India's government: where the power of Parliament stops

What the Constituent Assembly actually wrote

An assembly chosen by the members of the provincial legislatures met for the first time on 9 December 1946, in the hall that is now the Central Hall of Parliament House, with the Muslim League boycotting the sitting in pursuit of a separate state. Sachchidananda Sinha took the chair for two days before Rajendra Prasad was elected president of the body on 11 December. It opened with 389 members and finished with 299, partition having removed the rest.

Benegal Narsing Rau, appointed constitutional adviser in 1946 and never a member of the assembly, wrote the first draft: 243 articles and 13 schedules. A seven-member drafting committee under B. R. Ambedkar was appointed on 29 August 1947 and sat for 141 days on it. The assembly held eleven sessions across 165 days, moved 2,473 amendments out of 7,635 tabled, and adopted the result on 26 November 1949, when 284 members signed it. It came into force on 26 January 1950, kept since as Republic Day.

What emerged ran to 395 articles in 22 parts and 8 schedules, and it named its borrowings. The parliamentary machinery came from the British system, the fundamental rights and the Preamble from the constitution of the United States, the directive principles of state policy from Ireland, and long passages of text straight out of the Government of India Act 1935, the statute the constitution then repealed.

The physical object matched. The original is hand-written, lettered by the calligrapher Prem Behari Narain Raizada, decorated page by page by artists from Shantiniketan and photolithographed by the Survey of India. Each member signed two copies, one in Hindi and one in English, at the final sitting on 24 January 1950. That original is kept in a nitrogen-filled case in the Parliament Library Building in New Delhi. Fifteen women sat in the assembly and fourteen served the full term.

Why Parliament can amend so much

Article 368 sets the procedure, and by the standards of written constitutions it is a low wall. An amendment bill has to pass each house by a two-thirds majority of the total membership with at least two-thirds present and voting. Where the change touches the federal structure or Article 368 itself, more than half the state legislatures must ratify it as well. There is no joint sitting available to break a deadlock between the two houses on an amendment, the one procedural constraint with real force behind it.

The document had been amended 106 times by 28 September 2023, the date the most recent amendment received assent. As it then stood it carried a preamble and 470 articles in 25 parts, with 12 schedules and five appendices, running to about 145,000 words.

Part of that frequency is a drafting decision rather than a measure of upheaval. The constitution spells out governmental powers in such detail that a great many matters handled by ordinary statute elsewhere can be changed in India only by amending the constitution itself.

The list of what has passed through Article 368 reads as a political history. The Twenty-sixth Amendment in 1971 abolished the privy purses paid to the rulers of the former princely states. The Thirty-ninth, in 1975, placed the office of prime minister beyond judicial scrutiny during the Emergency. The Forty-second, in 1976, curtailed fundamental rights, added a list of fundamental duties, and inserted the words socialist, secular and integrity into a Preamble that until then had said only sovereign and democratic. The Forty-fourth, in 1978, passed after the Emergency ended and Indira Gandhi lost office, restored safeguards and replaced internal disturbance with armed rebellion as the ground for emergency powers. The Sixty-first in 1989 lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.

What the courts refuse to let Parliament amend

In Golak Nath v. State of Punjab in 1967 the Supreme Court held that a state could not restrict fundamental rights. Parliament answered with the Twenty-fourth Amendment in 1971, which overturned the ruling.

Two years later the court moved the argument onto ground Parliament could not amend away. Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, decided in 1973, held that an amendment cannot destroy what it seeks to modify: certain basic features of the constitution cannot be abridged or abolished, however large the majority behind the bill. The judgment named some of them, including the supremacy of the constitution, the republican and democratic form of government, its secular character, the separation of powers and its federal character.

The doctrine has never been reduced to a closed list. Article 368 contains no exceptions and the text nowhere mentions a basic structure. Whether a given provision counts as a basic feature is settled by the courts, one case at a time, after the amendment has already been passed.

The reach of the principle was tested within a decade. The Forty-second Amendment had widened Article 31C and added Articles 368(4) and 368(5), which declared that no law passed by Parliament could be challenged in court. In Minerva Mills v. Union of India the Supreme Court struck down all three, holding judicial review to be itself a basic feature.

So the boundary between what an elected Parliament may rewrite and what a court will void is drawn by judges, from a doctrine that judges made, and it moves. Both halves of the arrangement carry weight: a legislature that had rewritten its own constitution 106 times by 2023, and a bench that can void the next attempt.

