Political Philosophy
Duties Without a Forum: What Article 37 Assumes About Who Enforces a Constitution
8 August 2026 · 9 min read
Article 37 of the Constitution contains a sentence that ought to be harder to read than it is. The provisions of Part IV, it says, "shall not be enforceable by any court, but the principles therein laid down are nevertheless fundamental in the governance of the country and it shall be the duty of the State to apply these principles in making laws."
Three things are asserted at once. The principles are fundamental. Applying them is a duty. No court may enforce them. On a strict positivist account this is close to incoherent: an obligation from which no sanction follows is not an obligation but an exhortation, and calling it fundamental does not repair the defect. The usual response is that the drafters wrote aspirationally, that a newly independent State could not afford to promise enforceable welfare, and that Part IV is therefore a list of intentions dressed in the grammar of command.
That explanation is not wrong so much as incomplete. Scarcity explains why the State could not deliver the outcomes. It does not explain why the drafters used the word "duty" at all, or why they placed the principles in the constitutional text rather than in a resolution. A document written to be candid about its own limits does not usually go out of its way to describe its unenforceable clauses as fundamental.
The more useful reading is that Article 37 is not a statement about the strength of the obligation. It is a statement about its forum.
Separating the Addressee of a Norm from Its Enforcer
Every constitutional norm has an addressee and an enforcer, and there is no reason the two must be paired the same way in every case. Parts III and IV share an addressee: both are directed at the State. They differ in who is assigned to hold the State to them. Part III hands enforcement to the courts, and equips them for it with Article 32. Part IV hands enforcement to the electorate.
On this reading the distinction is not between enforceable and unenforceable obligations, but between judicially enforceable and politically enforceable ones. Article 37 does not say the State may ignore Part IV. It says that the consequence of ignoring it is not a writ.
That allocation makes sense only if the two Parts contain structurally different kinds of obligation. They do, and the difference is not one of importance.
Why the Two Parts Are Not Interchangeable
Most Part III obligations are negative and discrete. The State is told not to do a thing: not to discriminate, not to restrict speech beyond stated limits, not to deprive a person of liberty except by procedure established by law. A breach of such an obligation has a determinate structure. There is an identifiable act, an identifiable person injured by it, and a remedy that consists in undoing the act. A court is well suited to all three tasks. It can find a fact, identify a claimant, and issue an order that ends the violation without needing to know anything about the rest of the State's commitments.
Part IV obligations have none of that structure. They are positive, cumulative and allocative. The State is to secure a living wage and conditions of work ensuring a decent standard of life, to raise the level of nutrition and public health, to provide free legal aid, to protect the environment. Failure here is not an act but a condition. There is no moment of breach to locate, no claimant whose injury is distinguishable from that of everyone else similarly placed, and no remedy that consists in undoing something. The remedy is a budget: a decision to spend on this rather than that, made under scarcity, among goods that are all constitutionally endorsed and mutually competing.
A court asked to enforce Part IV would face all three problems at once, and the third is the serious one. Nothing in the judicial method supplies a way to decide that nutrition should be preferred to legal aid in a given year, or that a particular allocation between them is constitutionally deficient. That is not a criticism of courts. It is a description of what adjudication is: a method for resolving a dispute between the parties before it, not for ranking claims that are not before it.
There is a second constraint, less often noticed. Enforceability has a price, and the price is specificity. A norm can be judicially enforced only if it fixes a threshold, because a court must be able to say whether the threshold was met. Part IV consistently declines to fix thresholds. It speaks of a living wage, of a decent standard of life, of raising the level of nutrition. These are deliberately unfixed, because they are meant to rise as capacity rises. To make them justiciable, someone would have to convert them into numbers, and whatever number were chosen would be wrong in one of two directions: low enough to be affordable, in which case it entrenches a floor the Constitution wanted to keep moving, or high enough to be adequate, in which case the declaration is unenforceable in fact whatever its status in law.
Non-justiciability, on this account, is what keeps the standards open-ended. The two features are connected, not merely coincident.
