Principal Organs of the Union: Executive, Legislature, Supreme Court

The syllabus asks for the envisaged role and the actual working, and the gap between them is the answer. Each organ has moved: the executive has gained, Parliament has lost, and the Court has taken on functions no one designed it for.

This is chapter 24 of the PSIR Optional Notes, from the part on Indian Government and Politics in the Paper I syllabus. The complete book is a free download.

The executive

The President: envisaged and actual

The President is elected indirectly by an electoral college of elected members of both houses and of the state legislative assemblies, including Delhi and Puducherry, by proportional representation with a single transferable vote, with weighted values designed to secure parity between the states as a whole and the Union.

Article 74(1) requires the President to act in accordance with the advice of the Council of Ministers. Before 1976 the text said only that there shall be a council to aid and advise; the Forty-second Amendment made the advice binding, and the Forty-fourth allowed the President to require reconsideration once, after which the reconsidered advice binds.

The envisaged role was therefore ceremonial. Actual practice has found three genuine spaces.

• Government formation. Where no party has a majority, the choice of whom to invite is a real decision. The Sarkaria and Punchhi Commissions have proposed an order of preference, but it is not binding.
• Assent. There is no time limit for assent to an ordinary bill, which permits the pocket veto; President Zail Singh used it on the Indian Post Office (Amendment) Bill in 1986. A bill returned under Article 111 and passed again must be assented to.
• Counsel and delay. Presidents have returned files, sought reasons, and delayed: K.R. Narayanan’s return of the Bihar President’s Rule recommendation in 1997 is the standard instance of a President exercising real influence within the advice framework.

Prime Minister and Cabinet

The envisaged model was collective cabinet government: ministers collectively responsible to the House of the People under Article 75(3), the Prime Minister primus inter pares.

The actual trajectory has been toward concentration, and the causes are structural rather than personal.

• The Prime Minister’s Office has grown into a parallel executive with the capacity to coordinate, and increasingly to originate, policy across ministries.
• Anti-defection under the Tenth Schedule removed the backbench’s ability to threaten a government from within, which was historically the cabinet’s own check.
• Party centralisation means ministers hold office by the leader’s choice, and their political survival depends on it rather than on a separate base.
• The single-party majority of 2014 and after restored a pattern interrupted between 1989 and 2014, when coalition partners imposed genuine constraints.

The counter-consideration worth stating: cabinet government was never as collective as the model implies, and the coalition decades demonstrated that when the parliamentary arithmetic changes, the constitutional form reasserts itself. The concentration is a function of political conditions, not of constitutional design.

Parliament

Envisaged role and the record

Parliament was designed to legislate, to scrutinise the executive, to control the purse, to represent, and to serve as a deliberative forum. The record on each is mixed and specific.

Legislation. Bills are increasingly passed with limited debate, and the proportion referred to committees has fallen sharply from the levels of the fourteenth and fifteenth Lok Sabhas. Ordinance-making under Article 123, envisaged for genuine urgency when the house is not in session, has been used to legislate around Parliament, and Krishna Kumar Singh (2017) held that re-promulgation of ordinances is a fraud on the Constitution.

Financial control. The guillotine means the greater part of the demands for grants is voted without discussion. The Comptroller and Auditor General reports after the fact, and the Public Accounts Committee’s examination is post-audit rather than pre-approval.

Scrutiny. Question hour, calling attention motions, adjournment motions, no-confidence motions and the half-hour discussion remain, but disruption has cost a large proportion of scheduled time in recent decades, and sitting days have declined markedly from the first decades after independence.

Parliamentary committees

The 2025 paper asked about committees as indispensable to the legislative process and as the site of cross-pollination between the two chambers, which is a precise and answerable claim.

Why they matter: they sit in camera, so members are free of the incentive to perform for cameras; the whip does not formally operate, so cross-party agreement is possible; they can summon officials and take expert evidence; and, because standing committees are drawn from both houses, they are the principal institutional site where members of the Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha work on the same text together, which is precisely the cross-pollination the question named.

Their limits are equally examinable: recommendations are not binding; attendance is frequently poor; membership rotates annually, which prevents the accumulation of expertise; and the executive can bypass them entirely by declining to refer a bill, which no rule prevents.

