BEFORE THE DRAFT CONSTITUTION of 1948 provided that no person could be deprived of their life or personal liberty "except according to procedure established by law,” the interim report of the Advisory Committee on Minorities and Fundamental Rights (1947) stated that "No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty, without due process of law, nor shall any person be denied the equal treatment of the laws within the territories of the union” (emphasis ours).
The phrase “due process of law” lies at the heart of N. Kavitha Rameshwar’s book “They Created a Nation” (LexisNexis, 2026), which centres around the gradual resurrection of the original phrase by the Judiciary while broadening the scope of Article 21.
The book carries the expression of ‘due process of law’ as a yardstick for state action in both its substance and its application, and justifies the exercise of reading beyond the text of the Constitution to enforce the scheme of constitutionalism by the judiciary. As one of the important pointers of development in the Indian Constitution, the book records how the Supreme Court embraced it, acknowledged it and sometimes failed to use it in simple terms. In the end, the utilization of this expression by the judiciary to broaden the scope of Article 21, reading the directive principle of state policy in order to recognize the rights of disabled, the LGBTQ+ community, and victims of intersectionality, created the Nation.
