Article 356 and the Limits of the ‘Constitutional Coup’ Frame
Authored by Aryan Gupta, a 3rd-year law student pursuing B.A.LL.B. at Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law, Punjab
In writing about Article 356 of the Indian Constitution, it is not unusual to reach for Kim Lane Scheppele's account of the "constitutional coup": the removal of a government through procedures the Constitution itself supplies, with no overtly illegal act anywhere in the chain. Since 1950, the president’s power under Article 356 to impose a ‘state emergency’ when they deem it necessary has repeatedly done exactly this to elected state governments, at the whims of the centre. But Scheppele's model of a ‘constitutional coup’, built to describe Hungary's transformation after 2010 from a liberal democracy into an illiberal electoral autocracy under Viktor Orbán, describes something more specific than any single dismissal. It requires a sustained, coordinated project by one governing actor, executed over years, packing courts, rewriting electoral rules, and entrenching its own hold on power while never breaking a formal law. Before borrowing the label, it is worth asking whether Article 356's history actually has that shape, or whether the analogy is doing more rhetorical work than analytical work.
Scheppele's 'Constitutional Coup' Model Tested Against India's Article 356 Record
Congress has invoked Article 356 against Janata-ruled States, the Janata government against Congress-ruled States in 1977, Congress again in 1980 and 1992, and BJP-led governments after 2014 [i]. This is not one actor entrenching itself against permanent opposition; it is a recurring instrument that has changed hands with the government at the Centre and been turned, opportunistically, on whichever party controlled the States at the time. But the rotation was not evenly distributed, and calling it a "reciprocal" spoils system risks flattering a record that was, for its first four decades, heavily one-sided. The figures below show the great majority of invocations were concentrated in the two decades of Congress's near-uninterrupted dominance at the Centre, when opposition-run States had little capacity to retaliate in kind. Rotation became a real, mutually inflicted feature of the practice only once the party system itself fragmented after 1989. This makes the self-limiting character of Article 356's abuse a contingent product of coalition politics rather than a structural feature the provision was ever designed, or observed, to have from the outset.
What survives the comparison is narrower than the label suggests, but still doing real work: Scheppele's central insight is that formal legality can be the mechanism of subversion rather than a check on it. An act can defeat constitutional self-government precisely by never breaking any rule along the way. That insight travels to Article 356 even where the entrenchment logic does not. Part of the reason it does not is structural: Article 356 requires parliamentary ratification within two months and lapses by default within six. That forecloses the kind of multi-year, uncontested entrenchment Scheppele describes, even where any single invocation is grossly misused. The remainder of this piece uses Scheppele's insight about legality as mechanism, not her assumption of a single, permanently entrenching actor.
Article 356's Colonial Origin: Section 93 of the Government of India Act, 1935
Article 356 permits the President to assume a State's executive and legislative functions where the government of a State “cannot be carried on in accordance with the provisions of this Constitution.” Its lineage runs to Section 93 of the Government of India Act, 1935, which let a colonial Governor override an uncooperative provincial ministry. Hriday Nath Kunzru had warned the Constituent Assembly that the provision could reduce electoral accountability to a fiction, since a determined Union could always locate a pretext to topple the elected state government. Dr B.R. Ambedkar answered not by denying the risk but by minimising it, insisting the provision conferred no power to judge the quality of governance in a State, and hoping Article 356 would remain a “dead letter” [ii]. The conventional reading of that exchange is that Ambedkar underestimated how often the power would be misused. The sharper misjudgment ran the other way: the debate assumed, as India's political landscape in 1949 gave every reason to assume, that one dominant party would hold the Centre for the foreseeable future. Neither Kunzru's fear nor Ambedkar's reassurance anticipated a multi-party federal system in which the abuse of Article 356 could eventually be checked by the practical threat of its return in kind, because in 1949 there was no credible opposition capable of posing that threat. What restrained the provision, once it finally was restrained, was a structural feature of Indian party politics, not anything built into the text the framers wrote. That restraint postdates the Constituent Assembly debates by four decades.
How Often Has President's Rule Been Imposed? The Record, By the Numbers
The scale of the gap between text and practice is measurable, though the precision of any single figure should not be overstated. The government's own National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution, drawing on Chapter Six and the annexures of the Sarkaria Commission's 1988 report, recorded that the power had been exercised on more than ninety occasions between 1950 and 1994. That same chapter offers a narrower figure on the Commission's own assessment of misuse: of seventy-five proclamations examined between 1951 and 1987, the Sarkaria Commission found fifty-two to be instances where the power should not have been invoked. The usage pattern was heavily front-loaded on any account: a compilation of President's Rule impositions by decade, known through an RTI, puts the count at twenty invocations in the Constitution's first two decades against sixty-three between 1971 and 1990 alone, the period of Indira Gandhi's dominance and the Janata government's retaliatory dismissals of 1977. The clearest single metric relevant to Bommai's claimed effect is a before-and-after comparison offered in one case summary of the decision, which puts the invocation rate at roughly 2.5 a year between 1950 and 1994 against a little over one a year between 1995 and 2021, a decline worth taking seriously even though, as the next section argues, it does not by itself prove what caused it.