A deadline alone does not solve this either. Article 45, as originally enacted, directed the State to endeavour to provide free and compulsory education for all children until they completed the age of fourteen years, and to do so within ten years of the commencement of the Constitution. That is about as specific as Part IV ever became: a defined beneficiary class and a fixed date. It changed nothing, because specificity without a forum is only a more precise description of what was not done.
The Design Under Pressure: Supremacy Is Not Enforceability
The scheme has been tested from both directions, and both episodes are instructive.
The first attempt was to make Part IV override Part III. Section 4 of the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976 rewrote Article 31C so that a law giving effect to any directive principle could not be challenged under Article 14 or Article 19. In Minerva Mills Ltd. v. Union of India (1980) the Supreme Court struck down that expansion, holding that the balance between Parts III and IV was itself among the things an amendment could not destroy. The conventional understanding is that Article 31C thereby stood restored to its narrower pre-1976 form, covering only laws giving effect to Articles 39(b) and 39(c), though what precisely survives has continued to be argued since.
What the 1976 provision reveals can be separated from the question whether the Court was right to strike it down. That amendment did not make a single directive principle enforceable. It made Part IV a defence. It gave the State an immunity from Articles 14 and 19 wherever it declared it was acting on a directive principle; it gave no citizen any additional claim against the State. A directive principle deployed as a shield converts a promise into a permission. This is the characteristic failure of trying to strengthen Part IV without confronting the forum problem: supremacy is not enforceability, and the two can move in opposite directions.
The second route was migration. Courts have read Part IV content into Part III, principally through Article 21, and the clearest completed instance is education. In Unni Krishnan, J.P. v. State of Andhra Pradesh (1993) the Supreme Court held that every child has a right to free education until completing the age of fourteen years, implicit in Article 21 read alongside the directive principles bearing on education, with the right beyond that age subject to the economic capacity and development of the State. The matter was then settled by the Constitution (Eighty-sixth Amendment) Act, 2002, which inserted Article 21A as a fundamental right for children of the age of six to fourteen years, added a corresponding duty of parents and guardians under Article 51A(k), and substituted a new Article 45 confined to early childhood care and education for children below the age of six.
Note the shape of the exchange. What became enforceable was narrower than what had been directed. The original directive reached every child up to fourteen; the fundamental right begins at six, and the years below it were returned to the language of endeavour. The obligation acquired a forum by acquiring an edge. This is what the structural account predicts: specificity is the currency in which justiciability is bought, and the price is paid out of scope.
The Cost of the Transfer
None of this establishes that migration is a mistake. A claimant who obtains a remedy from a writ court has obtained something real, and the alternative — waiting for an electorate to enforce a diffuse obligation across successive governments — carries an uncertain and sometimes indefinite timeline. The argument for judicialising a Part IV obligation is that the political enforcement mechanism has visibly failed, and on the facts that argument is often sound.
But the transfer is not costless, and the cost is structural rather than ideological. When an allocative question moves from the legislature to a court, it moves into a forum that decides one case at a time, on the record before it, in favour of the party who is present. The claims that lose the allocation are not represented in the proceeding, because they are not parties to it. The court has no method for weighing them and no mandate to answer for the weighing. And the resulting order enters an administrative system that must fund it out of the same finite pool, so that compliance is often managed rather than achieved — supervised across hearings, in a form of continuing oversight that resembles administration more than adjudication.
Conclusion: Article 37 as a Routing Rule
Understood this way, Article 37 is not a confession of weakness. It sorts constitutional failures by the kind of remedy they admit: those that can be answered by stopping the State from doing something, and those that can only be answered by choosing what the State should do first. The first sort was sent to a court. The second was assigned to an election.
The question to ask of any particular migration, then, is not whether the underlying goal is desirable. Everything in Part IV is desirable; that is why it is in a constitution at all. The question is whether the specific failure complained of is one a court can actually remedy or only declare, and whether the narrowing required to make it justiciable leaves enough of the original commitment to justify the transfer.
Authored by Eshan Kumar Gupta, Advocate, Hon'ble Allahabad High Court, Lucknow Bench.