The 130th Amendment And The Erosion Of The Procedural Basic Structure
- IJLLR Journal
- 4 days ago
- 2 min read
Tania Singh, University Institute of Legal Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh
I. INTRODUCTION
The One Hundred and Thirtieth Amendment Bill of 2025 (130th Amendment Bill) arrives a very particular and perilous journey in the India’s constitutional journey, marked by the period characterized by an increasing societal and political impatience with the procedural technicalities in the face of a perceived moral crisis with the body politic. The Bill’s central proposition is the automatic vacation of any office for any Minister, Chief Minister or even Prime Minister, who has been in judicial custody for thirty consecutive days. The bill follows a theme of the criminalization of politics, by targeting the phenomena of governance from jail. The implication of the Bill is to safeguard the dignity of the constitutional offices, ensuring that those who pilot the Great Ship of State do so from the cabinet room rather than a prison cell.
The legislative intent leans towards the normative framework of constitutional morality, a concept popularized and refined by the Supreme court in the case of Manoj Narula v. Union of India. The court, here, observed that the Prime Minister and Chief Ministers serving as custodians of public trust, suggest that their discretion in appointing and retaining ministers should be guided by a high moral compass and expectation of the institutions’ integrity. The 130th Amendment Bill attempts to take the judicial sentiment of aspirational hope as expressed in the above noted case and deforms it into a rigid, self-executing constitutional command.
However, in the architecture of a liberal democracy, the structure, implementation and the perceived meaning of a policy matters more as compared to its declared goal. While the Bill presents itself as an ethics code designed to cleanse the executive, in reality, it is a profound structural intervention that threatens to fundamentally rewrite the rules of political survival in India. By grafting a custodial trigger, the Bill intends to create a new modal of executive removal that operates entirely outside the will of Legislative, by amending the constitutional provisions of Articles 75, 164 and 239A.