S.R. Bommai v. Union of India: A Real but Partial Correction
In State of Rajasthan v. Union of India (1977), the Supreme Court treated the President's satisfaction under Article 356 as almost entirely non-justiciable. Bommai (1994) reversed that deference, holding a proclamation open to review wherever it rests on irrelevant, mala fide, or extraneous material, placing the burden of justification on the Union, and barring dissolution of the Assembly before Parliament ratifies the proclamation. But the same nine-judge Bench also held secularism to be part of the Constitution's basic structure, so that a State government's action against that value could itself supply grounds for invoking Article 356. This matters because Article 356's text speaks only to breakdown of constitutional machinery, an administrative and procedural failure, whereas a secularism violation is a substantive, values-based judgment about how a government governs, a different kind of trigger altogether. Both halves of this holding are expressed in the judgment itself. Sawant J. (Para VIII) held that acts "calculated to subvert or sabotage secularism" can themselves count as a breakdown of constitutional machinery, and Jeevan Reddy J. (Para (10)) held that a State government following "unsecular policies" becomes liable to action under Article 356. Bommai narrowed the provision procedurally while simultaneously widening its substantive trigger beyond breakdown of governmental machinery, a tension the case does not resolve.
Whether the post-1994 decline is attributable to Bommai or to the coalition politics that arrived at nearly the same time is genuinely unsettled by this record, and the temptation to resolve it with a single natural experiment should be resisted. The period since 2014, when a single party has again held a comfortable Lok Sabha majority, is sometimes offered as a test: if the constraint were mainly doctrinal, controversial invocations should stay rare regardless of the numbers at the Centre; if it were mainly political, they should resurface once single-party dominance returns. The two most contested invocations of that period, Uttarakhand and Arunachal Pradesh in 2016, did occur inside a single-party government, executed through partisan Governors against ministries facing internal dissent rather than any breakdown of governance. But two correlated episodes from one year cannot carry the weight of a general claim about which mechanism, doctrine or political fragmentation, is doing more of the restraining work. A single-party government invoking the provision controversially twice in a decade, against a pre-Bommai rate of roughly 2.5 a year, is at least as consistent with Bommai having worked, imperfectly, as it is with the decline being a coalition-era artefact that has simply not yet fully unwound. The honest conclusion is that this record cannot adjudicate between the two explanations, only that both remain live.
Reforming Article 356: Governors, Speakers and Court-Supervised Floor Tests
The standard reform menu, non-partisan Governor appointments, mandatory floor tests, ex-ante parliamentary scrutiny, drawn largely from the Sarkaria and Punchhi Commissions, is correct as far as it goes, but its central proposal shares the defect it is meant to cure. A “collegial mechanism” for appointing Governors still has to be designed, staffed, and periodically reconstituted by political actors, and nothing stops the same parliamentary majority that controls the Centre from controlling the composition of that collegium too, one procedural step removed.
A floor test convened by the Assembly's own Speaker looks like an escape from that regress, since a floor test is a fact rather than a discretionary judgment. It is not, in fact, an escape: Speakers are themselves overwhelmingly majority-party figures, and disqualification timing under the anti-defection law has become its own well-documented site of partisan manipulation, entirely independent of Article 356. In Shrimanth Balasaheb Patil v Speaker, Karnataka Legislative Assembly (2019), a Speaker's disqualification orders reshaped a floor test's outcome in the run-up to a change of government in Karnataka, and in Subhash Desai v Governor of Maharashtra (2023), the Supreme Court had to resolve a dispute over whether a Speaker facing his own removal motion could rule on disqualifications at all. Both episodes turned on Speaker discretion, not Governor discretion, and both show the same capture logic reappearing one office over. A reform that swaps a Governor's discretion for a Speaker's has not escaped the regress; it has relocated it to a marginally less obvious address.
The most capture-resistant option available is not a new domestic office at all, since any domestic office is reconstitutable by the same parliamentary majority the reform is meant to constrain. It is a standing, court-supervised floor-test protocol of the kind the Supreme Court has already improvised ad hoc, ordering floor tests directly under Article 142 in Karnataka in 2019 and Uttarakhand in 2016, made a default, automatic precondition, on a fixed short timeline, for any report recommending President's Rule, rather than a discretionary remedy litigants must apply for after the fact. The reform proposed here is not the floor test itself, which courts have already ordered ad hoc, but converting it from a discretionary remedy sought after the fact into a mandatory, automatic step triggered the moment a Governor's report recommends President's Rule, a shift from case-by-case litigation to a standing rule. Courts are not perfectly insulated from political pressure either, and this essay does not claim otherwise. But of the three institutions in play, Governor, Speaker, and Court, only the last is not a standing feature of the very majority the reform is trying to discipline, which is a modest claim, not a solution.
Conclusion: Is Article 356 a Constitutional Coup?
None of this means Kim Lane Scheppele's work has nothing to say about India. It means the useful version of the comparison is more modest than the headline analogy suggests, and more modest than this essay's own conclusion should be tempted to claim. What the record actually supports is three narrower propositions. First, formally lawful displacement of an elected government is a transferable mechanism, not unique to any one constitutional order. Second, the same mechanism produces different outcomes depending on the surrounding party system: entrenchment, where one actor can expect durable dominance, a rotating and only belatedly self-limiting abuse where it cannot. Third, which of those conditions holds in India at a given moment, and how much of any given period's restraint is owed to doctrine versus to political fragmentation, is not something this record settles with confidence. The question worth asking is not whether Article 356 amounts to a coup; it does not, on the evidence assembled here, but whether the structural condition that has so far prevented one, a federal system without any single party's durable dominance, is something India's Constitution actually guarantees, or only something its recent political history has happened to supply.
References
[i] M. P. Jain, Indian Constitutional Law (8th edn, LexisNexis 2023).
[ii] Sujit Choudhry, Madhav Khosla and Pratap Bhanu Mehta (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution (OUP 2016).
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