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Golak Nath Case.
There occurs in the course of history some events which catapaults ordinary people to the heights of glory and a place in history.
One such person is I. C. Golaknath.
The Golaknath Case entered the history books as the case in which the Supreme Court of India ruled that Parliament is not empowered to amend the Fundamental Rights enshrined in the Constitution.
Barrister MK Nambyar was the legal luminary who argued and won the case for the petitioners.
KK Venugopal,in his biography of his father MK Nambyar writes:
“Henry Golak Nath who died on 30 July 1953, was the son of Golak Nath Chatterji who, in historian Granville Austin’s recounting, had been disgraced by his Kuleen Brahmin family for having converted to Christianity. Austin recalls that Chatterji had left Bengal in the mid nineteenth century and had reportedly walked across the whole of North India to Punjab, where he joined up with the Scottish Presbyterian Mission.
In Jalandhar, where Chatterji eventually starioned himself, he became the first Indian in the country to be ordained a Presbyterian minister. Going on to marry a Kashmiri woman, the couple had several children, and one among the many was Henry Golak Nath. Golak Nath who had received his divinity degree in 1879 from the Princeton Theological Seminary in the United States, on his return took his father’s place as a minister. Together with his brother William, Golak Nath acquired some 500 acres of land in the region.
But in 1962, the financial commissioner of the Jalandhar Division held that the petitioners, that is the legal heirs of Henry Golak Nath, held some 418 standard acres and 9 and 1/4 units above what they are entitled to hold under the Punjab Security of Land Tenures Act X of 1953.
But Inder Golak Nath and the others, who had by now had inherited only thirty acres, as a result of the law, argued that this finding infringed their right to equality under Article 14, and the right to hold property under Article 19(1)(f).”
…………………….
” Ultimately Golak Nath’s amendment didn’t come to fruition, but Parliament, under Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership, did introduce the Twenty -fourth and Twenty-fifth Amendments to the Constitution in a bid to reassert Parliament’s sovereignty by negating the impact of Golak Nath “….
