Nehru had spoken about India’s tryst with destiny at midnight on 14 August 1947 by emphasizing the idea of independence not as a destination but as a commitment partially honored. The bigger challenge of eradicating poverty, illiteracy, and inequality of opportunities still awaited the country then. The context of his statement has proven itself to be true even today. As 75 years since the birth of the republic have passed and as the year 2047 – the centenary of India’s freedom – becomes the point of view for gauging Indian governance, it makes sense. It makes sense in the sense that the horizon forces the shift in perspective from the “largest democracy of the world” facts, celebrating the anniversary in triumph, to the question of institutional framework design. Will the framework created in 1950, which includes a quasi-federal system, directly elected but highly mediated parliament, independent judiciary, and permanent bureaucracy, be able to cope with the responsibilities associated with the country that has the population of 1.6 billion people, 10 trillion dollar economy, and unprecedented media environment even a decade back?
Before turning to case law and statutes, it would be worthwhile to recover why the four principles mattered in the first place because the framers of the Constitution were surprisingly forthright about how delicate their creation was. In an address made to the Constituent Assembly on 25 November 1949, two days prior to the adoption of the Constitution, Dr B R Ambedkar reminded the Assembly that constitutional morality – the commitment to method over individual and party leaders – was not an innate feeling amongst Indians. It would have to be inculcated by dint of great effort. He warned, in particular, against the danger of discarding constitutional methods of both political and economic protest for unconstitutional methods and against hero-worship (bhakti) in politics which could too easily degenerate into dictatorship. This warning was not just a passing remark; it was, in a sense, the crux of the Constitution’s concerns. The Constitution could distribute powers as perfectly as possible on paper but fail if those who operated it – the electorate, legislators, judges, and executives alike – did not take to heart the art of losing arguments constitutionally instead of winning arguments unconstitutionally.
The groundbreaking study of the Constituent Assembly’s work by Granville Austin has suggested that rather than serving as a mechanism for governing, the document constituted an instrument for revolutionizing society. It was aimed at dismantling centuries-old social stratification on the grounds of caste hierarchy, gender oppression, and poverty using mechanisms of the state apparatus. The continuation of the same revolutionary spirit during the Emergency period and further years has been explored in Austin’s later work. Taking into account both Ambedkar’s warning and Austin’s interpretation, it may be concluded that the constitution of India was never intended to be something completed once and for all; on the contrary, it is to be revived by every new generation to come.
This link is made explicitly clear in the Preamble, and it bears saying because it is not always assumed to be known: Justice, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity are not four separate ideals but the forefathers of the Four Pillars identified in this essay. The Preamble defines Institutional Integrity as Justice with legs – the promise that courts and commissions will not give in to the will of the government of the day. It defines Transparent Contestation as Liberty being used properly – the liberty of the citizen to select a representative on the basis of knowing who is funding this representative and which candidate has committed a crime.
Federal Trust is the Equality of governments, as opposed to Equality of citizens – the guarantee that a state government is answerable to its electorate, not to the discretion of the Union. Finally, Inclusive Legitimacy is the Fraternity built into the representative process – the guarantee of dignity and having a seat at the table that has been partially honored up to this point. When the Preamble is read in this manner, it is more than just a ceremonial beginning to an essay that will cite it once before moving on. The Four Pillars formulated above can be viewed, in this context, as not new ideas generated for the purposes of the competition brief but a modern language expressing the same fear raised by Ambedkar in 1949 about whether Indians will opt to work their constitution rather than just possess it.
