B.K. Ravichandra v. Union of India: Article 300A as a guarantee of the rule of law, and 33 years of unlawful retention

B.K. Ravichandra v. Union of India, decided on 24 November 2020, is a compact but doctrinally sharp two-judge decision on Article 300A of the Constitution. It is not a case about the quantum of compensation, nor about the validity of an acquisition statute. It is about something more elementary: what happens when the State takes possession of land under a temporary requisitioning power, that power lapses, and the State simply refuses to leave. The answer Justice S. Ravindra Bhat gave — writing for himself and Justice Indira Banerjee — was that Article 300A is a rule-of-law guarantee, and that indefinite retention of property without any subsisting authority of law is lawlessness the courts cannot condone.

The facts: requisition, not acquisition

The distinction between requisition and acquisition is the spine of the case, and the facts turn on it. Requisition is a temporary taking of possession for a public purpose, with the title remaining in the owner and compensation payable for the use and occupation. Acquisition is a permanent divesting of title, on payment of compensation, following the procedure prescribed by law. The two produce different consequences, and one cannot silently ripen into the other.

The suit lands were three properties in Byappanahalli, Bangalore South Taluk — Survey Nos. 101/1 and 101/2, aggregating 2 acres 39 guntas, and Survey No. 104, measuring 2 acres 8 guntas — belonging to the appellants' predecessor, the late B.M. Krishnamurthy. In 1963, invoking the Defence of India Act, 1962, the Union requisitioned these properties; the owner handed over possession under protest, the land being taken under Section 30 of that Act. When the Defence of India Act lapsed with effect from 10 January 1968, an amendment to the Requisitioning and Acquisition of Immovable Property Act, 1952 — inserting Section 25 — created a deeming fiction under which property requisitioned under the lapsed Act was treated as requisitioned under the 1952 Act. Through successive amendments, the requisition was continued.

It finally ended in 1987. That date matters: from 1987, the Union's occupation ceased to have any lawful basis. Yet it did not release the land, and — despite repeatedly asserting in arbitration and before the High Court that it had acquired at least parts of it — never established a valid acquisition. The factual question was examined by the High Court twice and by arbitrators three times; each time the finding went against the Union.

The High Court's error

The Karnataka High Court, though it recognised that the Union's claim of acquisition had no merit, nonetheless declined to order release. Its rationale was that the adjoining areas were used by the Union for defence purposes, and — most significantly — it granted the Union indefinite time to take steps to acquire the suit lands. The Union then did nothing with that latitude for a further twelve years. The Supreme Court described the resulting position bluntly: repeatedly the Union asserted an acquisition it could not prove, its occupation had ceased to be lawful in 1987, and yet it "implacably refused to hand back possession". These facts, the Court said, "paint a stark, even sordid picture."

Article 300A after the Forty-fourth Amendment

The judgment situates itself in the constitutional history of the right to property. The Forty-fourth Amendment of 1978 omitted Article 19(1)(f) and Article 31, removing property from the catalogue of fundamental rights in Part III; the residual guarantee was re-enacted as Article 300A in Chapter IV of Part XII. The right is therefore no longer a fundamental right, but — as the Court was at pains to reiterate — it "remains a valuable constitutional right."

Bhat, J. marshalled the Court's own Article 300A line to fix the content of that right, drawing on K.T. Plantation Pvt. Ltd. v. State of Karnataka — which held that a person "cannot be deprived of his property merely by an executive fiat, without any specific legal authority or without the support of law made by a competent legislature" — and on the regulatory-deprivation cases underlining that the essential theme of Article 300A is unauthorised deprivation. The organising idea is not compensation alone; it is legality.

The reasoning: from royal prerogative to rule of law

The heart of the judgment is a short passage of constitutional theory. The Court traced how Indian governments had once asserted a royal-prerogative immunity — the claim that the sovereign is not bound by ordinary law — an understanding the Court itself later overruled as "inconsistent with the rule of law based on the doctrine of equality." From that correction Bhat, J. drew the present principle: it is "no longer open to the state — in any of its forms (executive, state agencies, or legislature) — to claim that the law, or the constitution, can be ignored, or complied at its convenience."

It is here that the judgment places Article 300A alongside Articles 21 and 265.

The grouping is deliberate. Article 21 forbids deprivation of life or personal liberty except by procedure established by law; Article 265 forbids the levy or collection of any tax except by authority of law; Article 300A forbids deprivation of property save by authority of law. Read together, the three provisions express a single constitutional demand: the State may act against the individual's core interests — liberty, money, property — only through law, never through bare executive will. The Court cast the judiciary as "the guarantor and jealous protector of the people's liberties," warning, in a borrowing from Justice Robert Jackson's dissent in Korematsu v. United States, that any judicial condonation of unauthorised executive conduct leaves the principle "lying about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need."

The direction

Applying that principle, the Court held the High Court had erred in refusing relief. Its remedy was direct and time-bound:

"33 years (based upon cessation of the Union's legal possession) is a long enough time, even in India, to be kept away from one's property."

The Union was directed to hand back peaceful possession of the suit lands to the appellants within three months. Because the requisition had subsisted lawfully until 1987, the appellants remained entitled to compensation for the periods of use and occupation; the Court left open a fresh claim for compensation based on re-fixation of capital and recurring annual value over the last twenty years, to be referred to arbitration, with the award to follow within six months. Costs of Rs. 75,000 were awarded to the appellants. Crucially, the obligation to vacate within three months was made independent of the compensation exercise — the State could not hold the land hostage to a pending valuation.

Why the case matters

B.K. Ravichandra is significant less for novelty than for clarity. Three points stand out.

First, it refuses to let requisition mature into a de facto acquisition by inertia. A temporary taking cannot become permanent simply because the State neglects, for decades, to either acquire the land lawfully or return it.

Second, it recasts Article 300A in rule-of-law terms rather than merely compensatory ones. The demotion of property from Part III in 1978 did not license the State to deal with property outside the law; the guarantee that survives is a guarantee of legality, enforceable through writ jurisdiction, placed on the same conceptual footing as the protections of liberty and taxation.

Third, it is a pointed corrective to judicial indulgence of the State. The High Court's grant of "indefinite time" to acquire was itself the error the Supreme Court identified. The remedy for a proven, subsisting illegality is restoration, not further latitude.

The decision belongs to a growing line in which the Court has ordered the State to restore land taken without lawful authority, marking a firm modern reassertion of Article 300A as a working constraint on the State rather than a hollow residue of the pre-1978 fundamental right.

Related editorial pieces

• K.T. Plantation Pvt. Ltd. v. State of Karnataka: Article 300A and the public-purpose requirement
• Indore Development Authority v. Manoharlal: Section 24(2) of the 2013 LARR Act
• R.C. Cooper v. Union of India: how the eleven-judge Bench dismantled Gopalan
• Property Owners Association v. State of Maharashtra: a nine-judge Bench redraws the boundary of Article 39(b)

Sources

• B.K. Ravichandra v. Union of India, Supreme Court of India, judgment dated 24 November 2020 (Civil Appeal No. 1460 of 2010)
• Govt sits over land for 33 years without authority: SC directs handing over of land to owners within 3 months; says such lawlessness cannot be condoned — SCC Times
• The Lawyer's Digest: Supreme Court Judgments passed in November 2020 — Bar & Bench