Basic Structure Is The Weave That Keeps India's Constitutional 'Khaat' Steady : Chief Justice Of India Surya Kant

Invoking the image of a traditional Indian khaat(cot), Chief Justice of India Surya Kant on Saturday said the Basic Structure Doctrine is the woven rope that keeps the Constitution balanced, resilient and morally anchored. Speaking at a session organised by O. P. Jindal Global University to mark fifty years of the Kesavananda Bharati ruling, he said judicial independence depends on maintaining the right tension between rigidity and flexibility, just like the precision weave of a khaat.

"If I were to describe this balance in a way that feels closer to home, I would turn to something very ordinary, very Indian — the khaat or chaar-pai as its called here in my home State of Haryana, and known in English simply as a 'woven cot'. Its frame is strong, its legs sturdy, but it is the careful weaving of rope that gives it form and function. Pull the ropes too tight, and it snaps under strain. Leave them too loose, and the whole structure sags. It is the precision of that weave — the deliberate tension between rigidity and flexibility — that makes it enduring.

The Basic Structure Doctrine is that weave of our constitutional khaat. The text provides the frame, the institutions form the legs, but the rope— that interlacing of restraint, balance, and moral discipline — is what makes the entire structure useful, just, and lasting."

Chief Justice Surya Kant was addressing a gathering shortly after witnessing a reenactment of the historic hearing before the 13-judge bench. He described the performance as a living scholarship that transported the audience to a time when the Constitution stood at a transcendental crossroads. He commended the Senior Advocates, the Attorney General and the Solicitor General for capturing the ethical and institutional stakes of the moment.

Reflecting on 1973, he said India was then barely twenty-three years into its constitutional journey and still shaping its institutions. Yet the Supreme Court displayed maturity far beyond its age when it resisted attempts to bend the Constitution to the convenience of political power. The question before the Court was nothing short of civilizational: could even a massive parliamentary majority be permitted to rewrite the moral DNA of the Constitution.

CJI Surya Kant compared India's institutional moment to constitutional struggles faced earlier by the United States during the New Deal era and by the United Kingdom when parliamentary sovereignty strained against the need for separation of powers. Both countries had centuries of accumulated constitutional experience. India did not. Yet, he said, the young Republic responded with courage, conscience and constitutional morality.

He described the true legacy of Kesavananda Bharati as the assertion that India's democratic culture is supple but not brittle. It bends without breaking and adapts without surrendering its moral compass. The Court's delineation of the separation of powers reaffirmed India's commitment to parliamentary democracy while ensuring that no branch could dominate the constitutional order.

He emphasised that the doctrine was not invented in 1973 but rediscovered. The idea that power must answer to principle had always been present in the Preamble, in the distribution of powers, in the protection of fundamental rights and in the oath taken by every judge. The Kesavananda bench merely gave expression to a truth the Constitution had long carried within it: that no authority can amend away the promise of justice.

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