The first of the pillars – institutional integrity – starts from the principle which gives permanence to the Indian Constitution. The Constitution was never meant to be a rigid instrument; in Article 368 there is a provision for the amendment of the Constitution and its framers envisaged an extensive exercise of this power by the Parliament. What the framers did not envisage and what was provided by the Judiciary in the face of constitutional crisis of the seventies was a limitation to that power. In the case of Kesavananda Bharati v State of Kerala the Supreme Court decided, by the narrowest margin possible, that Parliament had power to amend any provision of the Constitution except its “basic structure” which comprises federalism, secularism, separation of powers, judicial review and rule of law. It was tested in less than no time. In the case of Indira Nehru Gandhi v Raj Narain the Supreme Court struck down the offending clause of the Thirty-Ninth Amendment on the ground that free and fair elections form part of the basic structure of the Constitution. A little later, in Minerva Mills Ltd v Union of India, the Court struck down an amendment seeking to place constitutional amendments beyond judicial review altogether, arguing that a restricted amending power was itself a feature of the Constitution’s basic structure. Collectively, these three cases cannot be said to be concerned so much with any specific article of the Constitution as with an ongoing theme: each time the elected majority has sought to turn its parliamentary arithmetic into permanent and unreviewable authority, the Court has found such an attempt to constitute precisely what the Constitution prohibits.
This is the legacy that any future vision for 2047 must preserve, because the temptation to undermine it is far from gone – it merely takes different forms. While today, the threat may no longer take the form of a single momentous amendment; it takes the form of gradual capture of nominally autonomous bodies through the power of appointment, or even the regular resort to emergency-like provisions for purely political purposes. The rule of law, in this context, is as much a matter of whether the institutions enforcing Articles 14 or 21 are institutionally capable of saying no to the government of the day. A few years later, the Supreme Court struck down an amendment that sought to make all constitutional amendments immune from judicial scrutiny, reasoning that the restricted right to amend is a feature of the basic structure of the Constitution.8 Taken together, these three cases have less to do with the particular clause at issue than with the consistent pattern that when an elected majority attempts to transform its parliamentary majority into an irrevocable source of political power, the Court has found such transformation unconstitutional.
The viability of Indian democracy in 2047 will depend less on whether there are regular elections, a matter that is now taken for granted, and more on whether the Election Commission, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, the Central Bureau of Investigation, and the higher judiciary are independent enough to defy the executive that appointed and funds them.
The second component of transparency, which is contestable proceedings, can perhaps be seen most acutely in the Election Commission of India. The independence of the Election Commission throughout much of its existence was more of a product of convention and the reputation of individual Chief Election Commissioners rather than from a solid statutory mechanism for their appointment. The Constitution is vague on this matter: Article 324 leaves it open to Parliament to provide for the manner of appointment, which Parliament has failed to do in the seventy years since the Republic’s inception, leaving the appointment purely to the executive. It was not until Anoop Baranwal v Union of India that the Supreme Court had occasion to fill this lacuna and decided that until Parliament did so, the Election Commissioners would be appointed by a committee made up of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, and the Chief Justice of India. However, Parliament’s attempt at filling this gap through the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners Act, 2023 retained the selection committee but substituted the Chief Justice with a Union Cabinet Minister nominated by the Prime Minister, leaving the executive with an effective two-to-one majority on the panel. Whether one is convinced of the constitutionality of such a move notwithstanding, it underscores the structural problem in question – an appointments process for the guardian of electoral integrity that is ultimately determined by the very political actors whose elections are under protection.
The reform suggestions that lie downstream of this appointments process are more familiar – synchronized elections, a shorter and more predictable window period for enforcement of the model code of conduct, and improved technology utilization, including through VVPAT verification. In this regard, the observations of the 170th report of the Law Commission of India, dating as far back as 1999, in relation to electoral reforms come close to predicting most of these debates, as they recommended state-funded elections, greater candiate disclosure obligations and anti-defection rules. Over a quarter of a century since then, most of these recommendations remain non-starters, which should say something – electoral reform in India does not fail for lack of expert advice. It fails because the political incumbents of all parties benefit from the system in question. A 2047 vision would therefore have to contend with this political economy of reform.
