Q.Explain the reason for requiring special majority for amending the Constitution.

Special majority is required so that a constitutional amendment reflects support well beyond the ruling party's own numbers, protecting the Constitution from being changed too easily by whichever party happens to be in power. …

The Constitution's makers wanted the amending process to be both 'flexible' (able to correct genuine faults) and 'rigid' (resistant to casual, narrowly-backed change). An ordinary law needs only a simple majority of members present and voting. If constitutional amendments needed no more than that, a party with a comfortable working majority could rewrite the Constitution's own rules to entrench its own power — exactly what the special-majority requirement is designed to prevent. As Dr B.R. Ambedkar put it in the Constituent Assembly, if those dissatisfied with the Constitution cannot even obtain a two-thirds majority in favour of change, their dissatisfaction "cannot be deemed to be shared by the general public" — meaning special majority is really a proxy for testing whether an amendment reflects genuine public opinion, not just parliamentary arithmetic.

Special majority works through two conditions together: support of a majority of the total membership of the House (not merely of those present that day), and support of at least two-thirds of the members actually present and voting — with both Houses required to pass the bill separately. To see why both conditions matter, take the Lok Sabha's 545 members: a majority of total strength is 273. If only 300 members are present on the day of voting, the bill must still get 273 of their votes — well above a plain two-thirds of 300 (200) — so a thinly-attended sitting cannot push an amendment through. …