A dispute over farmland in Karnal, Haryana, has given the Supreme Court occasion to settle a question several High Courts had answered differently for years: does the preferential right of purchase given to co-heirs under Section 22 of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 apply to agricultural land, or only to other kinds of inherited property. A bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and N. Kotiswar Singh has now held, in Mahinder and Others v. Puran Singh, that it does.
The facts were straightforward. Co-heirs had inherited land in Karnal, and one of them sold his undivided share to an outsider without first offering it to the other Class I heirs, who then sued to exercise their statutory right to step into the buyer's shoes on the same terms. The trial court and the First Appellate Court both ruled for the co-heirs, as did the High Court, and the outsider carried the matter to the Supreme Court arguing that a provision of this kind, which restricts an owner's freedom to sell to whomever he pleases, could not survive constitutional scrutiny when applied to agricultural land, a category long treated as a sensitive subject for legislative competence.
That argument rested heavily on Atam Prakash v. State of Haryana, the 1986 Constitution Bench ruling that struck down a provision of the Punjab Pre-emption Act granting a right of pre-emption to certain classes of relatives over agricultural land, on the ground that it was an anachronistic restraint on alienation with no rational basis in a modern property regime. If pre-emption rights over farmland could not survive under one statute, the appellant argued, Section 22 should meet the same fate when it operates on farmland too.
Justices Karol and Kotiswar Singh declined to extend Atam Prakash that far. It read the two provisions as different in kind rather than degree. The Punjab Pre-emption Act's right ran in favour of a wide and somewhat arbitrary class of relatives and strangers to the title, untethered from any process of succession, which was precisely what the Constitution Bench found irrational. Section 22, by contrast, operates only among Class I heirs who have jointly inherited property from the same propositus, and its purpose is to let the family unit retain intact what it inherited together rather than see an outsider buy into a share and force a fragmented, contentious co-ownership. The right is intrinsically tied to succession, the Court held, not a free-standing restraint on transfer, and Babu Ram v. Santokh Singh correctly stated this distinction without needing reconsideration by a larger bench.
On legislative competence, the Court pointed to Entry 5 of List III in the Seventh Schedule, which deals with succession generally and, importantly, does not carry the carve-out for agricultural land that an older entry under the Government of India Act, 1935 once did. Parliament's power to legislate on inheritance and succession was never meant to stop at the farm gate, and nothing in the constitutional text supports reading agricultural land out of a succession-law provision simply because other statutes dealing with transfer of agricultural land have attracted different, sometimes adverse, constitutional treatment.
The appeal was accordingly dismissed, and the co-heirs' pre-emption claim over the Karnal land stands. For families holding agricultural property across the Hindu Succession Act's reach, meaning most of the country outside matrilineal and a handful of other excepted systems, the ruling removes a genuine doubt that had been sitting unresolved in conflicting High Court decisions. A co-heir who finds that another co-heir has sold an undivided share in inherited farmland to a stranger now has a Supreme Court ruling squarely behind the claim to buy that share back on the same terms, rather than having to litigate the threshold question of whether Section 22 even reaches agricultural property in the first place.
Practitioners advising on partition suits, family settlements or the sale of inherited agricultural holdings should treat this as settled law going forward rather than an open question to be argued state by state. The ruling also tightens the scope within which Atam Prakash can be invoked to challenge restraints on alienation, confining it to provisions that, unlike Section 22, create pre-emption rights disconnected from any succession relationship among the parties involved.