Great to see you return to this week’s Politics to Policy edition. This week I broke down the constitutional history of the age-old Governor problem in the Indian constitution, the Tamil Nadu judgement and what the future looks like. Read on.

The Indian Constitution imagined the Governor as an elder statesman. Someone who brings institutional gravity to a high constitutional office, acts as a dynamic link between the Centre and the states, and exercises discretion only in narrowly defined situations. B.R. Ambedkar was unambiguous in the Constituent Assembly: the Governor was to be "a purely constitutional Governor, with no power of interference in the administration of the province."

Seven decades of practice have produced something rather different.

The friction between Governors and state governments has become one of the most consistent and corrosive features of Indian federalism. From withholding assent to bills passed by elected legislatures, to departing from the official text of the mandatory address to the assembly, to the timing of Chief Minister swearing-in ceremonies, to the omission to invite the single largest party to form a government in Manipur and Goa: the pattern is hard to read as a series of coincidental individual judgments. It maps too cleanly onto a single variable: which party runs the state.

Article 200 of the Constitution requires a Governor to act on bills passed by the state legislature. The options available are straightforward: grant assent, withhold assent and return the bill to the legislature for reconsideration, or reserve the bill for the President's consideration. What Article 200 does not do is prescribe a timeline for any of these options. It is this silence, that has been exploited with considerable creativity, deliberately or otherwise.

The National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution, set up in 2000, recommended a six-month limit within which the Governor should take a decision. The Sarkaria Commission had made a similar suggestion years earlier. Neither recommendation produced legislative action. The result is a constitutional provision that places enormous discretionary power in the hands of a centrally appointed official with no accountability to the electorate and no enforceable deadline for acting on legislation passed by an elected legislature.

Article 176 presents a parallel problem. It requires the Governor to deliver a mandatory special address to the state legislature at the commencement of each year's first session. This address carries the policies and programmes of the elected government. It is a far from ceremonial formality: the Calcutta High Court, as far back as 1966, held that the non-delivery of the special address hampers legislative debates and budgetary criticism. The address exists precisely because executive accountability to elected representatives is the constitutional baseline.

When Tamil Nadu Governor R.N. Ravi omitted several paragraphs from the official text of his address and departed from the government-approved speech, he was using the ceremonial architecture of Article 176 to undermine the very government whose policies that address was constitutionally required to convey.

The most direct judicial confrontation with gubernatorial overreach came in the Tamil Nadu government's challenge to Governor Ravi's prolonged withholding of assent to ten state bills. On April 8, 2025, the Supreme Court held that the Governor's indefinite delay was illegal and erroneous. The court set timelines, introduced the concept of deemed assent where deadlines were missed, and used Article 142 of the Constitution to deem the ten bills as having received assent.

The judgment was celebrated by those who had watched elected state governments' legislation gather dust on Raj Bhavan desks for years. Tamil Nadu subsequently notified ten Acts in the Government Gazette, creating legislative history: the first bills to become law without the formal assent of either the Governor or the President.

The Centre's response was to use a mechanism that had never before been deployed in quite this way. President Droupadi Murmu, acting on the government's advice, filed a Presidential Reference under Article 143, placing fourteen constitutional questions before the Supreme Court and asking, in effect, whether the court had overstepped by imposing timelines on constitutional authorities whose discretion the Constitution itself leaves unqualified.

Several opposition-ruled states argued that the Reference was a gambit to use presidential advisory jurisdiction to claw back what a binding judgment had restricted. Tamil Nadu and Kerala urged the court to reject it entirely. The argument had force: eleven of the fourteen questions raised in the Reference had, the states argued, already been answered by the April judgment.

On November 20, 2025, a five-judge Constitution Bench delivered its advisory opinion. The ruling was nuanced, and its implications run in different directions depending on which part you read.

The bench held that the judiciary cannot prescribe fixed timelines for Governors or the President to act on bills. A one-size-fits-all timetable, the court said, ignores the nature and complexity of legislation. It also rejected the concept of deemed assent, holding that the court cannot use Article 142 to assume a constitutional authority's functions. The April 2025 judgment's use of deemed assent was described as erroneous.

But the bench did not hand the Centre an unrestricted victory. It confirmed that a Governor has three and only three options under Article 200: grant assent, withhold assent and return the bill to the legislature, or reserve it for the President. The crucial clarification was that withholding assent and sitting on the bill are constitutionally indistinguishable. If a Governor decides not to grant assent, the bill must be returned to the House. The option of holding legislation in indefinite suspension carries no constitutional basis.

