Introduction
The Indian Constitution allocates to the Governor a set of formal powers over state legislation that, if exercised without restraint, can paralyse the legislative functioning of an elected state government. Among these, the power to withhold assent to bills passed by the state legislature has emerged as one of the most contested constitutional fault lines of the post-2015 period. The confrontations between Governors and state governments in Tamil Nadu, Punjab, Kerala, Telangana, and Jharkhand between 2021 and 2024 represent something qualitatively different from ordinary constitutional friction: they illustrate the weaponisation of a formal power that was designed by the framers to serve as a limited safety valve, not as an instrument of political attrition.
The question at the centre of this dispute is deceptively simple. Article 200 of the Constitution gives the Governor four choices when a bill is presented for assent: assent, withhold assent, return the bill for reconsideration, or reserve it for Presidential consideration. What it does not explicitly say is how long the Governor may take, what reasons must accompany any of these decisions, or what happens if the Governor simply does nothing. The Supreme Court’s landmark decisions in 2023 and 2024, most significantly in the Tamil Nadu Governor case and the Punjab Governor case, addressed these silences with uncharacteristic directness, holding that indefinite inaction is not a constitutionally available option and that the Governor’s discretion in this area is significantly more circumscribed than some incumbents had assumed.
Legal Framework
Article 200 of the Constitution reads: “When a Bill has been passed by the Legislative Assembly of a State or, in the case of a State having a Legislative Council, has been passed by both Houses of the Legislature of the State, it shall be presented to the Governor and the Governor shall declare either that he assents to the Bill, or that he withholds assent therefrom, or that he reserves the Bill for the consideration of the President.” The article further provides that the Governor may, as soon as possible after presentation of the bill, return it with a message for reconsideration. Crucially, it adds that if the bill is passed again by the legislature with or without amendments, the Governor “shall not withhold assent therefrom.”
Article 201 deals with bills reserved for Presidential consideration, providing that the President shall either assent or withhold assent. Where the President withholds assent, the state legislature is informed and may pass the bill again in the same form, after which it must be presented again to the President, who has no further power to return it.
The constitutional structure of these provisions creates several ambiguities. First, the word “shall” in Article 200 is grammatically mandatory but has historically been treated as directory in relation to the Governor’s timeline. Second, nothing in Article 200 explicitly states the basis on which the Governor may withhold assent or reserve a bill; the provision lists the options without specifying their conditions of exercise. Third, the interaction between the Governor’s power to withhold and the mandate that re-passed bills “shall” receive assent raises the question of whether the Governor’s withholding at the initial stage is subject to any judicially reviewable standard.
The Seventh Schedule of the Constitution delineates the legislative competence of states under List II and the concurrent sphere under List III. A state legislature acting within its competence passes laws that the executive of the Union, through the Governor, may not ordinarily obstruct. The Governor, as the constitutional head of the state, acts on the advice of the Council of Ministers under Article 163 in all but a narrow set of matters reserved for discretionary action. Bills passed by a state legislature backed by a majority government fall outside those discretionary areas.
Judicial Developments
The jurisprudence on gubernatorial assent prior to 2023 was relatively sparse. The Supreme Court in Nabam Rebia and Bamang Felix v. Deputy Speaker (2016) addressed the powers of the Governor in the context of summoning the legislative assembly, not directly in relation to bills. The court’s observations about the Governor being a constitutional functionary bound to act on ministerial advice in non-discretionary matters were influential, but the specific question of indefinite withholding of assent remained untested.
The real reckoning came in 2023. In State of Tamil Nadu v. Governor of Tamil Nadu, decided in November 2023, a Supreme Court bench presided over by Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud held that the Governor had no power to indefinitely withhold assent to bills and that the pocket veto, a concept drawn from American constitutional practice where the executive allows a bill to lapse through inaction, was simply unavailable under the Indian constitutional scheme. The court held that the Governor’s options under Article 200 are exhaustive and that indefinite withholding of assent, without taking any of the constitutionally prescribed steps, amounts to a colourable exercise of power that violates the scheme of representative democracy enshrined in the Constitution.
