By which time Governor has to return an ordinary bill to the concerned State Legislature for reconsideration ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — D, No time limit. Article 200 is the governing provision. When a Bill passed by the State Legislature is presented to the Governor, the Governor must declare either that assent is given, or that assent is withheld, or that the Bill is reserved for the consideration of the President. The first proviso adds the fourth course: the Governor may, 'as soon as possible after the presentation to him of the Bill for assent', return the Bill — if it is not a Money Bill — with a message asking the House to reconsider it, in whole or in part, or to consider particular amendments. 'As soon as possible' is the entirety of the temporal instruction. No number of days, weeks or months appears anywhere in Article 200, so options offering one, two or three months are inventing a figure the Constitution does not contain. The only clock in this whole sequence lies in Article 201, and it binds the legislature rather than the Governor: where a Bill has been reserved for the President and the President directs it to be returned to the House, the House must reconsider it within six months of receiving the message. Two further features of the first proviso matter. The Governor's power to return is exhausted after one use, because if the House passes the Bill again, with or without amendment, and presents it once more, the Governor 'shall not withhold assent therefrom'. And a Money Bill cannot be returned at all — the Governor must either assent to it or reserve it. That combination, an open-ended clock on the first decision and a binding obligation on the second, is what makes the absence of a deadline constitutionally significant rather than a mere drafting gap.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) No period of one month appears in Article 200. The figure is attractive because it sounds like a reasonable administrative deadline and because one month does appear elsewhere in constitutional practice, but nothing in the Governor's assent provision fixes it.  (b) Also absent from the constitutional text. Three months is a period a candidate may half-remember from proclamations and emergencies rather than from Article 200, and importing it here converts a deliberately open-ended provision into a fixed one.  (c) Nowhere in Articles 200 or 201. Of the three numeric options this is the least anchored to anything in the Constitution at all — it is a filler figure placed between the other two to make the set look like a graded range of plausible deadlines.

Concept: Article 200 gives the Governor four possible responses to a Bill passed by the State Legislature: assent, withhold assent, reserve the Bill for the President, or — under the first proviso, and only for a Bill that is not a Money Bill — return it with a message seeking reconsideration. Article 201 then deals with what the President may do with a reserved Bill. Article 111 is the Union analogue, giving the President the same open-ended 'as soon as possible' language for Bills passed by Parliament. Because none of these provisions fixes an outer limit on the first decision, the head of state can in principle simply not act, a practice conventionally called the pocket veto — most famously when President Zail Singh neither assented to nor returned the Indian Post Office (Amendment) Bill of 1986. Successive commissions on Centre-State relations, including the Sarkaria Commission and later the Punchhi Commission, have recommended that a time limit be prescribed for the Governor's decision, and the recurring friction between elected State governments and Raj Bhavans over delayed Bills is a standing item in Indian federalism.

State PCS 2024 Q53 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q53 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer