Supreme Court Greenlights Politicking By Governors, Undercuts Federalism; As Maoism Fades, Adivasi Futures Still Stand on Precarious Ground; What Did the Harappans Eat?

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Snapshot of the day

November 20, 2025

In a blow to India’s federal structure, the Supreme Court today essentially legitimised the arbitrariness with which Governors appointed by the Narendra Modi government have used their formal authority to assent to legislation, turning a procedural requirement into a form of harassment against opposition-ruled state governments. In April this year, Justices J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan’s passed a landmark judgment imposing timelines on Governors — and the President of India — for deciding on Bills passed by state legislatures. Upset by the manner in which two judges had upset the establishment’s apple cart, the government got President Droupadi Murmu to refer 14 questions to the Supreme Court on points of law relating to the powers of governors and the president that made no reference to the Justice Pardiwala bench ruling but was nothing but a crude attempt to overturn it.

Well, on Thursday, a five-judge bench led by Chief Justice B.R. Gavai ruled that the judiciary cannot in fact put the two offices on the clock. The constitution intentionally provides for a degree of “elasticity” to these offices keeping in mind the diversity of situations politics can throw up, so holding governors and the president to a timeline “would be strictly contrary” to that intent, the bench said while ruling on President Murmu’s ‘reference’. That dictum had also ‘deemed’ a number of Bills long pending with Tamil Nadu governor R.N. Ravi to have been assented to; however today’s bench said that the notion of ‘deemed assent’ was “antithetical not only to the spirit of the Constitution but also specifically to the doctrine of separation of powers”, reports Ananthakrishan G.

At the same time, the court held that if a governor sits on Bills in a “prolonged, unexplained and indefinite” manner, the court “can issue a limited mandamus for the governor to discharge his function … within a reasonable time period, without making any observations on the merits of the exercise of his discretion”. Krishnadas Rajagopal has compiled the court’s answers to all 14 questions in the Presidential Reference. Gautam Bhatia sees the opinion as a “blatant abuse of reference powers’ and explains its consequences.

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has arrested four more ‘prime accused’ persons linked to the blast near the Red Fort metro station in Delhi earlier this month, taking the total number of arrests in the case to six. The