What a President Is For

On 25 July 2022 the Chief Justice of India administered the oath of office to Droupadi Murmu in the Central Hall of Parliament, and she became the tenth President in succession to be sworn in on that date.

There is no rule requiring it. The date holds for an unremarkable reason. Neelam Sanjiva Reddy took office on 25 July 1977 after a stretch in which two Presidents had died in office and the cycle had gone out of step, and every President since has served the full five years, so each term has ended on 24 July and the next one has begun on the 25th. The date is a monument to nothing going wrong.

Which is the awkward part of the subject, because everything worth knowing about the office is visible only in the moments when something does.

The standard description is that the President of India is ceremonial, a rubber stamp, a figurehead who signs what is put in front of them. That is roughly accurate and almost entirely useless, in the way that describing a fire alarm as a box on a wall is accurate.

What the Constitution actually says

The executive power of the Union is vested in the President by Article 53. That sounds enormous and it is immediately qualified.

Article 74 says there shall be a Council of Ministers with the Prime Minister at its head to aid and advise the President, "who shall, in the exercise of his functions, act in accordance with such advice". The word is shall. The President may send the advice back for reconsideration, once, and must then act on whatever comes back.

That wording has a history. The original text simply said the ministers were there to aid and advise, which left an argument about whether the advice was binding. The 42nd Amendment in 1976 closed the argument by making it binding in terms. The 44th Amendment in 1978, passed by the government that came in after the Emergency, added the single reconsideration. So the modern position, that the President must do as told but may make the Cabinet think about it once, is itself a product of the crisis this article is about.

Article 74(2) adds something people rarely notice: whether any advice was given, and what it was, "shall not be inquired into in any court". The conversation is sealed. What the public sees is only the signature.

And then there is Article 60, the oath, which the Chief Justice administers. The President swears to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution and the law". Every other officeholder swears to bear true faith and allegiance to it. The President is the only one whose oath makes the document itself the thing being defended.

The night it mattered most

At about a quarter past eleven on the night of 25 June 1975, President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed sent for his secretary, K. Balachandran. Ten minutes later Balachandran found him in a sitting room at Rashtrapati Bhavan in his pyjamas, holding a one-page letter from the Prime Minister marked Top Secret. It asked for a proclamation of Emergency under Article 352. It also said that Indira Gandhi would have preferred to consult the Cabinet first, but there was no time.

Balachandran raised the obvious constitutional objection. The President asked for a copy of the Constitution and went through it with his deputy secretary. What they concluded is the single most important sentence in the history of this office: the President's personal satisfaction was constitutionally irrelevant. What the Constitution required was the advice of the Council of Ministers.

There had been no meeting of the Council of Ministers. The ministers themselves learned about the Emergency the following morning.

The draft proclamation arrived. Ahmed signed it. Then, according to the account of that night, he took a tranquiliser and went to bed.

Fundamental rights were suspended, opposition politicians were arrested, and the press was censored, on a signature obtained at midnight from a man who had read the rules and concluded that his own view did not count. Whether the correct reading of Article 74 as it then stood would have let him refuse is still argued over. What is not arguable is that he did not try.

The one President who simply did not sign

Eleven years later the office produced the opposite result, and it did so by exploiting a hole rather than a power.

In 1986 Parliament passed the Indian Post Office (Amendment) Bill, which would have let the government intercept and detain postal articles. President Zail Singh did not assent to it. He also did not return it. He kept it.

Article 111 gives the President three options on an ordinary bill: assent, withhold assent, or return it to Parliament for reconsideration. If it comes back, assent is compulsory. What the article does not contain is any period within which a decision must be made.

K.C. Singh, who was deputy secretary to the President at the time, has described the reasoning. Returning the bill would have guaranteed its passage, because the government would simply have sent it back and forced the signature. Sitting on it would not. So the President sat on it, on the view that his oath, unlike everyone else's, was to defend the Constitution itself.

The relationship between Zail Singh and Rajiv Gandhi collapsed entirely in the process, and the government had neither the Rajya Sabha numbers to impeach him nor the public mood to fight him on a bill about opening people's letters. The bill was never signed. It was formally withdrawn twelve years later, by a government of an entirely different political complexion.

Which is why the argument came back in 2025

One President had helped suspend civil liberties by signing and another had protected one by not signing, and the Constitution names neither move. The second hole, the one about time, reopened in 2023, at state level, over ten bills.

The Tamil Nadu government had passed them, and its Governor had left them pending. In 2023 the state went to court. On 8 April 2025 the Supreme Court held the delay illegal, laid down timelines within which a Governor and the President must act on bills under Articles 200 and 201, and then used Article 142 to deem the ten bills assented to.

That was a large step, and the Union objected to it. On 13 May 2025 President Murmu did something Presidents rarely do: she used Article 143 to ask the Supreme Court for an advisory opinion, putting fourteen questions about the limits of her own office and a Governor's. A Constitution Bench of five judges was constituted on 22 July, heard argument over twelve days between 19 August and 11 September, and delivered its opinion on 20 November 2025.

