Hans Raj Khanna

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Hans Raj Khanna (3 July 1912 – 25 February 2008) was an Indian judge, jurist and advocate who propounded the basic structure doctrine in 1973 and attempted to uphold civil liberties during the time of Emergency in India in a lone dissenting judgement in 1976. He entered the Indian judiciary in 1952 as an Additional District and Sessions Judge and subsequently was elevated as a judge to the Supreme Court of India in 1971 where he continued till his resignation in 1977. He is most notably remembered for his minority judgment in the highly publicized ADM Jabalpur v. Shiv Kant Shukla habeas corpus case during the 1975 - 1977 Indian Emergency, in which the remaining four judges of the five-member bench, Chief Justice A. N. Ray, Justice M. H. Beg, Justice Y. V. Chandrachud and Justice P. N. Bhagwati, agreed with the government's view that even the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution of India like the right to life and liberty stood abrogated during a period of national emergency...

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