The system of disclosures is largely an outcome of court orders as opposed to any legislation. In Union of India v. Association for Democratic Reforms, the Supreme Court of India asked the Election Commission to make it mandatory for all candidates to disclose all their pending criminal cases, assets and liabilities, and educational qualifications, viewing voters’ right to know this as an implication of their Article 19(1)(a) rights, which is the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression.1 Just one ruling made the Indian elections much more transparent than any piece of legislation ever done previously and after that case. Nevertheless, disclosure has not prevented the core problem: the analysis of the affidavits submitted by the candidates prior to the general election revealed that the percentage of MPs who have serious criminal charges against them is increasing. The parties nominate such candidates since their ability to win, rather than their integrity, is the key criterion to be considered in distributing the tickets, and no party needs to explain the logic of this to voters at the polling day.
Once more it is the judiciary that has achieved what Parliament has failed to do. In Lily Thomas v Union of India, the Supreme Court invalidated section 8(4) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, which permitted a convicted legislator to continue to serve until his case was determined on appeal; the Court ruled that disqualification must be immediate upon conviction. Further directives have included the obligation to provide information about the antecedents of those nominated as candidates in relation to their criminal record, as well as justifications for choosing them rather than non-criminal candidates. The last issue here relates to enforcement: providing such information does nothing to change the motivation to nominate someone who will win regardless of any means used. Fast-track courts in cases against sitting legislators, established by the Supreme Court in 2018 but consistently understaffed in most states, would be the more direct solution, one that would make “pending trial” no longer synonymous with impunity.
In case, criminalisation is a sign of an inadequately regulated political marketplace, political finance opacity is the underlying structure behind it. In the greater part of the country’s history, the majority of political finances in India have been made anonymously, without any reporting of any kind from either the donor or, above a nominal limit, from the beneficiary party. The Electoral Bond Scheme, launched in 2018, has been claimed to be a mechanism that would end the opacity issue, but it has resulted in anything but transparency from the citizenry perspective, while keeping the anonymity from the State’s, since in principle only the State Bank of India, and by extension the government, could follow the trail of the bond’s donor. In the recent decision in the case of Association for Democratic Reforms v Union of India, made by the constitution bench of the Supreme Court in February 2024, the scheme was invalidated in total because it offered absolute anonymity, which is a violation of the voter’s right to information secured by Article 19(1)(a), and could not be proportionate means of fighting corruption and black money, since there were alternatives that could serve the purpose.
There is no consensus yet on what might succeed the unconstitutional system. There are three elements, however, that frequently reappear both in the comparative experience and in the Law Commission reports of India itself: a National Election Fund, to which donations would be directed and from which funds would be disbursed according to a formula based on the party’s share of the votes cast, eliminating any connection between donation and party; expenditure limits that are genuinely applied, rather than circumvented with “party expenditures”; and the electronic reporting of donations above a small threshold, in real time. Nothing here is new. What has been lacking is the political commitment to enact such reforms because all parties have, at some point, benefitted from the secrecy they now enjoy.
The 2019 and 2024 elections took place in the midst of an era where communication through media channels was dominated by encryption and algorithmic amplification; the elections after 2029 will be the first set to take place in an era where the generation of synthetic audio and video through AI technology is a real threat of being able to create convincing audio/visual representations of a candidate saying anything. The entire framework of regulations to regulate this electoral communication – the Model Code of Conduct, Section 126 of the Representation of People’s Act and the takedown powers available under the Information Technology Act have been geared towards print, radio, and loudspeakers campaigning, and have found it difficult to adapt to this challenge. Even the Supreme Court has made efforts that have gone both ways in terms of regulating digital communications; the apex court struck down Section 66A of the IT Act in Shreya Singhal v Union of India for being vague and overbroad. This case also held that there must be a due process in place before intermediaries need to comply with the takedown orders. This is the balance which needs to continue despite the emergence of deepfakes.
