Earlier this year, a constitutional provision returned to the headlines after a brief hiatus. Article 356 was invoked and President’s Rule imposed in the states of Arunachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. After prolonged political drama, the judges of the Supreme Court and the Uttarakhand High Court struck down these proclamations.
As the situations developed in parallel, it became clear that the Governors of the states played key roles in the use of this constitutional provision as a weapon of political war. This was also evident from a bare reading of the text of Article 356.
What was the constitutional design behind vesting the Governor with these powers? Why did the judiciary not interfere, as Article 356 was repeatedly misused for forty years? What motivated the judges of the Supreme Court and the Uttarakhand High Court to strike the proclamations down?
To answer these questions, we turned to senior advocate and Times Now regular Sanjay Hegde and Alok Prasanna Kumar, the Senior Resident Fellow at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. As they explain judgments of the Supreme Court and narrate tales of political intrigue, you will realise that the history of Article 356 is the history of Centre-State relations in India.