FIRST AMENDMENT TO THE INDIAN CONSTITUTION

1. Context 

2. First Amendment to the Constitution

• Just over a year into the working of the Constitution, then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru introduced a Select Committee Which considered the issue for six days.
• The amendment officially came into effect on June 18, 1951.
• The First Amendment Bill sought to make several consequential changes from exempting land reforms from scrutiny to providing protections for backward classes in the Constitution.
• Notably, it also expanded on the scope of the restrictions on the right to free speech.

3. The constitutional position on free speech

• Article 19 (1) (a) in Part III of the Constitution guarantees the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression.
• But this freedom is not absolute or unfettered.
• It is followed by Article 19 (2), which lists exceptions or "reasonable restrictions" on that right.

3.1 The text of Article 19 (2) in the original Constitution 

3.2 Following the Amendment, Article 19 (2) was changed to 

4. Key changes in the First Amendment 

• First, It introduced the qualification "reasonable" to the restrictions that Article 19 (2) imposed.
• In a 2015 paper, legal scholar Gautam Bhatia placed this term in context and traced its origins to debates in the Constituent Assembly.
• The insertion of the term "reasonable" he argued, keeps the door open for the courts to step in and examine the legitimacy of the restrictions imposed by Parliament.
• Second, the amendment introduced into the Constitution the specific terms "Public order" and "incitement to an offence".
• This set of new, narrower terms in the provision was necessitated by two Supreme Court rulings in 1950, that went against the state's power to curb free speech.

5. Supreme Court Verdicts 

• In 1949, the Madras Government (Tamil Nadu had not been created then) banned "Cross Roads", a left-leaning magazine, for its criticism of the government's foreign policy.
• This led to the first significant free speech ruling by the Supreme Court in Romesh Thappar v State of Madras.
• The petitioner had challenged Section 9 (1-A) of the Madras Maintenance of Public Order Act, 1949 as unconstitutional.
• This provision authorised the government to impose restrictions for the wider purpose of securing "public safety" or the "maintenance of public order".
• The Court had to define the terms "Public Safety" and "Public order", and examine if they fell within the scope of the restrictions allowed in Article 19 (2).
• The government argued that the words "undermining the security of the state" in Article 19 (2) could be equated with "public safety" and "maintenance of public order".
• In its majority opinion in the case, the court disagreed with the government and struck down the provision as unconstitutional.
• The court found a vast difference in degrees between the two provisions.
• Justice Fazal Ali dissented from the majority view and said that disrupting public order is a means to undermine the security of the state.

5.2 Brij Bhushan Case 

• In 1950, the Chief Commissioner of Delhi issued a "pre-censorship order" on the RSS mouthpiece "organiser" which too was critical of the government.
• Its publisher Brij Bhushan challenged Section 7 (1) (c) of the East Punjab Safety Act, which allowed per-publication scrutiny of material "prejudicial to public safety or the maintenance of public order".
• The issue, in this case, was essentially the same as the one in Romesh Thappar and the Verdict of the Supreme Court followed the same pattern as in the earlier case.
• Then Chief Justice of India Hiralal Kania and Justices M Patanjali Sastri, Mehr Chand Mahajan, Sudhi Ranjan Das and B K Mukherjea formed the majority that struck down the law.
• Justice Fazal Ali again dissented.

For Prelims & Mains