Article 14 of the Constitution of India
Provides equality before the law, equal protection
Article 14 of the Constitution of India provides for equality before the law or equal protection of the laws within the territory of India. It states:"The State shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws within the territory of India."
Reasonable Classification and Non-Arbitrariness
Article 14 guarantees equality to all persons, including citizens, corporations, and foreigners. Its provisions have come up for discussion in the Supreme Court in a number of cases and the case of Ram Krishna Dalmia v. Justice S R Tendolkar reiterated its meaning and scope as follows. Article 14 permits classification, so long as it is 'reasonable', but forbids class legislation. A classification of groups of people is considered reasonable when:
The classification is based upon intelligible differentia that distinguishes persons or things that are grouped from others that are left out of the group, and,
The differential has a rational relation with the objective of the act.
In addition, the classification must be non-arbitrary. Supreme Court in E. P. Royappa (1973) provided guidance on arbitrariness of an act:"Equality is a dynamic concept with many aspects and dimensions and it cannot be ‘cribbed, cabined and confined’ within the traditional and doctrinaire limits. From the positivistic point of view, equality is antithetic to arbitrariness.
The public source identifies “Article 14 of the Constitution of India” as provides equality before the law, equal protection. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Article, Constitution and India.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q28169367. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “Article 14 of the Constitution of India” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.