There is a seductive simplicity to the idea at the heart of the 130th Constitution Amendment Bill: a Prime Minister or Chief Minister who has spent 30 consecutive days in custody for a serious offence should not continue to hold office. Who, after all, wants to be governed from a jail cell?
But the ease with which that question answers itself is precisely why we should be suspicious of it. Constitutional design is not about how a power will be used by a government we trust; it is about how it can be abused by one we do not.
Arrest is not conviction
The Bill’s central mechanism — automatic removal upon 30 days of custody — inverts a foundational principle of our criminal law. An arrest is an accusation backed by state force, not a finding of guilt. Bail can be denied for reasons that have nothing to do with the strength of the case. Investigating agencies, whoever controls them, decide whom to arrest and when. Stitch these together and the provision creates a straightforward recipe: arrest an inconvenient Chief Minister, oppose bail vigorously for a month, and the elected head of a state government stands removed — no trial, no conviction, no voters consulted.
The Joint Parliamentary Committee examining the Bill, which meets on July 17 to adopt its report, is reported to favour retaining the 30-day clause with added safeguards against motivated arrests. The safeguards will deserve close reading. But there is reason to doubt that any drafting can fully immunise the provision, because the vulnerability is structural: it hands an executive-controlled process the power to unseat an elected executive.
The accountability argument deserves an answer
Honesty requires conceding the other side. The spectacle of ministers running governments from prison has genuinely corroded public faith. Resignation on arrest was once a convention; conventions have collapsed, and the Bill is in part a response to that collapse. Those who oppose the amendment cannot simply defend the status quo — they owe the public an alternative, whether time-bound judicial review of such arrests or a requirement that removal follow the framing of charges by a court rather than custody alone.
A constitutional amendment is forever, or close to it. Written for the government of the day, it will be inherited by every government to come. The question for Parliament this monsoon is not whether tainted leaders should cling to office. It is whether we want removal from office to be decided by the slow scrutiny of courts — or by the speed of a police van.
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