Constitutional Fiats: Presidential Legislation in India’s Parliamentary Democracy

his article (the first in a two-part series) evaluates the nature and scope of executive controls over primary legislation in India and Pakistan. A Parliament, in a representative democracy, is the principal legislative body. Statutes enacted by it are substantively legitimate, presumably, because they satisfy minimum constitutional requirements. Procedurally, Bills go through several stages of drafting, parliamentary readings and some form of majority consensus before they are enacted into law. Despite the numeric and procedural hurdles, control over proposed legislation from the point of introduction is, ordinarily speaking, internal to Parliament. However, it is not uncommon for Constitutions, specifically in South Asian parliamentary democracies like India and Pakistan, to recognize conditions under which ordinary legislative controls may be entirely by-passed or, for limited purposes, placed with executive offices. This article attempts to articulate reasons that limit the scope of substitutive executive control, without necessarily offending the constitutional space afforded to it. http://papers.ssrn.com