The court also held that prolonged, unexplained and indefinite inaction can invite limited judicial scrutiny, a limited mandamus compelling the Governor to act, even if the court cannot review the substance of the decision or impose a fixed deadline. The phrase "as soon as possible" in Article 200 carries what the court described as "constitutional content." It is not decorative language.

The advisory opinion is technically non-binding, as all presidential references are. Whether it will change behavior on the ground depends on how the political incentive structure around Governor appointments and conduct evolves.

No examination of gubernatorial overreach is complete without engaging with how Governors are appointed and who gets appointed.

The Governor is a central government appointee with no fixed accountability to the state. The legitimacy of a nominated constitutional authority in a democracy was, as the notes of the Constituent Assembly record, a matter of heated debate in 1949. It was carried forward into the republic on the assumption that the office would be occupied by people of genuine stature and scrupulous neutrality.

This assumption, however, has been tested repeatedly. In recent years, retired judges of the Supreme Court, retired military commanders, and politicians have all found their way to Raj Bhavans. The Punchhi Commission on Centre-State relations recommended a national prohibition on Governors being burdened with the role of chancellor of any university, arguing that the practice reduces the dignity of the office. More fundamentally, opening Raj Bhavans as post-retirement possibilities for figures who are constitutionally required to remain aloof from partisan politics in their active roles creates an obvious structural problem. The dignity of the office they leave and the office they occupy both suffer.

The careful reader will notice that the most significant episodes of gubernatorial friction in recent years share a common feature. They occur in states governed by parties in opposition to the ruling party at the Centre. The friction in Kerala. The prolonged standoff in Tamil Nadu. The early-morning swearing-in ceremonies in states where post-election government formation was contested. The omission to invite the single largest party in Manipur and Goa.

Individual episodes carry their own context. Governors have constitutional judgments to make. Some bills raise genuine federalism questions. Some situations are genuinely ambiguous. The Constitution does leave gaps.

The aggregated pattern, however, sustained across multiple states and multiple Governors over a sustained period, points toward something more systematic than independent exercises of constitutional discretion. The Sarkaria Commission was clear that reservation of bills for the President's consideration on grounds of unconstitutionality was the only scenario that could plausibly count as a discretionary gubernatorial act. Everything else, the commission said, must be discharged on the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers.

When T.T. Krishnamachari explained in the Constituent Assembly that a Governor returning a bill for reconsideration does so expressly on the advice of the Council of Ministers, he was describing the constitutional logic that makes the Governor's role compatible with parliamentary democracy. Using the mechanisms of constitutional procedure to frustrate the will of a democratically elected legislature places a Governor well outside the role Ambedkar described and the Sarkaria Commission endorsed.

The Supreme Court has said as much, twice, through two different constitutional instruments.

The constitutional role of the Governor was conceived as that of an elder statesman: someone who brings gravitas to a high office, acts as a check against hasty or unconstitutional legislation, and serves as a "friend, guide and philosopher" to the state cabinet, in the Supreme Court's own phrase from the Tamil Nadu judgment.

The word philosopher carries deliberate weight. A philosopher exercises judgment in search of truth. The role demands genuine independence from partisan considerations. When Governors are appointed with political debts to discharge, when their conduct in office tracks the Centre's political interests in opposition states, and when constitutional silences are systematically exploited to delay and obstruct duly enacted legislation, the institution has drifted far from that design, toward something closer to a parallel administrative channel, which is precisely what the Supreme Court said the Constitution does not permit in Shamsher Singh back in 1974.

The question that the Tamil Nadu judgment, the Presidential Reference and the November advisory opinion together leave open is whether the legal framework, however well-calibrated, can resolve a problem rooted in political incentives. Courts can clarify that Governors cannot exercise pocket vetoes. They can issue mandamus to compel action. They can declare deemed assent when Governors act unlawfully.

Changing the political incentive that produces the conduct in the first place requires a different kind of accountability, one that runs through the political process itself, and through a shared commitment among political parties to treat constitutional institutions as serving the republic rather than the ruling party.

That commitment has been conspicuous in its absence.

Thank you for reading through.

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Until next time.

Anas Ahmad Tak