The Punjab Governor case, decided alongside or in close succession, addressed a variation on the same theme. Governor Banwarilal Purohit had declined to give assent to bills passed by the Punjab Vidhan Sabha and had, at one point, returned bills for reconsideration after the legislature had been specially summoned at the Governor’s own direction during the budget session controversy. The Supreme Court found that the Governor’s conduct was constitutionally impermissible, that his refusal to summon the budget session and his subsequent actions in relation to bills were not a legitimate exercise of constitutional discretion.
These judgments represent the most direct judicial articulation yet that the Governor’s powers under Article 200 are not simply formal; they are substantive obligations with constitutional time-frames implied within them. While the court stopped short of laying down specific timelines in numerical terms, it indicated that the Governor’s constitutional function must be performed “as soon as possible” in a manner that gives meaning to legislative sovereignty rather than frustrating it.
Contemporary Issues and Analysis
The political backdrop against which these confrontations occurred is important to understand. Several of the states where Governors withheld assent or reserved bills for Presidential consideration were governed by parties in political opposition to the ruling coalition at the Centre. The Governors in question were appointed by the Union government and, in a number of cases, had publicly clashed with state governments on matters unrelated to legislation. The perception, widely articulated by state governments and constitutional scholars, was that gubernatorial powers were being instrumentalised for partisan political purposes.
This perception raises a structural constitutional problem. The Governor is appointed by the President of India under Article 155, acting in effect on the advice of the Union Council of Ministers. The framers of the Constitution were aware of this executive link but expected Governors to function as constitutional heads rather than agents of the Centre. The convention of gubernatorial neutrality, always fragile, has been under sustained pressure in the post-2014 political landscape. The Supreme Court’s 2023 and 2024 judgments can be read, in part, as a judicial attempt to enforce that convention through legal rather than political mechanisms.
There is a genuine constitutional argument, however, that the court’s intervention itself raises questions. The Governor is a constitutional authority. Whether the Governor has acted correctly or incorrectly in exercising powers under Article 200 has traditionally been regarded as beyond the scope of judicial review, at least in the sense that the courts would not ordinarily examine the substantive merits of a decision to withhold assent. The 2023 Tamil Nadu judgment pushed into territory that had previously been regarded as the Governor’s exclusive constitutional domain. Whether this expansion of judicial review of gubernatorial action is constitutionally sound or represents judicial overreach is a question that legal scholars have begun to examine with considerable interest.
The interaction between Article 200 and the concept of parliamentary sovereignty at the state level also presents analytical complexity. Once a bill is passed by the state legislature with a sufficient majority, the will of the elected representatives has been expressed. The Governor’s function at that point is constitutionally ministerial in relation to bills within the state’s legislative competence. Allowing a Governor to frustrate that will through inaction is inconsistent with the federal democratic structure that the Constitution establishes and that the Supreme Court has held to be a basic structure element.
Comparative and International Perspective
The Westminster system, from which India’s constitutional framework draws substantially, does not in practice raise questions of this kind because the reserve power of the Crown to withhold Royal Assent has not been exercised in the United Kingdom since 1708. The convention that Royal Assent will be granted to bills passed by Parliament is absolute and forms part of the unwritten constitutional understanding that underlies the Westminster model. India’s Constitution formalised some aspects of this convention while leaving others to evolve, and the result has been exactly the kind of ambiguity that the 2023 judgments sought to resolve.
The Sarkaria Commission, which reported in 1988 on Centre-State relations, recommended that the Governor should normally give assent to bills, that the practice of reserving bills for Presidential consideration should be used sparingly and only where the bill is clearly unconstitutional or raises serious questions of national policy, and that the convention of gubernatorial neutrality should be vigorously upheld through the appointment of persons with no active partisan affiliations. The Punchhi Commission, which reported in 2010, went further, recommending a time limit of six months for gubernatorial action on state bills and suggesting that the President’s decision on reserved bills should also be subject to time constraints.
