The Supreme Court’s Constitution Bench has now given the President and governors a significant reprieve by ruling that no court can compel them to grant assent to a bill within a fixed time. In effect, the court has said that the Constitution’s silence on timelines cannot be filled by judicial innovation. The ruling overturns the earlier two-judge decision in the Tamil Nadu case, which had held that prolonged inaction by a governor amounted to “deemed assent”. This clarification was sought by President Droupadi Murmu herself, after the smaller bench’s decision triggered an intense national debate. Her queries were straightforward: the Constitution does not prescribe a timeline under Articles 200 and 201, raising the issue of whether the courts........

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