PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 927
I would first like to refer to article 13 of the Constitution. Article 13 says that all laws inconsistent with the Fundamental Rights are void from the date on which the Constitution comes into existence. That is a general provision which is laid down in article 13. It is, as a matter of fact, a general notice given to the public as well as to the Judges of the Court that if any question was raised before them which involved the adjudication of the Fundamental Rights, the court shall not give effect to any existing law that was in conflict with the Fundamental Rights. But the makers of the Constitution were not satisfied with the general declaration because they felt that it was too much to expect a common citizen to go to a court of law in order to get relief from the court for the invasion of his Fundamental Rights. That was too much of a burden on the common citizen. And, therefore, the Constitution enacted another article, which is article 372, sub-clause (2), which gives power to the Government to make modification and adaptation in existing laws in order that the laws may be brought in conformity with the Fundamental Rights.
If my hon. Friend will allow me to make a personal reference, I would say that when I was in charge of law, I immediately took up this queston about adaptation and modification of the existing law in order to bring it in conformity with the Fundamental Rights. And I did succeed in getting repealed one of the most important pieces of legislation in the Punjab, called the Punjab Land Alienation Act, under which certain communities, or as the law speaks of them, certain tribes, were declared to be the only tribes which could hold property or acquire property in the Punjab. The law, in my judgement, was so iniquitous that a man who was actually an agriculturist, but whose community or tribe was not declared by the Government to be an agricultural tribe, was not entitled to get any land. But a person who was a barrister all his life, and never hoped to grow even two blades in a field, became entitled to acquire property, because the Government had chosen to declare his tribe to be an agricultural tribe. I succeeded in having the whole Act cancelled under the provisions of article 372, clause (2). There