None of these recommendations were enacted into law. The political branches have had little incentive to formalise constraints on a power that the ruling party at the Centre finds useful when dealing with opposition-governed states. The judiciary, as the 2023 judgments demonstrate, has now stepped into the vacuum created by this legislative inaction.
Practical and Policy Implications
The practical consequences of gubernatorial inaction on state bills are significant. Several bills relating to universities, public services, and social welfare programmes in Tamil Nadu were pending gubernatorial assent for periods exceeding one year by the time the Supreme Court intervened. This meant that legislation democratically enacted by a duly elected legislature was simply not in force, not because any court had found it unconstitutional, not because Parliament had legislated in a field that preempted it, but because a constitutionally appointed functionary declined to perform a constitutionally assigned act.
The implications for federalism are profound. India’s constitutional structure, while federal in its division of powers, has always been characterised as tending toward the unitary end of the spectrum. The Governor’s position as a Centre-appointed authority in each state introduces a structural subordination that the convention of gubernatorial neutrality was supposed to mitigate. Where that convention breaks down, the federal balance tilts further toward the Centre, not through any legislative or judicial decision but through executive inaction dressed in constitutional form.
The Supreme Court’s articulation of the principle that the pocket veto is constitutionally unavailable is correct and important. But its implementation depends on state governments being willing to approach the court each time a Governor delays, which itself creates a further burden on an already overburdened judicial system. A statutory framework setting out the timelines and consequences of gubernatorial inaction, of the kind recommended by the Punchhi Commission, would be more effective and more consistent with the rule of law than reliance on litigation.
Suggestions and Reforms
The most direct reform would be a constitutional amendment specifying clear timelines for gubernatorial action under Article 200. A period of three months for granting assent, returning the bill, or reserving it for the President’s consideration would be reasonable and consistent with the spirit of the provision. If no action is taken within that period, the bill should be deemed to have received assent by operation of law. This would eliminate the pocket veto as a practical matter while preserving the Governor’s legitimate role in the legislative process.
The appointment of Governors requires reform at its source. The practice of appointing active politicians from the ruling party at the Centre to gubernatorial positions should give way to a convention, perhaps enforced through a consultative mechanism involving the Chief Minister of the relevant state, that favours persons with demonstrated constitutional understanding and no recent partisan role. Several constitutional democracies have statutory or conventional requirements of this kind, and India’s experience of the past decade makes the case for similar constraints compelling.
The President’s power under Article 201 to withhold assent to reserved bills indefinitely also needs to be addressed. The constitutional text provides no timeline, and the Union government has, on occasion, allowed reserved bills to remain undecided for years. The same principle of time-bound constitutional action that the Supreme Court applied to Governors should apply to Presidential action on reserved bills.
Conclusion
The Governor’s assent power, conceived by the framers as a mechanism for preventing hasty or constitutionally questionable state legislation, has in recent years become an instrument for political friction between the Centre and states governed by opposition parties. The Supreme Court’s interventions in 2023 represent a judicial correction that was constitutionally overdue and practically necessary. The court’s conclusion that the pocket veto has no place in the Indian constitutional scheme is analytically correct and jurisprudentially significant.
What the court cannot do alone, however, is make those corrections durable. The conventions that once kept gubernatorial conduct within acceptable bounds operated because political actors had some interest in maintaining them. That interest has evidently weakened. The case for legislative and constitutional reform is therefore not merely academic; it is a functional requirement for the health of India’s federal democracy. The Punjab and Tamil Nadu confrontations are symptoms of a deeper design problem in the constitutional relationship between the Centre, the Governor, and elected state governments, and that problem will not be resolved by litigation alone.
