Generality and equality are two indelible characteristics of justice administered according to law. The Preamble to our Constitution by which the people of India resolved solemnly to secure to all its citizens equality of status and opportunity finds its realization in an ampler measure in Article 14 which guarantees equality before the law and the equal protection of laws to all persons, citizens and non-citizens alike. Equality is the faith and creed of our Democratic Republic and without it, neither the Constitution nor the laws made under it could reflect the common conscience of those who owe allegiance to them. And if they did not they would fail to command respect and obedience without which any Constitution would be doomed to founder on the rocks of revolution. A Constitution which, without a true nexus, denies equality before the law to its citizens may in a form thinly disguised, contain reprisals directed against private individuals in matters of private rights and worngs. The English Acts of Attainder beginning with the one passed by the English Parliament in 1459 after the commencement of the wars of Roses or the 'Privilegium' in Rome are only some of the historical instances in point. Speaking of Bracton's famous passage which contains the admonition that the King ought to be under the law because the law makes him King. Sir Frederick Pollock says that there you have in a nutshell the great point of Constitutional freedom that law is not merely the instrument of Government, but the safeguard of each individual citizen's public rights and liberties.† 679. Article 329-A (4) makes the existing election laws retrospectively inapplicable, in a very substantial measure, to the Parliamentary elections of the Prime Minister and the Speaker. The inapplicability of such laws creates a legal vacuum because the repeal, so to say of existing laws is only a step-inaid to free the election from the restraints and obligations of all election laws, indeed of all laws. The plain intendment and meaning of clause (4) is that the election of the two personages will be beyond the reach of any law, past or present. What follows is a neat logical corollary. The election of the Prime Minister could not be declared void as there was no law to apply to that election; the judgment of the Allahabad High Court declaring the election void is itself void; and the election continues to be valid as it was before the High Court pronounced its judgment. 680. These provisions are an outright negation of the right of equality conferred by Article 14, a right which more than any other is a basic postulate of our Constitution. It is true that the right, though expressed in an absolute form, is hedged in by a judge-made resriction that it is open to the Legislature to make a reasonable classification so that the same law will not apply to all persons alike or different laws may govern the rights and obligations of different persons falling within distinct classes. The boast of Law that it is no respector of persons is the despair of drawers of waters and hewers of wood who clamour for a differential treatment. The judge takes that boast to mean that in an egalitarian society no person can be above the law and that justice must be administered with an even hand to those who are situated equally. In other words, all who are equal are equal in the eye of Law and it will not accord a favoured treatment to persons within the same class. Laws, as Plato said, would operate “like an obstinate and ignorant