Amendment elevated Directive Principles by inserting a new Article 31C that immunised any law in furtherance of any Directive Principle from challenge under Articles 14 and 19. The pre-1976 Article 31C had immunised only laws giving effect to Articles 39(b) and (c). The expansion was massive — it converted the entire Directive Principles chapter into a generator of laws that could not be tested against equality or liberty. Minerva Mills would later strike this down as destructive of the basic structure, on the holding that the balance between Parts III and IV was itself basic structure.³ Read Part IVA against this. Directives told the State what to do; Duties told the citizen what to do; and the expanded Article 31C immunised the State's enforcement of the Directives from rights review. The citizen was now boxed in on two sides — by State obligations she could not enforce, and by State enforcement she could not resist.

Second, the 42nd Amendment inserted Article 368(4) and (5), which excluded constitutional amendments from judicial review and declared Parliament's amending power to be unlimited. The Court in Minerva Mills struck both clauses down. The function of those clauses, in the design of the Amendment as a whole, was to prevent the basic-structure doctrine from policing what Parliament now did. With basic-structure review out of the way, Parliament could amend the rights chapter at will, and Part IVA could be used by the courts as an interpretive guide to the substance of the very rights being amended. That is not a hortatory chapter. That is a chapter built to do work.

Third, the placement of Part IVA in the text matters. It sits immediately after Part IV. It is structurally parallel to the Directive Principles. Article 51A begins with the words "It shall be the duty of every citizen of India" — a formulation that consciously echoes the Directive Principles' "It shall be the endeavour of the State." The chapter was built to be paired with the Directives, not with the Rights, and its insertion converted the State-citizen relationship from one in which the Constitution principally constrained the State for the protection of the citizen, to one in which the Constitution constrained the State for the citizen and constrained the citizen for the State. The symmetry was new. The 1949 Constitution had not contemplated it.

The standard rejoinder is that none of this matters because Part IVA is not enforceable by mandamus. The Surya Narain ruling makes that clear. But unenforceability by mandamus has never been the test of whether a constitutional provision does work. The Directive Principles are not enforceable by mandamus either, and yet they have been used since the 1970s to read down the rights chapter, to validate restrictions on Article 19 trade rights, and to defend State action against equality challenges. The argument that Part IVA is inert because it cannot be directly enforced is the same argument that was made about Directive Principles before Mumbai Kamgar Sabha v. Abdulbhai Faizullabhoy¹¹ and the cattle-slaughter cases showed otherwise.

There is a further textual move worth flagging. The Basu commentary, which is otherwise scrupulous about flagging the limits of Part IVA, includes a striking aside: a person who burns the Constitution in violation of Article 51A(a) cannot then assert that the assembly at which the burning took place is protected by Article 19 freedoms. The example is presented as common sense. It is not. It is a constitutional doctrine — that a Part III right can be denied to a citizen because the same citizen has, on the same occasion, breached a Part IVA duty — and the doctrine has no textual warrant in the rest of the Constitution. The duties chapter, on this reading, is not just an interpretive aid. It is a precondition for the exercise of fundamental rights. That is a serious doctrinal claim, and it is the claim Part IVA makes available without quite stating outright. Once the claim is available, courts can reach for it; and once they reach for it, the rights chapter ceases to be the citizen's protection against the State and becomes a conditional grant the State can withdraw on duty-based grounds.

The second leg: the 2002 hinge and what came after

The harder part of the argument concerns what the courts have done with Article 51A since 2002. There is a clear before-and-after in the case law.

Before 2002, the duties chapter was used, when at all, in the way the Basu commentary describes — as an interpretive tie-breaker in cases of statutory ambiguity. The early reference in Mumbai Kamgar Sabha is the model: where two readings of a statute are open and one of them aligns with Article 51A, courts may prefer the one that aligns with the duties. The duties were a thumb on the scale, not the scale itself. Surya Narain made clear that no writ would issue to enforce the duties directly. HeadMasters Association made clear that the State could not be compelled to equip the citizen for performance of her duties. The early jurisprudence was modest and consistent.

The 2002 hinge is AIIMS Students' Union v. AIIMS. The case itself was narrow — it concerned the constitutional validity of institutional reservation in postgraduate medical courses at AIIMS. But the Court used the case to make a doctrinal move that has been quietly load-bearing for everything that has come since. Justice R.C. Lahoti's opinion offered two formulations that should be read carefully. The first: "State is, all the citizens placed together and hence though Art. 51A does not expressly cast any fundamental duty on the State, the fact remains that duty of every citizen of India is the collective duty of the State."⁴ The second: Article 51A must be used by courts "as a tool to tab, even a taboo, on State action drifting away from constitutional values." The first reads citizen duties back into the State; the second reads them forward as a check on State action.

