JOIN USThe art of compromise
Perhaps no Article of the Constitution of India caused as much controversy as did the erstwhile Article 31. This Article guaranteed the rights of property holders to compensation if the State took away property without consent. It was amended multiple times until it was finally abolished by the 44th Amendment to the Constitution. But even before the Article was introduced into the Constitution, its contents saw a furious and wide-ranging debate in the Constituent Assembly that lasted a day and a half. In direct contrast with the debate over guarantee of the right to life and liberty under Article 21, members upset with the Article were angry because the right guaranteed was too expansive!
The debate over Article 31 (introduced as draft Article 24) was kicked off by Jawaharlal Nehru. The Article, as he proposed it, was a compromise between the need to abolish the zamindari system and to protect an individual’s right to compensation when the State compulsorily acquired property. The latter was a right even the Government of India Act, 1935, protected, but abolishing the zamindari system was proving challenging.
The balance, broadly, was that laws abolishing zamindari should not require zamindars to be fully compensated but the Union government would try to ensure that states did not go overboard to avoid paying compensation even in regular land acquisition. The goal of abolishing zamindari would be to give ownership of the land to the tiller and remove the intermediary. Giving zamindars full compensation for all the properties acquired from them would drain the treasury of state and Union governments, apart from partially legitimising the system.
At the same time, creating an exception to the principle of compensation for compulsory land acquisition would deter people from investing in industrial development. Some careful balance had to be drawn between these two core promises of the independence movement, and Nehru proposed the draft Article as a good compromise.
Except, everyone seemed to hate it.
The socialists and leftists did not like it because the determination of compensation would be done by the judiciary and they feared that zamindars and industrialists, with their highly paid lawyers, would be able to stymie land reforms and nationalisation of industries. Some of the more extreme, like Brajeshwar Prasad of Bihar, proposed that all agricultural land in the country would vest in the State and that the government could take over all private property and give compensation only if it felt necessary.
On the other hand, zamindars and their supporters argued that just compensation was necessary because it was not as if they had simply sat on the lands inherited from their ancestors. Shyamanandan Sahay, also from Bihar and a zamindar himself, argued that zamindars had helped increase the land under cultivation by investing their own capital and should not have lands taken away from them without compensation. He also pointed out that industrialists may hesitate to expand industries (sorely needed for the Indian economy to develop) if they lived under the constant threat of nationalisation without compensation.
Some, like Alladi Krishnaswamy Ayyar, defended the compromise that Nehru had forged though they had earlier opposed it. Eventually, the Congress’ majority in the Assembly saw all the many amendments proposed to the Article rejected. Article 31 eventually passed in the form that it was introduced but it proved to be a somewhat hollow victory since zamindari abolition and land reforms would soon result in a constitutional tug of war between the legislature and judiciary.
Was there a better way to draft Article 31 that would have ensured abolition of zamindari, protection of property rights, and prevented a legislature-judiciary tussle? Of all the proposed amendments, none really found a middle ground better than what had been suggested by Nehru. Most veered towards doing away with property rights altogether or towards protecting the rights of zamindars to full compensation. The arguments were not without merit and couldn’t simply be dismissed. The debate over Article 31 is perhaps a reminder that there are some political problems that can’t be “fixed” with one neat solution but might need to be addressed and grappled with for years and even decades before something like an acceptable solution is found.