Your bills, dead or alive?

Brevity is the soul of wit, said Shakespeare. We, Indians, won’t agree. We created the world’s most verbose epic, and also the most verbose Constitution—395 Articles and eight Schedules in about 1,45,000 words. Yet, pundits say, the latter is silent on several things.

 

Governance becomes impossible when rulers confront silence in the statute. That’s where the courts come in. Where the statute is silent, judges speak. They spoke last week, ending the silence of the statute on an issue that has been plaguing governments for three quarters of a century.

 

The issue was this. The Constitution says that a bill passed by the legislature shall become law only after the president, or the governor in the case of a state, gives his assent. If he returns the bill, and if the legislature passes it again and sends it to him, he is bound to give assent.

 

What if he sits on it doing nothing? The Constitution is silent; it doesn’t give a deadline to the president or the governor to sign a bill on the dotted line, or to tear it up along any perforated line.

 

President Zail Singh used this silence of the statute to the hilt; he sat on Rajiv Gandhi’s postal bill, which would have empowered your postmaster to open your love letters, an ungentlemanly act in those pre-hacking days when epistolary privacy was an article of faith in decent democracies. Soon constitutional pundits came out with a new phrase—‘pocket veto’. Since then governors who have quarrels with their governments have been taking pages out of Zail’s pocket, keeping bills in their pockets or sending them to the president, leaving their CMs fretting and fuming.

 

Is such a bill dead or alive? Horror writers would have called it an ‘undead’ bill, after Bram Stoker used the term to describe Dracula. Horror or horrors—the Constitution is not a Gothic tome.

 

Two years ago, Governor R.N. Ravi of Tamil Nadu (or Tamizhagom, as he was pleased) tried to give a finality to the situation. Addressing a few civil service aspirants who came calling at his Raj Bhavan, he said a bill is dead if the governor has not given assent.

 

The death verdict from the Raj Bhavan brought back to life all the dead and buried federal spirits in Chief Minister M.K. Stalin. The Tamil thalaivar approached the apex court and asked the judges whether his 10 bills, that Ravi was keeping in his pocket or had sent to the president after long delay, were dead or alive.

 

Last week the judges spoke—a bill is neither dead nor undead; it is alive, if the governor holds it back for a month or sends it for the president to consider after a month. In effect, they took out the bills out of the governor’s pocket and declared them alive.

 

Moral of the story? Where there’s a will, there’s a way; where there is a bill blocked, there is a way out.

 

How did the judges do it? They took recourse to a rarely invoked provision in the Constitution—Article 142—that gives them the power to innovate the law so that “complete justice” gets done. They declared 10 bills, inordinately delayed by the governor, as deemed to have received his assent.

 

Very good, m’lords. But as Kerala Governor Rajendra Arlekar wondered, haven’t you legislated? You were asked to decide on the fate of a few undead bills, but you have written down deadlines and procedures to follow.

 

You were asked to read into the Constitution, but haven’t you written into the Constitution, a job that only Parliament can do with two-thirds majority?

 

They may have. But if Parliament doesn’t act, who will exorcise the bad spirits?

 

prasannan@theweek.in

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