The Executive Office Without a Limit

Source: The Hindu

Introduction 

Recently, Narendra Modi completed 8,931 days as head of an elected government in India — combining over thirteen years as Chief Minister of Gujarat with three consecutive terms as Prime Minister. The milestone surpassed the record of Pawan Kumar Chamling, who served as Chief Minister of Sikkim for 8,930 days.  

• The occasion raises a constitutional question that neither congratulations from within the ruling dispensation nor alarm from its critics adequately engages: why does India's Constitution impose no limit on how long a single individual may hold the office that wields actual executive power?

Constituent Assembly's Rationale 

• The Constituent Assembly's reasoning was articulated by B.R. Ambedkar in his speech of November 4, 1948, introducing the Draft Constitution. Ambedkar drew a distinction between two forms of accountability — the "daily assessment of responsibility," available through questions, no-confidence motions, and adjournment motions; and the "periodic assessment" offered by fixed-term elections.  
• The daily assessment, he argued, was far more effective.  
• No term limit was needed because the legislature's confidence served as a rolling check.  
• The Constituent Assembly thus envisioned questions, adjournment motions, and no-confidence motions as the primary instruments for holding the Prime Minister accountable, with fixed-term elections reinforcing that check as an efficient alternative to explicit term limits.

What the Tenth Schedule Broke? 

• The Fifty-Second Amendment (1985) inserted the Tenth Schedule, providing for the disqualification of any legislator who votes against the party whip.  
• The Supreme Court in Kihoto Hollohan vs. Zachillhu (1992) upheld its constitutionality as a measure to protect the integrity of the electoral mandate. 
• But the Tenth Schedule fundamentally altered the relationship between legislature and executive that Ambedkar had relied upon.  
• Under the anti-defection regime, a ruling-party member who votes against the government on a confidence motion faces disqualification. 
• The no-confidence motion becomes a dead letter whenever the ruling party has a working majority. 
• Nor does the British safety valve operate in India. Indian political parties have no institutionalised mechanism for leadership challenges.  
• The anti-defection law locks legislators into party loyalty; the absence of intra-party democracy locks the party into loyalty to its leader. The anti-defection law thus altered the intended system of checks the framers relied upon.

The Comparative Evidence 

• Tom Ginsburg, James Melton, and Zachary Elkins, in their study of executive term-limit evasion, showed that leaders in multiple regions have sought to extend their tenure through constitutional amendment, replacement, or judicial interpretation.  
• Ginsburg and Aziz Huq further argued that democratic decline more often proceeds through incremental institutional decay than through sudden authoritarian rupture. 
• India has not needed to abolish a term limit because it never had one. The question is whether the absence of a formal constraint, combined with the neutralisation of parliamentary accountability, produces the same structural risks that term limits elsewhere are designed to prevent.

The Presidential Irony 

• India has developed a convention against a third presidential term, though the presidency is largely ceremonial.  
• No President has served more than two terms. The expectation satisfies the three-part test for constitutional conventions laid down by Ivor Jennings in The Law and the Constitution (1959): precedents exist, the actors believed themselves bound by a rule, and the rule has a reason. 
• The office that holds no real executive power is constrained by convention. The office that holds virtually all executive power is constrained only by the electorate's periodic verdict — with the anti-defection law largely disabling other accountability mechanisms.

The Counter-Argument and Its Limits 

• The strongest counter-argument is that voters have endorsed Modi's tenure three consecutive times, and that a term limit would override their expressed preference.  
• The objection is serious: a term limit is, in a real sense, anti-democratic. But it rests on the premise that Ambedkar relied upon — that periodic elections, combined with parliamentary accountability, suffice to discipline executive power.  
• If that accountability has been structurally impaired by the Tenth Schedule, elections must carry a heavier burden. 
• Elections, however free, are a weak constraint on the compounding advantages of prolonged incumbency: control over appointments to regulatory bodies, the Election Commission, and the higher judiciary; the capacity to shape the information environment; and the ability to calibrate policy for electoral benefit across multiple cycles.  
• If parliamentary accountability is structurally weakened by the Tenth Schedule, elections bear an even heavier responsibility.

What Might Be Done 

• The more natural reform is to restore the mechanism the framers relied upon. Exempting votes on confidence motions from the Tenth Schedule's disqualification provision would allow legislators to remove a government without forfeiting their seats.  
• A more ambitious possibility is a constitutional amendment limiting consecutive terms as Prime Minister or Chief Minister, while permitting a return after a gap. 
• The State-level dimension is equally pressing, given the extended tenures of leaders such as Jyoti Basu, Naveen Patnaik, and Pinarayi Vijayan.

Conclusion 

The 8,931-day milestone forces attention to whether India's parliamentary system retains the self-correcting capacity the framers relied upon. India is unusual among large democracies in having no formal limit on prime ministerial tenure — a gap that the Constituent Assembly believed unnecessary given robust legislative accountability. The Tenth Schedule has since hollowed out that accountability. Whether the answer lies in restoring parliamentary checks, imposing formal term limits, or both, the constitutional asymmetry between a ceremonially constrained presidency and an effectively unconstrained Prime Minister's office is no longer a theoretical concern. It is a structural question that the 8,931-day milestone makes impossible to defer.