On Thursday, Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud paid rich tributes to noted jurist M K Nambyar saying his repeated efforts to highlight the interlinked nature of fundamental rights have borne fruit & become an integral part of Indian jurisprudence.
Born in 1898 in the present-day Kasargod district of Kerala, Nambyar stepped into the legal profession in the 1920s & was an illustrious lawyer of the Supreme Court & the Madras High Court. He died in 1975 & is known for defending the fundamental rights & basic structure of the Constitution.
Speaking at MK Nambyar Memorial Lecture organised by his son former Attorney General K K Venugopal & grandson senior advocate Krishnan Venugopal at Bharat Mandapam here, CJI Chandrachud said Nambyar’s ideas were new & unheard of when he first presented them but his interpretations have stood the test of time.
“Legacies are not a function of novelty alone. The reason we are discussing MK Nambyar’s ideas today is not only because they were new & unheard of when he first presented them, which they very much were.
“The primary reason is that his ideas & interpretations have stood the test of time. They continued to be relevant through social, legal & political changes until they were elevated from the pages of history & embedded in the legal framework,” the CJI said.
Chandrachud added that the legacies of constitutional visionaries such as Nambyar’s are embedded in the larger legacy of the Constitution itself.
“Today his repeated efforts to highlight the interlinked nature of fundamental rights have borne fruit & become an integral part of our jurisprudence. In fact, we have moved beyond recognising that fundamental rights gain colour from one another. We have devised tests to balance one right against the other in situations of potential incompatibility,” the CJI said.
He referred to the electoral bond case which dealt with funding of political parties & said the court had applied the double proportionality test & struck down the electoral bonds scheme.