How the two chambers of Parliament work

The Lok Sabha holds 543 seats filled by first past the post from single-member constituencies, each member serving five years unless the house is dissolved sooner. Of the 543, a total of 131 are reserved, 84 for Scheduled Castes and 47 for Scheduled Tribes, which is 24.03% of the chamber.

The Rajya Sabha represents the states and the union territories. Article 80 caps it at 250; the seating capacity in use is 245. Elected members are chosen by the members of the state and union territory legislatures by single transferable vote on an open ballot, so a state's delegation to the upper house of the union is decided by whoever controls that state's assembly. The twelve nominated members are appointed by the president for contributions to art, literature, science and social service. Terms run six years and are staggered, with about a third of the elected seats falling due every two years. The house is never dissolved, though it can be prorogued. The vice-president chairs it ex officio.

On legislation the two chambers stand equal except on supply, where the Lok Sabha overrides. A conflict can go to a joint sitting, which is settled by arithmetic and so favours the larger house.

Where executive power in India actually sits

The constitution vests the union's executive power in the president under Articles 52 and 53, then requires under Article 74 that the president exercise it on the aid and advice of a Council of Ministers headed by the prime minister. The National Portal of India states the effect plainly: the real executive power is vested in the Council of Ministers with the prime minister at its head.

A president may return advice to the council once, and presidents have used that return publicly to explain their reasoning. If the council resubmits it unchanged, the president must act on it, and Article 111 works the same way for legislation.

Election to the office is indirect and weighted. An electoral college of the elected members of both houses of Parliament, the elected members of the state assemblies and those of the assemblies of Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir and Puducherry votes by secret single transferable ballot. Article 55 splits the college in half: the votes of state legislators are weighted by the population of their state and carry half the total, and the national legislators carry the other half.

Article 75 leaves a live contradiction in the text. Ministers hold office during the pleasure of the president, which reads as a power of dismissal, and the same article makes the council collectively responsible to the Lok Sabha. What would happen if a president dismissed a prime minister who still commanded the lower house has never been tested. The closest approach came in 1987, when President Zail Singh let it be known that he was considering the removal of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

The ordinance power under Article 123 is the executive's route around a chamber it does not control. When either house is out of session the president, acting on the government's advice, may issue an ordinance carrying the force of law; it lapses six weeks after Parliament reconvenes, or sooner if both houses disapprove. The constitution permits this where circumstances require immediate action, and leaves the phrase undefined. Around ten ordinances a year have been issued in recent years, against more than thirty in a single year at the practice's height.

How the union holds power over the states

Article 1 calls India a Union of States, and the wording does real work. There are 28 states and 8 union territories, 36 subnational units in all. States have elected assemblies and their own governments. Five of the eight union territories are run directly from the centre through an appointed administrator, while Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir and Puducherry have elected legislatures of their own.

The Seventh Schedule divides subjects into three lists. The Union List holds defence, foreign affairs, immigration, banking and interstate commerce, and the states may not legislate on any of them. The State List holds the police, public health, agriculture, elections and a range of taxes, closed to the union. The Concurrent List holds courts and criminal law, trade unions, social security and education, where both may legislate and union law prevails in a conflict unless the president assents to the state law. Anything on none of the three lists belongs to the union.

Several mechanisms then pull the balance toward the centre. The Rajya Sabha can vote by two-thirds to lift an item off the State List for a renewable year so that Parliament may legislate on it. Every state's governor is appointed by the president, which in practice means selected by the prime minister, and can be replaced at any time; governors have used delay over assent as a lever where a state and the union are held by different parties. Article 356 allows the president to dismiss a state government outright and take over its administration, a power used freely and on thin grounds for many years until the Supreme Court's judgment in S. R. Bommai v. Union of India made its exercise reviewable.

The bluntest instrument is the power to redraw the federation. Parliament can create a state, merge two, or alter the boundaries of any of them by ordinary law, with no supermajority and no ratification. The legislature of an affected state must be asked for its views and those views need not be followed. States were rearranged wholesale on linguistic lines by the States Reorganisation Act of 1956. Telangana was created in 2014; Ladakh was separated from Jammu and Kashmir as a union territory in 2019, the year Article 370 was abrogated; Daman and Diu was merged with Dadra and Nagar Haveli in 2020.

Below the states, the Seventy-third and Seventy-fourth Amendments of 1992 gave constitutional standing to rural panchayats and urban municipalities and reserved seats on them for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and women. More than a quarter of a million elected local bodies now sit at city, town, district, block and village level.

Why so many parties contest Indian elections

More than 200 parties have been formed since independence in 1947. The Election Commission's published count as of 23 March 2024 stood at 6 national parties, 57 state parties and 2,764 registered but unrecognised ones.