Read on its surface, this looks emancipatory — duties as a check on the State, not on the citizen. But notice what the move actually does. It makes Article 51A available as a constitutional standard the Court can invoke to decide what counts as legitimate State action — and equally, what counts as a legitimate exercise of citizen rights. The same year, the Court decided Aruna Roy v. UOI, upholding the National Curriculum Framework for School Education on the explicit ground that the curriculum was "in consonance with the fundamental duties enshrined under Art. 51A (e), (g) and (i)."⁵ A State-prescribed curriculum, justified by reference to a duty the State itself wrote for the citizen. That is not Part IVA as a check on State action. That is Part IVA as a constitutional warrant for State action that would otherwise be challengeable.

The trajectory after 2002 is consistent. State of Gujarat v. Mirzapur Moti Kureshi Kassab Jamat in 2005 upheld an extended cattle-slaughter ban in part on the strength of Article 51A(g), with the Court treating the duty to have "compassion for living creatures" as constitutional support for restricting the Article 19(1)(g) trade rights of butchers.⁸ Animal Welfare Board of India v. A. Nagaraja in 2014 went further. The Court declared Articles 51A(g) and (h) the "magna carta of animal rights," read them directly into the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960, and used the duties chapter as a generator of substantive prohibitions on Jallikattu and bullock-cart racing.⁷ Note the doctrinal route. The Court did not say the State had a duty to ban Jallikattu. It said citizens had a duty under Article 51A, and used that duty to expand the regulatory reach of an ordinary statute.

And alongside the case law sits the institutional infrastructure the Verma Committee designed and the Ranganath Misra Court directed the executive to operationalise.⁹¹⁰ The Verma Committee proposal — phased awareness programmes, training modules, statutory backing — is the Swaran Singh penalty clause re-introduced through the back door. The 2003 direction in Ranganath Misra that the Union "consider the report earnestly" is not enforceable in its own terms, but it has been cited in subsequent pleadings as authority for an executive obligation to give Article 51A bite. The National Education Policy 2020 invokes the duties chapter in its preamble. The Lokpal Act oath of 2013 reproduces Article 51A verbatim. None of this was true before 2002. None of it is incidental.¹²

What I see in this trajectory is the original Swaran Singh design completing itself through judicial accretion rather than legislative declaration. The penalty clause was dropped in 1976; the equivalent of a penalty clause now exists in the form of statutes whose constitutional validity rests partly on Article 51A and whose restrictions on rights cannot easily be challenged because the duty side of the constitutional ledger now does the justifying work. The blanket immunity from Article 14 and 19 was struck down by Minerva Mills; an effective immunity now exists in the form of an interpretive practice that reads duties into the scope of rights, narrowing the rights as it goes.

The counter-argument, taken at its strongest

The strongest case against my reading is not the one usually offered. It is not the claim that Part IVA is inert because it is unenforceable — that claim is empirically wrong, as the post-2002 case law shows. The strongest case is one I want to set out as fairly as I can, because if it is right then my essay is wrong.

It runs like this. The duties listed in Article 51A are not new obligations invented by the Indira Gandhi government. They are restatements of obligations that every citizen of every constitutional order already carries under the rule of law: respect the Constitution, defend the country when called upon, abjure violence, protect public property, safeguard the environment. To call this a Trojan horse is to mistake declaration for innovation. The 42nd Amendment did not create these duties; it transcribed them. And the post-2014 jurisprudence has not used Article 51A to contract citizen rights — it has used it, in cases like M.C. Mehta v. Union of India, to generate citizen-led claims against the State for environmental protection that did not exist before.⁶ The duties chapter has been a tool of the litigant, not of the State. To read Part IVA as Indira-era authoritarian residue is bad history and worse doctrine.

This argument has weight, and I want to engage what is right about it. The environmental jurisprudence really has used Article 51A(g) as a generator of claims against the State, not as a restriction on citizens. The cleanliness-week directions in M.C. Mehta require the executive to act, not the citizen to suffer; the directions to the Centre to mandate environmental education in schools are obligations on the State, not constraints on the school. The tribal-rights cases, including the directions in Animal and Environment Legal Defence Fund v. UOI regarding sanctuaries and forest cover, similarly use the duties chapter to demand State action, not to limit the rights of forest-dwellers. The litigants invoking Article 51A in these cases were not the State. They were citizens using a duty as a sword against State inaction. That is a reading of the chapter the Swaran Singh Committee did not anticipate, and it is a reading that has done real work for environmental and animal-welfare jurisprudence.

