On 28 April 1976, in the depths of the Emergency, a five-judge Constitution Bench held by 4:1 that a person detained under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act could not move habeas corpus because the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 stood suspended by the Presidential Proclamation under Article 359. Justice H.R. Khanna's sole dissent — that life and liberty are not the Constitution's gift to be taken away by it — cost him the Chief Justiceship. Forty-one years later, in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, a nine-judge Bench explicitly overruled the majority and adopted the Khanna dissent as the constitutional position. A digest of the judgment, its setting, the dissent, the supersession, and the doctrine that has supplanted it.
On 10 July 1985, a five-judge Constitution Bench held in Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation that the right to life under Article 21 includes the right to livelihood — because no person can live without the means of living. The Bench was hearing a petition by pavement dwellers in Bombay challenging their eviction under the Bombay Municipal Corporation Act, 1888. The petitioners ultimately did not succeed in vacating the eviction architecture, but the doctrinal contribution — that livelihood is part of Article 21 — has shaped four decades of socio-economic-rights jurisprudence.