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TABLE OF CASES Pg
No. No.
1. Tilokchand Motichand v. H.B. Munshi,(1969) 1 SCC 110 09
2. Rabindranath Bose and Ors. v. Union of India and Ors,.(1970) 1 SCC 84 09
3. Ramchandra Shankar Deodhar v. State of Maharashtra, 1 SCC 317 09
4. Express Publication (Madurai) Ltd. v. Union of India, (2004) 11 SCC 526 10
5. T.K. Dingal v. State of West Bengal, (2009) 1 SCC 768 10
6. Minnesota Thresher Mfg. Company vs Langdon, 46 N. W. 310 (1890) 11
7. Keshavanda Bharti vs State of Kerala, AIR 1973 SC 1461 11
8. Indira Gandhi v. Raj Narain, 1975 AIR 1590 12
9. Minerva Mills v. Union of India, AIR 1980 SC 1789 12

Tilokchand Motichand v. H.B. Munshi,(1969) 1 SCC 110 :

The petitioner Trilokchand was faced with an order of the Sales Tax Officer, dated 17-3-1958,
which forfeited a sum of Rs. 26,563.50 under Section 21(4) of the Bombay Sales Tax Act
(Bombay Act III of 1953) which provision is similar to Section 12-A(4) of the Bombay Sales
Tax Act, 1946. The petitioner promptly filed a writ petition in the Bombay High Court
challenging this order. His petition was dismissed on 28-11-1958. He also filed a petition of
appeal before the division Bench on 7-7-1959. An order of attachment followed and so the
petitioner paid the sum of Rs. 26,563.50 in various instalments from 3-10-1959 to 3-8-1960.
By letter, dated 9-1-1962, the petitioner was called upon to pay a penalty amounting to Rs.
12,517.68 on account of late payment of sales tax dues, but this order of penalty was
ultimately cancelled.

On 9-2-1968, the petitioner filed this writ petition under Article 32 praying that the order,
dated 17-3-1958 and the notice and order, dated 18-12-1958 and 24-12-58 be quashed.

Brief judgement : The petitioner moved the High Court for relief on the ground that the
recovery from him was unconstitutional. He set out a number of grounds but did not set out
the ground on which ultimately in another case recovery was struck down by this Court. That
ground was that the provisions of the Act were unconstitutional. The question is: can the
petitioner in this case take advantage, after a lapse of a number of years, of the decision of
this Court ? He moved the High Court but did not come up in appeal to this Court. His
contention is that the ground on which his petition was dismissed was different and the
ground on which the statute was struck down was not within his knowledge and therefore he
did not know of it and pursue it in this Court. To that I answer that law will presume that he
knew the exact ground of unconstitutionality. Everybody is presumed to know the law. It was
his duty to have brought the matter before this Court for consideration. In any event, having
set the machinery of law in motion he cannot abandon it to resume it after a number of years,
ORDER: In accordance with the opinion of the majority, the petition fails and is dismissed
with costs.

Rabindranath Bose and Ors. v. Union of India and Ors,.(1970) 1 SCC 84 :

The petitioners were recruited-as income Tax Officers Class I Grade II by competitive
examination and the respondents were recruited to it by promotion in the pre-Constitution
period 1945 to 1950. In 1952 a committee met to finalise the Seniority List. It also
modified the Seniority Rules in that year. A revised Seniority List was issued in 1953. As a
result of the seniorities thus allotted and by operation of the.Seniority Rules the respondents
became senior to the petitioners.

The present petitions were filed under Art. 32 of the Constitution in 1967 Thepetitioners did
not attack the validity of the respondents' appointments but urged that for the purpose of
seniority their appointments should be postdated in conformity with the 'quota rule' laid
down in para 2(d) of the Government letter dated 29-9-1944. They relied on Arts. 14 and
16 of the Constitution.

Judgement :Learned Counsel for the petitioners, however, says that there has been
no undue delay. He says that the representations were being received by the
Government all the time. But there is a limit to the time which can be considered reasonable
for making representations. If the Government has turned down one representation, the
making of another representation on similar lines would not enable the petitioners to explain
the delay. Learned Counsel for the petitioners says that the petitioners were
under the impression that the Departmental Promotion Committee had held a meeting
in 1948 and not on April 29, 1949, and the real true facts came to be known in
1961, when the Government mentioned these facts in their letter dated December 28,
1961. We are unable to accept this explanation. This fact has been mentioned in
the minutes of the meeting of the Committee which met in Feb. 1952 and we are unable to
believe that the petitioners did not come to know all these facts till 1961. But even
assuming that the petitioners came to know all these facts only in Dec. 1961, even then there
has been inordinate delay in presenting the present petition. The fact that
Jaisinghani's case(1) was pending before the High Court and later in this Court is also, no
excuse for the delay in resenting the present petition. Inthe result, the petition fails and
is dismissed. There will be no order as to costs.