The solution certainly cannot be further regulation of speech, since this is likely to replicate the very vagueness criticized by Shreya Singhal. A more sustainable method of response would involve compulsory labelling of AI-powered political material, by imposing platform liability as opposed to prosecuting individual users; an Election Commission oversight body, with statutory backing, capable of issuing immediate takedowns within the campaigning period only; and digital literacy initiatives aimed precisely at those identified by demographic surveys as being most vulnerable – older generation smartphone users in semi-urban and rural India, not urban youths as usually presumed. The integrity of elections in a digital republic hinges, ultimately, on regulation keeping pace with technology, something no institution designed for the era of print politics can do without statutory empowerment.
The third pillar – federal trust – raises an issue that the framers of the Constitution made a conscious decision about. The Constitution of India terms India as ‘a Union of States’ and not a ‘federation’. It was necessary that there be a strong Centre that would bind a partitioned and divided India together, and therefore, the framers provided residuary powers and even provisions under emergencies that were clearly tilted in favor of New Delhi. This imbalance worked well during the first four decades of the republic as the same political party ruled at both levels of government throughout this period. Multi-party and multi-level governance since 1989, however, has brought out this imbalance as a constitutional issue. The landmark judgment by the Supreme Court is S R Bommai v Union of India, where it was held that the Union government’s power to invoke President’s Rule using Article 356 of the Constitution was amenable to judicial scrutiny and cannot be enforced simply because the Central Government did not approve of the state government’s politics; a floor test had to be conducted in the state assembly, and not a mere subjective satisfaction of the Governor.
While Bommai curbed the more obvious abuse of Article 356, it has not been able to resolve the subtle questions raised about the role of the Governor who still enjoys broad discretion regarding assent to state laws and the time of floor tests – all of which recent litigation from various states demonstrates continues to follow the dictates of the Governor’s relation to the Union, and not of a constitutional standard.
The third major front has been in the National Capital Territory where the issue was not one of emergency power but of the distribution of executive power between an elected government and a Centrally appointed Lieutenant Governor in the National Capital Territory. In Government of NCT of Delhi v Union of India, the Supreme Court of India has held that the Lieutenant Governor has no independent decision making powers in regard to issues coming within the legislative competence of the Delhi Assembly and has to act on the aid and advice of the elected Council of Ministers. The subsequent Parliamentary legislation regarding control over services shows how easy it is to unsettle a settled federal question by exercise of legislative competence. In 2047, the more likely route will be that of the aggregation of incremental measures: statutory timelines constraining the discretionary power of the Governor to assent and conduct floor tests, as per the recommendations of the Sarkaria and Punchhi Commissions; an effective Inter-State Council through Article 263; and fiscal federalism changes, especially relating to GST compensation and terms of reference for the Finance Commission.
Each of the reforms considered above requires the presence of an independent judiciary ready to implement it in the face of the executive’s resistance. Therefore, judicial independence becomes the central element of this whole structure, and in the terminology of this essay, the pillar of institutional integrity, this time as applied to the judiciary. India’s collegium system, whereby senior judges appoint their own successors and where the executive only performs a consultative role, was created by the judiciary itself, through the Second and Third Judges Cases in the 1990s, as a reaction to excessive executive interference into the process of transfers and appointments of judges during and after the Emergency. The attempt by parliament to abolish it and to introduce the National Judicial Appointments Commission with a formal role played by the executive and two “eminent persons” was declared unconstitutional in 2015 as a violation of the principle of the basic structure, because it could effectively amount to an executive veto over judicial appointments. The collegium continues to exist, though not due to its perfect design: its proceedings remain secret, its criteria unwritten, and it has been justifiably criticized for regional and social imbalances of the selected judges.
