Tests of wills, with a few bills

Our Constitution, lauded as the world’s longest and one of the finest, is said to contain prescriptions for most of the problems that our politics, which is often the art of the impossible, can throw up. Yet there are occasions, however rare, when we find the Constitution being silent, and its pundits clueless.

- R. PRASANNAN

The Constitution says that a bill passed by the legislature shall become law only after the president, or governor in the case of a state, gives his assent. If he returns the bill, and if the legislature passes it again and sends it to him, he is bound to give his assent.

But what if he does nothing on presentation of a bill for the first time? That is, if he simply sits on it? The Constitution is silent on this; it does not prescribe a time frame for the president or the governor to sign on the dotted line, or tear it up on any perforated line.

President Zail Singh used this silence of the statute to the hilt; he killed Rajiv Gandhi’s postal bill, which was not to his liking. The postal bill, if you don’t know, was one which empowered your postmaster to open your love letters, an ungentlemanly act in those pre-hacking days when epistolary privacy was an article of faith in decent democracies.