Ramchandra Shankar Deodhar v. State of Maharashtra, 1 SCC 317 :

The petitioners were Tahsildars in the quondam state of Hyderabad. After the new state
of Bombay was constituted with territories drawn from various existing States
including Hyderabad, under the States Reorganisation Act, 1956, equation of
posts and determination of inter se seniority was done by the Allocated
Government Servants' (Absorption, Seniority. Pay and Allowance) Rules, 1957.

Under these rules (1957-Rules) the Government of Bombay declared that the posts of
Mamlatdar in the former State of Bombay shall be deemed to be equivalent to the posts
of Tahsildars from the former State of Hyderabad, and the posts of Deputy Collector in the
former State of Bombay shall be deemed to be equivalent to the posts of Deputy
Collector allocated from the former State of Hyderabad.

Some of the allocated Mamlatdars/Tahsildars in other divisions who were junior to

the petitioners became officiating Deputy Collectors earlier than the petitioners and
were consequently entitled to be confirmed in-the cadreof Deputy Collectors in preference to
the petitioners.The petitioners filed a writ petition in this Court, challenging the procedure for
promotion.

Judgement : The divisional cadres of 'Mamlatdars/Tehsildars were created as far back as 1st
November, 1956 by the Government Resolution of that date, and the procedure for
making promotion to the posts of Deputy Collector on the basis of divisional select lists,
which was a necessary consequence of the creation of the divisional ,cadre of
Mamlatdars/Tehsildars, had been in operation for a long number of years, at any rate from
7th April, 1961" and the Rules ,of 30th July, 1959 were also given effect
to since the date of their ,,enactment and yet the petitioner did not file the petition until
14th July, 1969. There was a delay of more than ten or twelve years in filing the
petition since the accrual of the cause of complaint, and this delay, contended the
respondents, was sufficient to disentitle the petitioners to any relief in a petition under Art,
32 of the Constitution.

Express Publication (Madurai) Ltd. v. Union of India, (2004) 11 SCC 526 :

In this petition filed under Article 32 of the Constitution of India challenge is to the
constitutionality of paragraph 80(2) of the Employees' Provident Fund Scheme, 1952. The
effect of the impugned paragraph is that the employees of newspaper industry, for the
purposes of provident fund scheme, do not fall in the category of excluded employees despite
their pay being above prescribed amount as notified by Government of India from time to
time.

The petitioners have tried to explain that though the impugned provision came into effect in
1956, they tried to bear the burden with equanimity and with a certain sense of rectitude but,
with passage of years, there has been severe setback to the newspaper industry in general and
the petitioners' organization in particular and, therefore, this challenge at this stage.

Judgement : In the present case, there is no satisfactory explanation for delay of over forty
five years. The petition can be rejected by declining to exercise discretion in favour of
petitioners only on this count. Further, as already noticed, a provision though constitutional
when enacted, may with passage of time become unconstitutional, but the said principle has
no applicability to the present case. The contention here is that the impugned provision was
unconstitutional from its inception in the year 1956 since there was never any legal basis for
classification of newspaper establishments as a separate class.

T.K. Dingal v. State of West Bengal, (2009) 1 SCC 768 :

In the early ‘90’s, there was a big vacuum in requirement of Medical Technologists in the
Dept. of Health and Family Welfare, West Bengal. These posts were filled up through
entrance examinations and oral interviews in 1995 and 1996. Subsequently petitioners filed
WP objecting to certain appointments and promotions.

Judgement :In our considered opinion, the law laid down by this Court in aforesaid and other
cases applies to the present situation also. We are of the considered view that it would be
inequitable if we set aside appointments of candidates selected, appointed and are working
since 1998-99. We, therefore, hold that the Tribunal and the High Court were right in not
setting aside their appointments.

It is undisputed that by the time we are called upon to decide the matter, the selected and
appointed candidates have completed ten years. They are thus having rich experience in the
field.

