The Governor's Office Was Meant to Be Ceremonial. Here Is How It Stopped Being So

Article 153 says simply that there shall be a governor for each state. It does not say the governor must delay assent to bills for years, or decline to summon a legislature promptly, or comment publicly on a state government's policy choices in ways that would be unthinkable from any other constitutional functionary. Nothing in the constitutional text anticipated the governor's office becoming, as it has in several states over the past decade, the single most litigated point of friction in Indian federalism. Yet here we are, with the Supreme Court repeatedly having to remind governors of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Punjab and West Bengal that Article 200 does not grant them an indefinite veto over legislation passed by elected assemblies.

An office designed for restraint, filled by people who often show none

The framers debated the governor's role at some length in the Constituent Assembly, and the resolution they reached was deliberately modest: a governor would act, in almost all matters, on the aid and advice of the council of ministers, retaining discretion only in a narrow set of circumstances such as reserving a bill for presidential consideration or recommending President's Rule. B.R. Ambedkar himself, when pressed on whether the governor could become a rival centre of power to the elected government, was fairly dismissive of the concern, treating the office as a constitutional formality akin to the British crown's relationship with its ministers. What the framers did not fully anticipate was a political landscape in which the party governing at the Centre and the party governing a particular state would be different often enough, and adversarial enough, that the governor's residual discretion would become the single lever through which the Union could frustrate a state government it disliked.

Assent withheld, sessions delayed: the accumulation of small refusals

The pattern that has emerged is rarely a single dramatic constitutional crisis; it is an accumulation of small, individually defensible-sounding refusals. A governor sits on a bill for eighteen months without either assenting, refusing, or reserving it for the President, which the Constitution's text does not clearly forbid but which no reasonable reading of a functioning democracy could endorse. A governor declines to appoint vice-chancellors recommended by a state's higher education department, citing a search-committee process, and ends up embroiled in litigation that drags on for years. A governor's address to the legislature, meant to be drafted by the government of the day and merely delivered by the governor as a formality, becomes instead an occasion for the governor to depart from the text and criticise the very government whose policies he is constitutionally bound to read out. Each of these episodes, taken alone, can be argued away as a procedural dispute. Taken together across Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Telangana, Punjab and West Bengal in recent years, they describe an office that has drifted a long way from the ceremonial bridge the Constitution imagined.

What the courts have actually said, and how slowly

The Supreme Court's 2023 ruling in the Punjab governor case was unusually direct: a governor cannot indefinitely withhold assent to a bill, and if the intent is to reserve it for the President, that must be done within a reasonable time and not used as a device to stall legislation the governor personally opposes. A similar rebuke followed in the Tamil Nadu case in 2025, when the Court set outer time limits for gubernatorial action on bills for the first time, effectively writing procedural teeth into a constitutional silence. These rulings matter, but their timing matters too — years after the bills in question were first passed, by which point governments had lost legislative sessions, policy windows and, in some cases, entire terms in office waiting for judicial correction. A remedy that arrives after the fact is still a remedy, but it is a poor substitute for an office that behaves correctly the first time.

The Sarkaria and Punchhi reports gathering dust

This is not a new diagnosis. The Sarkaria Commission, reporting in 1988, recommended that governors be appointed only after consultation with the state's chief minister, that they be persons detached from active politics, and that they not be removed simply because the party in power at the Centre changes. The Punchhi Commission, reporting two decades later in 2010, went further, recommending fixed tenures and a more codified list of situations warranting the use of discretionary power. Neither set of recommendations has been implemented by any government of any political persuasion, which is itself the most honest evidence available that both major national parties have found the current ambiguity useful when they control the Centre, whatever they say about it when they control a state instead.

The counter-argument that deserves to be taken seriously

It would be dishonest to present this only as one-sided overreach. Governors and their defenders make a real argument: state legislatures are not infallible, and a bill that is unconstitutional, or that a governor genuinely believes exceeds the state's legislative competence under the Seventh Schedule, ought to have some check before it becomes law, since presidential assent for central legislation faces no equivalent scrutiny delay. There have also been instances — university governance bills in some states being an example cited by governors themselves — where the objection was less about federal power politics and more about a defensible institutional concern regarding academic autonomy. The problem is not that governors ever have grounds to pause; it is that the current system gives no way to distinguish a good-faith constitutional objection from a political stalling tactic, and leaves the distinction to be litigated, at cost, years after the fact.

An office searching for the discipline it was always meant to have

The deeper issue is that India built a federal structure with a unitary appointment mechanism sitting inside it, and trusted convention to keep the two in balance. Conventions survive only as long as both sides in a political system have an interest in preserving them, and for much of India's history that mutual interest held, imperfectly but adequately. It no longer reliably does. Until Parliament legislates the kind of time limits and consultation requirements that Sarkaria and Punchhi proposed decades ago, the Supreme Court will keep being asked to do, case by case and years too late, what a properly designed office should never have required a court to do at all.