Research declarations

Research declarations

Funding and sponsor involvement

No external funding. This research was independently undertaken without financial sponsorship, institutional grants, or external sponsor involvement.

Competing interests

The author is associated with The Legal Gazette, the intended publisher of this manuscript. No other financial, professional, institutional or personal competing interests are declared.

Author contributions

Yuvraj is the sole author and was responsible for conceptualisation, research design, methodology, investigation, collection and analysis of constitutional and legal materials, critical evaluation, drafting, revision, and final approval of the manuscript.

Originality and related publications

This manuscript is based on and substantially revises my earlier article titled “Essence of Indian Constitution: 50 Years of Basic Structure Doctrine,” published on 31 March 2022. The present manuscript, titled “Constitutional Identity and the Limits of Amendment: Reassessing India's Basic Structure Doctrine,” has been substantially restructured, expanded, revised, and updated. It incorporates further doctrinal analysis, critical engagement with the development of the basic structure doctrine, examination of subsequent Supreme Court decisions, and a more focused assessment of constitutional identity, judicial legitimacy, and the limits of constitutional amendment. The earlier publication is disclosed transparently. The present manuscript is submitted as a substantially revised scholarly work and is not concurrently under consideration elsewhere.

Methods and legal currency

This article adopts a doctrinal and critical constitutional-law methodology. It analyses the text and structure of the Constitution of India, constitutional amendment legislation, leading Supreme Court judgments, and selected academic scholarship on constituent power, constitutional identity, and judicial review. The analysis focuses on the development and application of the basic structure doctrine in India. The legal position has been reviewed as of 28 October 2026. The article is based on legal and scholarly materials and does not claim empirical findings or rely on interviews, surveys, or original statistical research.

Limitations

The article is confined to the Indian constitutional framework and the judicial review of constitutional amendments under Article 368. It does not provide an exhaustive comparative study of basic structure or unconstitutional constitutional amendment doctrines in other jurisdictions. Its conclusions are doctrinal and normative and do not rely on empirical research into judicial behaviour, political institutions, or public opinion. The analysis is also limited to the constitutional principles and decisions examined in the manuscript.

Ethics and participant protections

This is desk-based doctrinal constitutional research based on publicly accessible legal instruments, judicial decisions, and published academic materials. It does not involve human participants, interviews, surveys, personal records, identifiable private data, or animal research. Institutional ethical approval and participant consent were therefore not applicable.

Data and materials availability

The research relies on publicly accessible constitutional provisions, constitutional amendment legislation, Supreme Court judgments, and published academic literature, identified through citations and references. No original dataset was generated. Access to third-party materials remains subject to applicable copyright, licensing, and database terms.

AI and writing assistance

Generative AI tools were used for editorial assistance, language refinement, organisation, and writing support during the revision of the manuscript.