The vision for 2047 need not decide in favour of one side or the other in the debate between collegium and another form of commission – constitutionalists may well have differing views, and even the Supreme Court has been deeply divided on this issue. All that a vision for 2047 could demand is process – an official, published memorandum of procedure with known criteria of elevation and transfer; reasons for not accepting or deferring a recommendation, whoever defers it; and a statutory period within which the executive must act on a reiterative recommendation, to eliminate the delaying tactic that has often brought appointments to a standstill for several years. Quality of adjudication also depends on a capacity unrelated to the appointments question – four crore pending cases in India’s courts, concentrated in the subordinate judiciary, mean that independence of the Supreme Court is of no use to a litigant who has to wait ten years before his case comes up for the first time.
The fourth pillar – inclusive legitimacy – picks up the social-revolution argument of Austin and seeks to find out how much progress has been made in this revolution. The transformative nature of the Indian Constitution as evidenced in the combination of fundamental rights under Part III along with the Directive Principles of State Policy under Part IV has always been to use the state to correct the social structure that has been passed down by history rather than merely to act as a referee of the competition among unequal competitors. Reservation policies have been the main tool for such a transformation and continue to be a highly disputed field. In Indra Sawhney v Union of India the Supreme Court supported reservations for the other backward classes in central government jobs subject to a ceiling of fifty per cent on reservations, which is not based on any provision of the Constitution but on what the Court itself regards as the extreme end of the spectrum that can accommodate equality of opportunity based on merit. The ceiling has been violated increasingly often at the state level while at the Union level, it has been exceeded by the Constitution (One Hundred and Third Amendment) Act, 2019; the Supreme Court upheld this amendment in Janhit Abhiyan v Union of India, with the majority holding that economic criteria alone could constitute a valid basis for reservation, even as two judges dissented on the ground that excluding the historically backward classes from this particular quota was itself discriminatory. What needs to be considered about 2047 is whether there can be a system of policy making in accordance with periodically updated data about backwardness, as opposed to a static structure based on caste and economic classification as is seen today.
Representation has expanded along another dimension through the passing of The Constitution (One Hundred and Sixth Amendment) Act, 2023 and the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, which reserve one-third of seats in the Lok Sabha and state legislative assemblies for women; however, this is not to go into effect before the first delimitation after the next decennial census, which will come only in 2029. What needs to be done by 2047 will have to take into account this delayed action. The representation of inclusive governance, in the broader sense, that is representation within the higher judiciary, civil services, and corporate boards, is much more imbalanced than even caste and gender-based representation in Parliament.
The ability of India to emerge as the leading world power, to some extent, hinges on the idea that it is, and will continue to be, a functional democracy of continental proportions – especially now that other long-established democracies are facing the challenge of polarization and internal stress. The 2023 chairmanship of India in the G20 group and expansion of the grouping with the African Union imply reliance, implicitly, on the reputation of India as a good example of domestic governance. This reputation depends not only on international assessments of democracy but also on the evaluations of foreign investors and other partner countries regarding the sustainability of Indian institutions after any specific administration. Soft power based on democratic reputation is particularly fragile because a single well-documented instance of domestic failure can damage it much more severely than the same instance could harm economic or military power.
The other side of this capacity to lead, however, concerns regulatory quality, which is no less important but perhaps less glamorous. Data-driven policy-making, which is the purpose behind NITI Aayog’s formation in place of the Planning Commission’s central approach, relies upon a data architecture which itself has come under methodological attack, not least through delays in conducting the important surveys on labour force and consumption. No country can claim to be the leader in evidence-based global governance when its own impact assessments are poor and its statistical calendar is treated as a mere convenience. The recommendations on regulatory quality of the Second Administrative Reforms Commission have largely been more talked about than actually followed.
None of it speaks to the frontier that will dominate most of the coming era up until 2047: the governance problems that were simply beyond the imagination of the framers. Indeed, this task is being done by the Supreme Court. In Justice K S Puttaswamy v Union of India the court interpreted an implied right to privacy in Article 21, thus establishing a constitutional foundation on which future attempts to regulate algorithmic decisions, biometric identification systems, or AI surveillance will have to be tested. Even more recently, in M K Ranjitsinh v Union of India the court recognised a right to freedom from the negative consequences of climate change as deriving from Articles 14 and 21, paving the way for a new doctrine – climate constitutionalism in essence – that India is just starting to put in place. Algorithmic governance, automated welfare eligibility checks, and AI-enabled policing pose a similar question to the one that was asked above concerning electoral technology: whether regulatory institutions will be able to keep up with the pace of the technology. The geopolitical argument for India’s leadership in 2047 will be made, in the end, not in New York or Geneva but there.
