Few Centre-state disputes have moved as fast, or turned around as sharply, as the recent fight over how long a state Governor can sit on a bill passed by an elected state legislature before acting on it. This article walks through the dispute, the Supreme Court’s dramatic April 2025 ruling, and its equally dramatic November 2025 reversal.
The Underlying Dispute
Several opposition-ruled states, including Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Punjab, West Bengal, and Telangana, have accused their centrally appointed Governors of deliberately delaying assent to bills passed by their elected state assemblies, sometimes for years, a practice these state governments argue effectively lets a single centrally appointed official override an elected legislature’s will simply by declining to act on its legislation one way or the other, neither signing it into law nor formally rejecting it and sending it back.
The Tamil Nadu Case That Forced the Issue
The dispute reached a head through Tamil Nadu’s case against Governor R.N. Ravi, who had left a substantial number of state bills pending without action for extended periods, according to coverage of the matter by the Supreme Court Observer, prompting the Tamil Nadu government to approach the Supreme Court directly seeking a ruling on whether the Constitution allows a Governor to indefinitely withhold action on a bill without either granting assent, withholding it, or formally reserving it for the President’s consideration.
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The April 2025 Ruling That Set Deadlines
On April 8, 2025, the Supreme Court delivered a landmark ruling in State of Tamil Nadu v. Governor of Tamil Nadu, finding that Governor Ravi’s handling of certain re-adopted bills was “illegal and erroneous,” according to News on Air’s coverage of the verdict, and going further to set indicative timelines within which Governors and even the President must act on bills going forward, exercising the Court’s special Article 142 powers to do so. The ruling was celebrated by several opposition-ruled state governments as a decisive check on what they characterised as governors weaponising legislative delay for political purposes.
The Presidential Reference That Followed
The ruling’s unusually assertive use of judicial power to impose specific timelines on a different branch of government drew a formal challenge through an unusual constitutional mechanism: President Droupadi Murmu referred a set of specific questions about the judgment’s constitutional soundness back to the Supreme Court itself for an advisory opinion, according to News on Air’s coverage of the reference, a rare procedural step that effectively asked the Court to reconsider whether its own April ruling had gone further than the Constitution actually permits. The Court began hearing arguments on this Presidential Reference in August 2025, according to further News on Air coverage, with the central government’s Attorney General specifically questioned during the hearings about the pattern of bills remaining pending before Governors since 2020, according to Deccan Herald’s reporting on the proceedings.
The November 2025 Reversal
On November 20, 2025, the Supreme Court delivered its verdict on the Presidential Reference, and the outcome marked a significant reversal of its own earlier position. According to Bar and Bench’s coverage of the ruling, the Court held that the specific directions in its April 8 judgment setting timelines for Governors and the President to act on bills were “incorrect and against the Constitution and separation of powers,” explicitly finding that a Governor’s constitutional role in granting assent under Article 200 cannot be replaced by any form of automatic “deemed assent” if the Governor simply doesn’t act within a set period. The practical effect, as Bar and Bench’s analysis put it, restored Governors’ and the President’s discretionary authority over the timing of bill assent, with no court-imposed deadlines currently in force.
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What This Back-and-Forth Reveals About the Underlying Tension
Taken together, this sequence, an initial ruling forcefully favouring elected state legislatures’ authority, followed seven months later by an equally forceful judicial reversal favouring gubernatorial discretion, illustrates just how genuinely contested the underlying constitutional balance between Governors’ formal powers and elected state governments’ legislative authority remains, with even the Supreme Court itself, across two different benches considering closely related questions, arriving at sharply different conclusions about where that balance should sit.
Where the Underlying Political Dispute Stands Now
With the November 2025 ruling removing the specific enforceable deadlines the April 2025 judgment had created, opposition-ruled states no longer have the same direct judicial timeline-enforcement tool they briefly held over the intervening seven months, meaning the underlying pattern of Governor-state government friction that originally produced the Tamil Nadu case remains, in practical legal terms, without the specific remedy the April ruling had appeared to provide, even though the broader political and public attention the episode drew to the issue of bill-pendency delays is likely to persist regardless of the specific legal outcome.
Bottom Line
The fight over how long Governors can sit on state bills before acting produced one of the most dramatic judicial reversals in recent Indian constitutional history: an April 8, 2025 Supreme Court ruling found Tamil Nadu’s Governor had acted illegally and set enforceable timelines for gubernatorial action, only for the Court, responding to a Presidential Reference, to hold on November 20, 2025 that those same timelines were themselves unconstitutional, restoring Governors’ full discretionary authority and leaving the underlying Centre-state tension over delayed bill assent without the specific judicial remedy the April ruling had briefly appeared to establish.
Disclaimer: This article is based on publicly available Supreme Court judgments and news reports listed below. It is written for general informational purposes and does not represent an official statement from the Government of India, the Supreme Court of India, or any state government.
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