Kuldip Nayar v Union of India

Facts

• Section 3 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 had required a candidate for election to the Council of States to be an elector in a parliamentary constituency in that State.
• Parliament amended the provision so that a candidate need only be an elector in any parliamentary constituency in India.
• Parliament separately amended the law so that voting by members of a State Legislative Assembly in an election to the Council of States would be by open ballot rather than secret ballot.
• The petitioners contended that the first amendment destroyed the federal character of the Council of States, and that the second violated the freedom of the elector and the principle of a free election.
• It was further argued that both amendments violated the basic structure of the Constitution.

Issue

1. Whether residence in the State is a constitutional requirement for membership of the Council of States; whether the open ballot in such elections is valid; and whether an ordinary statute may be struck down for violating the basic structure.

Held

• Both amendments were upheld. Article 84 prescribes the qualifications for membership exhaustively, and residence is not among them; the requirement had been purely statutory and Parliament was free to remove it. The Council of States is not a purely federal chamber: seats are allotted broadly by population under the Fourth Schedule rather than equally, so the analogy with the American Senate does not hold. As to the ballot, a legislator voting in such an election is not exercising a fundamental right, and the open ballot is a legitimate means of curbing cross voting and corruption, since the elector is accountable to his party and to the House. On the wider point, the Court held that the basic structure doctrine is a limitation on the amending power and cannot be invoked against ordinary legislation.

Ratio Decidendi

Where the Constitution itself states the qualifications for an office, a statutory addition to them is a matter of legislative policy that Parliament may alter. Federalism is a constitutional value, but its content must be gathered from the Constitution's own design rather than from a comparative model, and the design of the Council of States is not one of equal State representation. As for ordinary law, every basic feature finds expression in some specific article, so a challenge must be brought on that article; to allow a free standing basic structure challenge to a statute would introduce an unmanageably vague standard.