While one thing is to enumerate the four pillars, quite another thing is the ordering of them, and the contest brief calling for a “constitutional vision” is in essence calling for a schedule rather than a mere diagnosis. Below is the schedule, not a prophecy: the barebones schedule without which the four pillars mentioned above cannot but remain pillars of rhetoric.
By 2027 – the near future, within reach of the present Parliament and the ongoing Law Commission cycle – the realistic targets will include procedural, rather than structural, changes: a codified and published Memorandum of Procedure for judicial appointments, with legally binding timetables for both sides in the collegium-executive negotiation; a National Election Fund or some formula-driven financing system to plug the lacuna created by the Electoral Bonds decision; statutory deadlines for gubernatorial assent and floor tests; and a dedicated Election Commission cell for immediate action against AI-generated misinformation during elections.
By 2035, which marks the medium-term horizon spanning two periods of Lok Sabha, the objectives are more structural in nature. There should have been an adjustment to the process through which members are appointed to the Election Commission such that no single institution holds the requisite majority on this committee. The fast-track courts should have bridged the gap between revelation of any prior criminal record and its judicial settlement. There should have been a properly established and effective Inter-State Council sitting on a set statutory schedule as opposed to the one that sits at the will of the Union. A revision of the reservation policy based on both economic and caste considerations should have been considered using information that is less than ten years old.
And by the year 2047 – the centenary year itself – it will be an aspirational project in equal measure: a citizenry where Ambedkar’s constitutionality of politics is no slogan resurrected from the Constituent Assembly debates, but a reality in which political defeats become subsumed within the processes of the courts and elections rather than in the streets or through the excesses of executive authority; a federal Union where the Centre and the states vie with one another for the outcome of policy rather than the control of each other’s institutions; and a polity whose influence abroad depends on the simple truth that, during the intervening twenty years, it has done precisely what the Constitution promised it back in 1950.
In a discussion of this nature, it might be quite easy to come up with one big idea at the end – something along the lines of setting up a second Constituent Assembly, completely overhauling Centre-State relationships, drafting a fresh new set of rules for political funding. However, this essay makes a conscious effort not to follow suit. From the case of Kesavananda Bharati to the recent ruling on Electoral Bonds, it can be seen that Indian constitutional democracy is far more advanced through small but steady gap-closing between constitutional promise and actual institutionality, as laid out in the four pillars mentioned above and outlined chronologically below.
Nothing of this is inevitable. None of the decisions mentioned in this essay were reached by any court which had no obligation to reach such a decision, and none of the reforms pending were suggested by any Law Commission or Administrative Reforms Commission which had no ability to implement its own suggestions. However, inevitability was not what the framers promised when they framed the constitution. Ambedkar ended his speech to the Constituent Assembly on the responsibility of maintaining the republic not on the constitution but on the shoulders of those who will work with it in the years to come despite the constant temptation for shortcuts. Now imagine the promise that can be kept when a child born on 15 August 2026 turns twenty-one years old: Election Commissioner appointed by a process which cannot be claimed by any political party; the village council and the Parliament sitting down within months of each other under the same electoral schedule; two votes cast by a woman, one at the ballot box and one in the reserved constituency from which she may contest; and the district court hearing no more slowly than the Supreme Court. All of this is not an unattainable utopia for the republic, as all of these things can be found within Indian law right now, just awaiting combination. It seems appropriate to conclude the essay by referencing the very words at the beginning of the Indian Constitution, which better define the author of the entire enterprise than anything else in discussion of it could: “We, the People of India.”