The Rajya Sabha and the money bill question

The Rajya Sabha represents the states, is a permanent body with a third retiring every two years, and has equal powers with the Lok Sabha except on money bills and in the survival of the government. Its special powers under Articles 249 and 312 are its own: to authorise Parliament to legislate on a State List entry in the national interest, and to create an All India Service.

The money bill controversy is the sharpest live institutional question. Article 110 defines a money bill narrowly by reference to taxation, borrowing and the Consolidated Fund; the Speaker certifies whether a bill is one; and the Rajya Sabha may only recommend amendments the Lok Sabha may reject. The Aadhaar Act’s passage as a money bill was upheld in Puttaswamy (Aadhaar) (2018) with Justice Chandrachud dissenting, and Rojer Mathew (2019) referred the correctness of that reasoning to a larger bench, where it remains. The constitutional stake is real: if the certification is effectively unreviewable, the second chamber can be bypassed at will.

The Supreme Court

Jurisdiction

• Original (Article 131): disputes between the Union and states or between states.
• Writ (Article 32): enforcement of Fundamental Rights, itself a fundamental right.
• Appellate (Articles 132–134): constitutional, civil and criminal appeals.
• Special leave (Article 136): discretionary appeal from any court or tribunal except military tribunals. The widest such power anywhere, and the source of the Court’s enormous docket.
• Advisory (Article 143): the President may refer a question of law or fact of public importance, or a dispute arising out of a pre-Constitution agreement.
• Complete justice (Article 142): power to pass any order necessary for doing complete justice in a cause before it.

Advisory jurisdiction

The 2025 paper asked for the constitutional provisions and nature of advisory jurisdiction, which requires four points beyond the text of Article 143.

It is discretionary on both sides: the President may refer but need not, and under Article 143(1) the Court may decline to answer, though under 143(2), concerning pre-Constitution agreements, it must. The opinion is not binding on the President and is not a judgment delivering res judicata, though it carries very great persuasive weight and is followed in practice. It is heard by a bench of at least five judges. And it cannot be used to reopen a matter the Court has already decided.

The references worth naming: Delhi Laws Act (1951) on delegated legislation; Kerala Education Bill (1958); Berubari Union (1960), where the Court advised that ceding territory required a constitutional amendment, which produced the Ninth Amendment; Presidential Reference on the Special Courts Bill (1978); the Third Judges Case (1998), which reshaped the collegium; the 2G spectrum reference (2012) on whether auction was constitutionally mandatory for all natural resources, answered no; and the Ayodhya reference (1993), which the Court declined to answer, holding the question of whether a temple had existed at the site to be superfluous and opposed to secularism. That refusal is the best single illustration of the jurisdiction’s discretionary character.

Actual working: from adjudication to policy

The 2023 paper asked whether the Court has become a forum for policy evolution, and the honest answer is that it plainly has, by three routes.

Public interest litigation. From the late 1970s, relaxed locus standi allowed any public-spirited person to move the Court, letters were treated as petitions, and the Court appointed commissioners to investigate facts. This converted the Court from a forum resolving disputes between parties into one supervising the administration.

Continuing mandamus. Rather than deciding and departing, the Court retains a case and issues directions over years: Vishaka (1997) laid down binding guidelines on sexual harassment in the absence of legislation until the 2013 Act; M.C. Mehta produced a long line of environmental directions; Vineet Narain (1997) restructured the CBI’s insulation.

Article 142. The complete-justice power has been used to dissolve marriages, to order the transfer of a disputed site in Ayodhya (2019), and to grant relief the statute did not provide.

The critiques are serious and belong in any answer. The Court lacks the institutional capacity to gather evidence and weigh trade-offs the way an administration can; its interventions are not budget-constrained, since it does not have to find the money; it is unaccountable electorally; enforcement of its policy directions is weak; and the practice invites the charge of judicial overreach, most sharply after the NJAC judgment of 2015 left judicial appointments with the judiciary itself. The counter, made most often by former judges, is that the Court moved into space the other organs vacated, and that the alternative to an activist court in the 1980s was not a functioning administration but no remedy at all.

The Supreme Court has been assigned the role of a sentinel on the qui vive

Supreme Court of India, State of Madras v. V.G. Row, 1952

Read the rest. This chapter is one of 58 in the complete PSIR Optional Notes, covering Paper I and Paper II in full — free to download.