Q.Many amendments have been made due to different interpretations upheld by Judiciary and Parliament. Explain with examples.

Several amendments exist because Parliament and the judiciary interpreted the same constitutional provisions differently, and Parliament then amended the Constitution to settle the disagreement in its own favour, especially between 1970 and 1975. …

It is part of the normal working of a democracy that different institutions can genuinely interpret the Constitution, and the scope of their own powers, differently. When the judiciary's interpretation did not match what Parliament wanted, Parliament sometimes chose to amend the Constitution itself, so that its own preferred reading would become the settled, authoritative one — asserting its interpretation through formal amendment rather than accepting the Court's.

This happened especially often in the period 1970-1975, on three connected issues: first, the relationship between Fundamental Rights and the Directive Principles of State Policy — when the judiciary read Fundamental Rights as taking precedence, Parliament responded with amendments to protect its ability to give effect to the Directive Principles; second, the scope of the right to private property, where judicial rulings restricting Parliament's ability to acquire property for redistribution led to further amendments; and third, the scope of Parliament's own power to amend the Constitution, which is the very dispute that eventually produced the basic structure doctrine in the Kesavananda Bharati case. Because these three issues were so intertwined with the wider political history of the period, the chapter notes that they can only be fully understood in that context, which becomes clearer with further study of the political history of independent India. …