1 Jawaharlal Nehru, 'Tryst with Destiny' (Speech to the Constituent Assembly of India, New Delhi, 14 August 1947).
2 Constituent Assembly Debates, vol XI (25 November 1949), speech of Dr B R Ambedkar on adopting the
Constitution.
3 Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (Oxford University Press 1966); Granville
Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution: The Indian Experience (Oxford University Press 1999).
4 The Constitution of India 1950, Preamble; on the Preamble's status as part of the Constitution and relevant to its
basic structure, see Kesavananda Bharati v State of Kerala (n 5 below).
5 Kesavananda Bharati v State of Kerala (1973) 4 SCC 225.
6 Indira Nehru Gandhi v Raj Narain 1975 Supp SCC 1.
7 Minerva Mills Ltd v Union of India (1980) 3 SCC 625.
8 Anoop Baranwal v Union of India (2023) 6 SCC 161; Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election
Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act 2023.
9 Law Commission of India, Reform of the Electoral Laws (Report No 170, 1999).
10 Union of India v Association for Democratic Reforms (2002) 5 SCC 294.
11 Association for Democratic Reforms, 'Analysis of Criminal Background, Financial, Educational and Other Details
of Winners' (New Delhi, published before each general election since 2004); see also Election Commission of India,
affidavit data compiled under the disclosure regime in Union of India v ADR (n 10).
12 Lily Thomas v Union of India (2013) 7 SCC 653.
13 Public Interest Foundation v Union of India (2019) 3 SCC 224 (directing parties to publish reasons for selecting
candidates with pending criminal cases).
14 Public Interest Foundation v Union of India (2018) 5 SCC 1 (directing the constitution of special courts for the
trial of cases against sitting MPs and MLAs).
15 Association for Democratic Reforms v Union of India 2024 SCC OnLine SC 150.
16 Law Commission of India, Electoral Reforms (Report No 255, 2015), building on the National Election Fund
proposal first outlined in Report No 170 (n 9).
17 Shreya Singhal v Union of India (2015) 5 SCC 1.
18 Election Commission of India, guidance notes on the regulation of social media and paid political content during
the Model Code of Conduct period, issued ahead of the 2019 and 2024 general elections.
19 S R Bommai v Union of India (1994) 3 SCC 1.
20 See, eg, the litigation arising from delayed gubernatorial assent to state legislation before the Supreme Court in
2023-2024.
21 Government of NCT of Delhi v Union of India (2018) 8 SCC 501.
22 Commission on Centre-State Relations (Punchhi Commission, Report, 2010); Sarkaria Commission, Report of the
Commission on Centre-State Relations (1988); Second Administrative Reforms Commission, Report on Centre-
State Relations.
23 Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association v Union of India (1993) 4 SCC 441 (Second Judges Case); In re
Presidential Reference (1998) 7 SCC 739 (Third Judges Case).
24 Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association v Union of India (2016) 5 SCC 1 (NJAC judgment).
25 Memorandum of Procedure for appointment of judges, as revised following the NJAC judgment (n 24); the
revised Memorandum has remained in draft/contested form for extended periods.
26 Indra Sawhney v Union of India 1992 Supp (3) SCC 217.
27 Janhit Abhiyan v Union of India 2022 SCC OnLine SC 1540.
28 Constitution (One Hundred and Sixth Amendment) Act 2023 (Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam).
29 National Statistical Commission and Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, periodic reports on
Periodic Labour Force Survey and Household Consumption Expenditure Survey methodology and release
schedules.
30 Second Administrative Reforms Commission, Report on Ethics in Governance and related reports on regulatory
and civil service reform.
31 Justice K S Puttaswamy v Union of India (2017) 10 SCC 1.
32 M K Ranjitsinh v Union of India 2024 SCC OnLine SC 686.
33 Constituent Assembly Debates, vol XI (25 November 1949) (n 2).