It went against both sides.

The Court held that it cannot fix timelines for a Governor or the President, because the Constitution was deliberately written without them and that elasticity cannot be overridden by judicial order. It held there is no such thing as deemed assent, and that Article 142 does not permit a court to substitute itself for another constitutional authority. It held that the merits of what a Governor or President decides under Articles 200 and 201 are not justiciable, and that courts may not examine the contents of a bill before it is law.

And then it held the other thing. Where inaction is "prolonged, unexplained and indefinite", it "will certainly invite limited judicial scrutiny", and a court may issue a limited direction that the Governor decide within a reasonable time, without touching the decision itself.

So a President or a Governor still cannot be made to say yes. They can, eventually, be made to say something.

The line worth keeping

The opinion runs to 111 pages and the sentence that carries it is short.

The judges describe the constitutional organs as cogs that keep a clock ticking, each dependent on the others, each obliged to provide a check on the others. "Such a constitutional scheme," they write, "abhors inaction." And then: "our constitutional scheme works, only if it is worked."

They add, of the Governor and by extension of the President, that this "is not to say that the Governor is merely a rubber stamp, between a Bill becoming an Act. There is value, in his consideration."

That is the honest answer to what a President does. Almost everything that crosses the desk is signed, because Article 74 says it must be. But the office holds a small number of real decisions: whom to invite to form a government when nobody has a majority, whether to send advice back the one time that is allowed, what to do with a mercy petition under Article 72, whether to ask the Supreme Court a question under Article 143, and how long to think about a bill nobody has set a deadline for.

Most Presidents never face any of them. The ones who do have, on the record, got it right and got it wrong, and the difference has been measured in things like whether the post can be opened without a warrant, and whether people can be locked up without trial.

Back to 25 July

There is a reasonable chance that the next President of India will be sworn in on 25 July, in the Central Hall, by the Chief Justice, and will spend five years signing things and opening buildings, and the country will conclude once again that the office is decorative.

That is what the office looks like when the clock is ticking properly. The signature at the bottom of a proclamation in June 1975 is what it looks like when it is not.

Sources

• Supreme Court of India, "In Re: Assent, Withholding or Reservation of Bills by the Governor and the President of India, 2025 INSC 1333" (the advisory opinion of 20 November 2025 in full, including the holdings that courts cannot prescribe timelines under Articles 200 or 201, that Article 142 does not permit deemed assent, that the merits of the decisions are not justiciable, that prolonged, unexplained and indefinite inaction invites limited judicial scrutiny, and the passages quoted here about cogs in a clock, a scheme that abhors inaction, the Governor not being merely a rubber stamp, and the line that our constitutional scheme works only if it is worked).
• Supreme Court Observer, "Presidential Reference on Powers of the Governor and President" (the reference of fourteen questions on 13 May 2025; the Constitution Bench of Chief Justice B. R. Gavai with Justices Surya Kant, Vikram Nath, P. S. Narasimha and A. S. Chandurkar constituted on 22 July 2025; twelve days of argument between 19 August and 11 September; and the background of the Tamil Nadu judgment of 8 April 2025 covering ten bills and the timelines it set).
• LiveLaw, "Timelines Can't Be Fixed For Governors and President For Bills' Assent; No Concept Of 'Deemed Assent'" (the three options open to a Governor under Article 200 and the report of the holdings on timelines, deemed assent and limited mandamus).
• ThePrint, "President who took a tranquiliser after signing away India's democratic rights to Indira" (the events of the night of 25 June 1975: the summons at about 11.15 p.m., K. Balachandran, the Top Secret letter under Article 352, the statement that there was no time to consult the Cabinet, the President calling for a copy of the Constitution and concluding that his personal satisfaction was constitutionally irrelevant, and the tranquiliser afterwards).
• Governance Now, "An Insider's Account of the Zail Singh Years: The Endgame" (K. C. Singh, then deputy secretary to the President, on the pocket veto of the Post Office Bill: that returning it would have forced assent on resubmission, that the absence of any constitutional time limit was the opening used, the President's view of his own oath, the breakdown with Rajiv Gandhi, and the government's lack of numbers to impeach).
• Indian Kanoon, "Article 74, Constitution of India" (the text requiring the President to act in accordance with ministerial advice, and clause (2) barring any court from inquiring into what advice was tendered).
• Constitution of India, Centre for Law and Policy Research, "Article 60: Oath or affirmation by the President" (the text of the oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution and the law, and the requirement that the Chief Justice administer it).
• National Herald, "Droupadi Murmu to take oath as President of India today" (the swearing-in on 25 July 2022 in the Central Hall by Chief Justice N. V. Ramana, and Murmu becoming the tenth successive President to take the oath on that date).