Political Philosophy
Person and Citizen: What Part III Settles by Choosing a Noun
11 August 2026 · 8 min read
Read Part III of the Constitution with attention to its nouns and a pattern appears that has survived every amendment made to it. Article 14 is addressed to "any person". Article 15 is addressed to "any citizen". Article 19 opens "All citizens shall have the right". Article 21 says "No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty". Articles 20, 22, 25, 27 and 28 say person. Articles 16 and 29 say citizen.
This is not drafting inconsistency. The same document, in adjacent articles, in the same register, alternates between two nouns, and the alternation holds across the whole Part. Something is being decided by the choice, and it is worth asking what.
Two grounds for an obligation
A State can owe a person something for one of two reasons.
The first is that it is exercising power over them. If a State arrests someone, tries them, taxes them, or takes their liberty, it is doing something to a particular human being who is within its reach. The obligation arises from the act, not from any prior relationship. On this account the operative fact is jurisdiction: the duty attaches wherever the power lands.
The second is that they belong to the political community the State exists to constitute. Here the obligation arises from membership. What is owed is not only restraint but a share — in the making of decisions, in access to public office, in the shaping of common life. The operative fact is not that power has been exercised but that this is one of the people in whose name it is exercised at all.
These are genuinely different grounds. They do not reduce to each other, and they do not generate the same list.
Part III's two nouns track that difference closely. The person-articles are the ones about what the State may not do to someone it has got hold of: convict them under retrospective law, prosecute and punish them more than once for the same offence, compel them to be a witness against themselves, deprive them of life or liberty without procedure, detain them without informing them of the grounds, compel them to pay a tax appropriated to the upkeep of a religion, deny them equality before the law. The citizen-articles are the ones about participation and shape: speech, assembly, association, movement, residence and occupation under Article 19; equality of opportunity in public employment under Article 16; the conservation of a distinct language, script or culture under Article 29.
The distinction is not a ranking
It would be easy to read the division as a hierarchy — full rights for members, a reduced set for everyone else. The text does not support that reading, and the clearest evidence against it is Article 21.
Article 21 is a person-article. So are Articles 14, 20 and 22. The provisions that bear on the gravest things a State can do to anybody, and that do the most work in an ordinary week of litigation, are precisely the ones not confined to citizens. If the drafters had been rationing rights by membership, they rationed them in a strange order.
What the division tracks is not importance but the source of the claim. Someone facing the coercive machinery of the State need not establish membership in order to complain, because the complaint is about an exercise of power and the power is being exercised on them. Someone asking for a share in public employment is making a claim about whom the polity belongs to, and membership is exactly what that claim turns on.
Only one of the two classes is legislatively adjustable
The sharpest consequence of the distinction is structural rather than doctrinal, and it lies outside Part III.
"Citizen" is fixed by Part II. Articles 5 to 10 settle the position at commencement, and Article 11 then provides that nothing in those articles "shall derogate from the power of Parliament to make any provision with respect to the acquisition and termination of citizenship and all other matters relating to citizenship". The boundary of the class is therefore drawn, and can be redrawn, by ordinary legislation. Moving it requires no constitutional amendment.
"Person" has no counterpart provision. The Constitution nowhere defines the word. Article 367(1) directs that, unless the context otherwise requires, the General Clauses Act, 1897 applies to the interpretation of the Constitution as it applies to a statute, and that Act's definition of "person" is inclusive — it extends the ordinary meaning to companies and associations rather than confining it. Nothing in the scheme gives Parliament a power over the reach of that word answering to Article 11.
The point is about membership of the class, not the content of the right. No statute can dilute what Article 19 guarantees. But the set of people who can invoke Article 19 at all is defined by legislation that an ordinary majority can amend, whereas the set of people who can invoke Articles 14, 20, 21, 22 and 25 is not, because there is no lever attached to it. That is a real asymmetry in constitutional architecture, and it follows from a choice of noun rather than from any express limitation.
It also explains why the one exception is drafted as narrowly as it is. Article 22(3)(a) provides that nothing in Article 22(1) and (2) applies "to any person who for the time being is an enemy alien". That is the single place in Part III where alienage is made to bear on a person-right, and it is done expressly, in wartime terms, about one stated category. A drafter who took alienage to be generally relevant to person-rights would not have needed to say so once, in one clause.
The articles with no holder at all
A third group is easy to miss because it names nobody.
Article 17 does not confer a right on persons or citizens. It states that untouchability "is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden", and that enforcing a disability arising out of it "shall be an offence punishable in accordance with law". Article 23(1) is built the same way: traffic in human beings, begar and other similar forms of forced labour "are prohibited", and contravention "shall be an offence punishable in accordance with law". These are the two provisions of Part III whose breach the Constitution itself declares an offence — Article 35(a)(ii) then reserves to Parliament alone the power to make laws "for prescribing punishment for those acts which are declared to be offences under this Part" — and neither is drafted as an entitlement of a described class. What is being addressed is a practice, so the provision abolishes the practice.
Others name a class that is neither person nor citizen. Article 24 says no child below fourteen shall be employed in a factory or mine or other hazardous employment. Article 21A obliges the State to provide free and compulsory education to children of six to fourteen. Article 30(1) confers its right on minorities, which are groups rather than individuals.
And Article 32(1), on which the enforceability of the whole Part depends, names no holder whatever: "The right to move the Supreme Court by appropriate proceedings for the enforcement of the rights conferred by this Part is guaranteed." Not every citizen, not every person — the right itself is guaranteed, as a feature of the system rather than as an entitlement of a described class. That is the correct drafting, because a remedy indexed to the rights of Part III inherits their holders automatically. Naming a class would only have narrowed it, and would have forced a choice between the two nouns the Part had deliberately kept apart.
What Part III defines, and what it leaves open
Part III defines its obligor with some care. Article 12 says what "the State" means for the purposes of the Part, and says it in terms wider than the executive government, reaching Parliament, the State legislatures, and all local or other authorities. Having defined who owes, the Part declines to define who is owed. It uses two undefined nouns and lets the choice between them carry the argument.
That is a defensible way to draft, and more honest than either alternative. A Part III written wholly in the language of citizenship would have made the State's obligations conditional on membership — which is false of the obligations that matter most at the moment the State is most coercive, and would have left a person before a magistrate to establish his nationality before he could object to his detention. A Part III written wholly in the language of personhood would have obscured the fact that some rights are constitutive of a political community and make little sense detached from it; there is no coherent claim to equality of opportunity in the public employment of a State one is not part of.
The two nouns are the Constitution declining to choose between the two accounts, on the ground that neither is complete on its own. What a State owes because it has power over you, and what it owes because you are one of the people it exists for, are different debts with different sources. Part III keeps both, and keeps them in separate words.
Authored by Eshan Kumar Gupta, Advocate, Hon'ble Allahabad High Court, Lucknow Bench.