The hopes of opposition-aligned cheerleaders who had spent months predicting a judicial blow to governors appointed by the Narendra Modi government were decisively dashed when a constitution bench of the Supreme Court delivered its opinion on the reference made by President Droupadi Murmu. For months, activists, commentators and friendly media platforms portrayed the hearings as a historic opportunity for the judiciary to curtail gubernatorial discretion in states governed by anti-BJP parties ruling different states. Yet when the opinion finally arrived, it upheld the very constitutional architecture they had expected the judiciary to rewrite.

What these disruptive voices had anticipated was a dramatic reconfiguration of Articles 200 and 201 of the Constitution of India. They had hoped the judiciary would impose binding timelines on governors for granting or withholding assent to bills passed by state legislatures, or perhaps even validate the notion of deemed assent when an unconstitutional deadline they were praying for would not be honoured. This excitement was amplified during the hearings that began in August, when selective interpretations of judicial questions were circulated as evidence that the court was preparing to discipline governors.

Instead, the constitution bench reaffirmed principles that have existed since the early decades of the republic. It held that Articles 200 and 201, which define how governors and the president handle bills, were crafted to provide elasticity, not rigid procedure. That elasticity, the bench said, could not be judicially erased. Timelines cannot be invented. Deemed assent is constitutionally impermissible. The judiciary cannot substitute itself for a constitutional authority. It can intervene only when there is prolonged and unexplained inaction, and even then, only to the most limited extent.

This clear affirmation of constitutional boundaries has exposed the gap, rather canyon, between political expectations and constitutional reasoning. It is a gap created not by the court but by those who chose to view the hearings through a partisan lens rather than a constitutional one.

To understand the scale of the disappointment among opposition-aligned commentators, one must return to the earlier two-judge ruling that had criticised delays by the governor of Tamil Nadu. That ruling, which suggested timelines for action under Article 200 and even urged a three-month outer limit for presidential decisions under Article 201, was seized upon as proof that the judiciary had lost patience with gubernatorial inaction.

This interpretation, however, overlooked decades of constitutional jurisprudence. Legal scholars had quickly pointed out that the two-judge ruling was an outlier. It sat uneasily beside........

© News18