Keshavanda Bharti vs State of Kerala, AIR 1973 SC 1461 :

In February 1970 Swami Kesavananda Bharati, senior plaintiff and head of "Edneer Mutt" -
a Hindu Mutt situated in Edneer, a village in Kasaragod district of Kerala, challenged
the Kerala government's attempts, under two state land reform acts, to impose restrictions on
the management of its property. Although the state invoked its authority under Article 21, a
noted Indian jurist, Nanabhoy Palkhivala, convinced Swami into filing his petition under
Article 26, concerning the right to manage religiously owned property without government
interference. Even though the hearings consumed five months, the outcome would
profoundly affect India's democratic processes.

The lead petitioner, His Holiness Kesavananda Bharati Sripadagalvaru, the leader of
a math in Kerala, challenged the Constitution (29th Amendment) Act, 1972, which placed the
Kerala Land Reforms Act, 1963 and its amending Act into the IX Schedule of the
Constitution. A bench of 13 judges was constituted to hear the matter.

Judgement :In a seven-six majority, the bench held that Parliament’s power to amend the
Constitution was not explicitly limited, but was limited to not altering or modifying the basic
features or structure of the Constitution.

Indira Gandhi v. Raj Narain, 1975 AIR 1590:

Raj Narain had contested the 1971 Indian general election against Indira Gandhi, who
represented the constituency of Rae Bareilly in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian
Parliament Gandhi was re-elected from Rae Bareilly by a two-to-one margin of the popular
vote, and her Indian National Congress (R) party won a sweeping majority in the Indian
Parliament. Narain filed a petition to appeal the verdict, alleging that Indira Gandhi used
bribery, government machinery and resources to gain an unfair advantage in contesting the
election. Narain specifically charged Gandhi of using government employees as election
agents and of organising campaign activities in the constituency while still on the payroll of
the government.
Judgement :On 12 June 1975, Justice Jagmohanlal Sinha found Gandhi guilty of electoral
malpractices. Sinha declared the election verdict in the Rae Bareilly constituency "null and
void", and barred Gandhi from holding elected office for six years.While Sinha had dismissed
charges of bribery, he had found Indira guilty of misusing government machinery as a
government employee herself.
In Indira Gandhi v. Raj Narain,[6] a Constitutional amendment to regularise Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi’s election was struck down citing the basic features of democracy, rule of law
and equality. In Minerva Mills v. Union of India,[7] the Parliament, through the Constitution
(42nd Amendment) Act, 1976, attempted to circumvent Kesavananda Bharati by making
Parliamentary power unlimited. The Court in this case struck down the amendment on the
ground that the judicial review of Parliamentary enactments, and the limitation of
Parliamentary power to amend the Constitution, were themselves part of the basic structure of
the Constitution.

Minerva Mills v. Union of India, AIR 1980 SC 1789 :

Minerva Mills was a textile industry in the State of Karnataka engaged in the mass
production of silk clothes and provided market to the general public. The Central Govt. was
suspicious that company fulfilled the criteria to be classified as a sick industry. Therefore, the
Central Govt. in 1970 appointed a committee u/s 15 of the Industries (Development and
Regulation) Act, 1951 for making a full detailed report analyzing the affairs of Minerva
Mills. Relying on the Committee’s report, on October 19, 1971 the Central govt. empowered
National Textile Corporation Limited (a body under the 1951 act) to take over the
management of Minerva Mills u/s 18A of the 1951 act.

Earlier through 39th Constitutional (Amendment) Act, 1975 the Parliament inserted
Nationalization Act, 1974 into Ninth Schedule which means that any challenge on the said act
was outside the purview of judicial review. Now, the petitioner was not able to challenge this
aspect of 39th amendment since this remedy was barred by 42 nd Amendment. The Parliament
after suffering massive defeat in Indira Nehru Gandhi v. Shri Raj Narain [1]in order to make
its power and authority supreme passed 42nd amendment (as discussed earlier in Indira Nehru
Gandhi summary) to bar any challenge on constitutional amendments in courts of law.

Therefore, the main issue before the court was to check the constitutionality of
42ndConstitutional (Amendment) Act, 1976.

Judgement :This landmark Judgment came on July 31, 1980. The judgment was divided into
4:1, Y.V. Chandrachud (then CJI) writing on behalf of himself and (A.C. Gupta, N.L.
Untwalia, P.S. Kailsam JJ.) while Justice P.N. Bhagwati wrote the dissenting opinion. The
majority struck down Section 55 & 4 of the 42nd Amendment as it was in violation of basic
structure thereby upholding the Basic Structure doctrine laid down by Kesavananda Bharti.