Recognition is earned by results and it buys a symbol. A national party must take at least 6% of the valid votes in four or more states and win at least four Lok Sabha seats, or else win 11 of the 543 Lok Sabha seats from at least three different states. The symbol matters because parties appear on the ballot as pictures, so that a voter who cannot read can still identify one, and no two parties may hold the same picture.

Fragmentation is old and it accelerated after an anti-defection law was passed in 1984, which made crossing the floor harder and starting a new party easier. Parties contesting national elections rose from 33 in 1984 to 113 in 1989 and kept rising after that.

The shape of competition has changed three times. The Indian National Congress won the first general election in 1951 and every one after it until 1977, when a government formed by another party took office for the first time. Single-party majorities disappeared through the 1990s and coalitions replaced them, around the National Democratic Alliance formed after the 1998 election and the United Progressive Alliance formed after 2004. Single-party majorities returned in 2014, when the National Democratic Alliance took 336 of 543 seats with 282 going to the Bharatiya Janata Party alone; the alliance took 353 seats in 2019 and 293 in 2024, a total that depended on allies.

The eighteenth Lok Sabha was elected in seven phases between 19 April and 1 June 2024, with close to 970 million people eligible to vote. The Election Commission of India, a constitutional body under Article 324, administers this through the chief electoral officer of each state and district magistrates acting as district election officers. Photo identity cards for electors were introduced in 1993.

Who sits in those legislatures has its own documented problem. The Association for Democratic Reforms found after the 2024 election that 46% of newly elected members of the Lok Sabha faced criminal charges and 31% faced charges it classed as serious. The Constitution (130th Amendment) Bill of 2025 proposes the automatic removal of ministers detained for more than 30 days on serious offences.

Why assessments of Indian democracy disagree

Two facts hold at once and the indices weight them differently. Close to 970 million people were eligible to vote in the 2024 general election. Across the same period several external bodies lowered their classification of the country.

Freedom House moved India from Free to Partly Free in its Freedom in the World report for 2021, citing what it described as a multiyear pattern in which the government and its allies "have presided over rising violence and discriminatory policies affecting the Muslim population and pursued a crackdown on expressions of dissent by the media, academics, civil society groups, and protesters". The V-Dem Institute classified India as an electoral autocracy in 2023, citing a decline in freedom of expression and the suppression of dissent.

The Government of India has rejected those findings. Its stated objection is methodological: that the indices rest on the opinions of a small set of experts rather than on hard data. Supporters of the administration argue that democracy has deepened through the delivery of public goods over digital infrastructure. This catalogue records the classifications, the reasons given for them and the objection to them, and adjudicates none of the three.

Internal security moved the other way over the same years. The Ministry of Home Affairs reported by 2024 a reduction of 70 to 80% in violence connected with the Naxalite insurgency against its 2010 peak, and the count of districts classed as most affected fell from 36 in 2014 to 3 by 2025. Fighting in Manipur between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities that began in 2023 had caused more than 250 deaths and displaced 60,000 people by 2026. An opinion poll in 2026 found unemployment, inflation and poverty named as the issues that mattered most.

Which alliances India has and has not joined

India joined the United Nations on 30 October 1945, before independence, and stayed in the Commonwealth of Nations on becoming a republic in 1950. It supported decolonisation across Africa and Asia through the 1950s and took a leading part in the Non-Aligned Movement, which it joined in 1961. The later memberships are economic and regional: the World Trade Organization from 1 January 1995, BRICS from 16 June 2009, and the G20, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation.

Non-alignment had a hard edge. Relations with China were cordial for most of the 1950s and the two went to war in 1962; by 1967 Indian forces had turned back Chinese incursions into Sikkim. India and Pakistan have fought four wars, in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999, three of them over Kashmir, which this catalogue records as disputed and takes no position on. After the 1965 war India built close military and economic ties with the Soviet Union, which was supplying most of its weapons by the late 1960s.

The nuclear question shows the pattern most clearly. China tested a device in 1964 and threatened to intervene on Pakistan's side in the 1965 war, and India began building weapons of its own. It tested in 1974 and again underground in 1998, has signed neither the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty nor the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty on the grounds that both are flawed and discriminatory, and maintains a declared policy of no first use. A civil nuclear agreement with the United States in 2008, followed by waivers from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Suppliers Group, opened nuclear commerce to a state outside the treaty.

Cooperation with the United States and the European Union has grown since the end of the Cold War, alongside membership of BRICS since 2009 and of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Holding all of them at once is what the founding policy of the 1950s was designed to allow, and how that policy was built sits in India's own history.