But the argument proves less than it appears to. Three observations.

The first is that the rule-of-law point is non-falsifiable. If Part IVA only restates existing obligations, then the chapter does no work — and if it does no work, the question is why a government in the middle of an Emergency, with hundreds of pages of statutes to draft, would expend constitutional capital to insert it. Constitutional amendments do not happen by accident, particularly amendments inserted under a state of Emergency by a government that had concluded the Court was its principal political opponent. Either the chapter was meant to do work, or the chapter was decorative; if it was decorative, it should be lying inert in the case law, and it is not.

The second is that the environmental-litigant reading of Part IVA is real but selective. M.C. Mehta, Animal and Environment Legal Defence Fund, and the tribal-rights cases use the duties chapter offensively against the State. Aruna Roy, Mirzapur Kureshi, and A. Nagaraja use it defensively in favour of the State, to validate restrictions on rights. To treat the chapter as friend of the citizen because some cases have so used it is to ignore the cases — including the most cited one, Mirzapur Kureshi — in which Article 51A has narrowed the scope of Article 19(1)(g) trade rights and Article 25 religious-practice rights. The chapter cuts both ways, and the institutional reality is that the State has access to a constitutional drafting brief and the average citizen does not. Over time, a chapter that cuts both ways will cut more often in the direction of the better-resourced litigant.

The third is the strongest of the three, and it is the one I want to leave the reader with. If the rule-of-law defence of Part IVA is right, then the chapter is doing nothing the rule of law was not already doing. If that is so, the constitutional cost of leaving it in the text is small. But it is not zero. Every time a court reads Article 51A into the substantive scope of a fundamental right — narrowing the right, not merely defining it — the chapter is doing something the rule of law alone would not have done. The post-2014 case law has crossed that line. The Nagaraja reading of Article 51A as the magna carta of animal rights, used to read substantive prohibitions into the PCA Act, is not a restatement of the rule of law. It is a constitutional instrument generating regulatory obligations, justified by a duties chapter the framers refused to draft. That is the difference between a chapter that codifies what was already there and a chapter that adds something new — and the steel-manned defence of Part IVA does not survive contact with the cases that have done the adding.

What the original design has finally achieved

The Indira Gandhi government's draft of Part IVA, in its un-redacted Swaran Singh form, would have given Parliament a power to criminalise non-performance of duties and a blanket immunity for those laws from Article 14 and 19 challenge. The 1976 final text dropped both. What remained was a chapter of duties addressed to the citizen, sitting structurally parallel to a chapter of duties addressed to the State (the Directive Principles), with an interpretive expectation that courts would treat the two together.

What has happened since 2002 is that the courts have built, through case law, a functional equivalent of what the Swaran Singh draft proposed and the 1976 draft abandoned. The penalty clause is now embedded in statutes whose validity courts uphold on a Part IVA reading. The blanket immunity from Article 14 and 19 is now a softer interpretive presumption: where a State action can be justified by reference to a citizen duty, the rights chapter must accommodate the action. The architecture is more genteel than what the Emergency drafters proposed. The destination is the same.

I do not think the judges who decided AIIMS Students' Union or Aruna Roy or Nagaraja understood themselves to be completing the Indira Gandhi project. I think they were responding to particular cases on their facts, finding Article 51A available as a textual hook, and using it in the way constitutional courts use available text. That is precisely the point. A Trojan horse does not need its later occupants to be conspirators. It needs only to have been built well enough that, decades later, anyone who picks it up can use it for the purpose for which it was originally made. Part IVA was built that well. We are now seeing what it can do.

The honest reading of the duties chapter is that it should never have been inserted. The Constituent Assembly was right to refuse a Weimar-style duties chapter in 1949. The 42nd Amendment was wrong to insert one in 1976. Minerva Mills was right to strike down the 42nd Amendment's most aggressive features. The remaining presence of Part IVA in the text is an unfinished piece of Minerva Mills's work — a reminder that the Court of 1980 trimmed the worst of the Emergency drafting but left the architecture in place for a later generation of judges to discover and use. We are that later generation. The discovery is happening in real time. We should be honest about what we are discovering.

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