On April 8, 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that a long-term dispute between the governor of Tamil Nadu State and the state government and the Legislative Assembly. During the New Year, the governor has refused to take action against bills passed by the National Legislative Assembly – neither agreeing with them nor returning them to the Parliament, nor referring them to the President. Effectively, the governor has been exercising a “pocket veto” on the bill.
Under the push of the Supreme Court, the governor finally returned the bill to the Legislative Council for reconsideration; after the reconsideration, the Legislative Council sent the bill back to the governor’s office for the second time, the governor then referred it to the president. At the time of the court’s judgment, the president had agreed to one of the ten bills before her, refusing to agree to seven, but had not taken action on both.
Tamil Nadu is not the only state where such incidents occur: in recent years, conflicts between the centrally appointed governor and the state legislature have become increasingly common, in states where opposition parties or opposition parties are combined. Therefore, the disputes faced in the Supreme Court are not only for their own reasons, but are also important. Not only that, it represents a series of tensions within the structure of the Indian federal structure.
Beyond
In its long-term judgment, the Supreme Court involved 415 pages and found that the governor’s actions were unreasonable. Under the Constitution, the governor has neither the right nor the exercise of veto nor the power of veto on the bills of the state legislative session. Nor can the governor return a bill to the state legislature first and then quote it to the president. It must be one or the other (second, only under certain specific conditions).
When a president considers a state bill, the president cannot refuse their consent unless there are reasons for constitutional approval to do so (e.g., the contradiction between the state bill and existing central laws). Indeed, this is the only position that fully respects the will of the people of the country expressed by its elected representative in the Legislative Assembly of the State and the only position that can be fully respected for the structure of the Indian federal.
However, the Supreme Court has not stopped simply making laws. This move has attracted attention and caused some controversy, and it goes further: First, it sets out a specific and absolute timetable that requires the governor and president to consider and act and act (these timetables depend on the nature of the lawsuit – consent, referral, referral or return). It is important to note that the Constitution itself does not stipulate such a timetable.
Second, in this particular case, the governor found to have acted bona fideThe years have passed since the bill was first sent to his office, and the Supreme Court invoked the power to make “fully justice” under Article 142 of the Constitution and believed that the bills were considered passed and are now law. Indeed, the day after the court’s judgment, the Tamil Nadu government immediately notified the conduct and made it effective.
Critics argue that when the court “made” a pending bill when it comes to placing a timetable that does not exist in the Constitution, the court goes beyond its duties and performs the functions of other government departments in the Constitution. On the other hand, court defenders pointed out that the governor’s years, unreasonable delays placed the court in a corner where there were no other realistic options. So, what do we do to the court?
To answer this question, it is important to go beyond the specific actions of the specific participants in the play and consider the constitutional design itself.
Constitutional design issues
The Indian Constitution contains a series of tensions that are the product of writing historical moments. On the one hand, the Constitution’s makers are committed to establishing federal and parliamentary governance structures for the new nation-state that will be the forthcoming nation-state.
But on the other hand, the prominent members of the Constitutional Assembly – Jawaharlal Nehru, BR Ambedkar and Vallabbhai Patel, etc. are centralists. For many different reasons (not always overlapping), they want to ensure that even if the Constitution is decentralized horizontally (i.e., away from the executive and representative bodies) and vertically (remove the center and the state), the ultimate ultimate control will be exercised by a strong, unadministrative person.
To achieve this, the makers turned to what they knew best: colonial constitutional instruments, whose core management principles have always been the principle of execution supremacy. From the beginning of the 20th century, under the tremendous pressure of the Indian national movement, the British mercilessly and gradually existed representative institutions and original regulations. However, they always ensure that ultimate control is ensured in the British appointed executives who can cover the representative bodies in order to maintain the greater good of the British Empire.
A key part of the Arsenal was the colonial governors who were appointed to maintain nationalist aspirations in the provinces, as expressed by the provincial legislature.
Of course, the makers did not borrow colonial institutions wholesale by the governor. What they did was to incorporate forms into the new constitution. But the moment the Constitution establishes two powers at the federal level – the governor appointed by the central government and the legislature of elected states, tensions and conflicts arise.
One way to resolve these tensions is to adopt the strategies we see elsewhere in the Constitution: extensive codification and detailed rules that clarify how power is exercised, and how it can be limited. But when it comes to the structure of the government (legislature, executives and governors), the makers are not codified; instead, they leave the question and can be decided by unwritten constitutional practices.
This choice is not neutral: refusal to explicitly restrict the exercise of power means that the constitution is most important silence, which may be deprived of, and can be exploited by actors who disrespect constitutional practices.
Therefore, the problem before the Supreme Court is the problem of constitutional design. By design, the Constitution does not conduct a clear inspection of the governors who review the bag. At the same time, without such a check, the system relies entirely on sincerity: the moment the governor chooses to exploit the constitutional silence, the entire federal structure may and will be destroyed.
Time for course correction
Therefore, the Supreme Court’s ruling is best understood as a judicial attempt to correct flawed constitutional design. The choices made at the framework are in a way that reduce the principle of federalism and representative democracy to a farce unless there is external intervention. In our system, the only institution capable of such intervention is the courts.
Of course, there is no problem with the court’s judgment. The courts gave greater power in doing this: to enforce schedules (and exceptions to those schedules) and to judge conflicts of organs within the state. This should tell us that ultimately, such interventions are unsustainable in the long run, as fragmentary attempts to correct flawed constitutional design will lead to LOP side results elsewhere.
What is needed, then, is an emergency dialogue about the centralized drift of the Constitution, and the centralized choices in 1949 still exist today. This is a starting point that may be questioning why in 2025 we need the Governor’s Office first.
At the same time, however, the court’s judgment is not free. It is best understood as a temporary ointment on wounds that require deeper and longer-term treatment – a band-aid.
publishing – April 20, 2025 at 10:45 pm IST
