Three Amendments That Would Break the Mock Constitution
At the Shivamogga district youth parliament, 84 students from 14 pre-university colleges are debating a mock constitution modelled on the Indian Constitution. Team A proposes three amendments: (1) the Governor may dismiss a Chief Minister who loses a confidence vote without giving the Assembly a chance to elect a new leader; (2) no court may review any law passed by the legislature; (3) any amendment to the mock constitution may be passed by a simple majority of the Assembly. Team B objects that these proposals destroy the very design of the Constitution. The moderator asks both teams to argue from constitutional principles, not from personal opinion. The audience will vote after the debate. A student in the audience asks a practical question: if such amendments were actually made in India, what could a citizen do? The teams have 10 minutes to prepare and no access to the Constitution text.
1. Identify the feature of the Indian Constitution that each of the three proposals violates, and explain why the violation matters for citizens.
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Proposal 1 violates parliamentary government and collective responsibility. Under Articles 163 and 164, the Governor normally acts on the advice of the Council of Ministers, and the Chief Minister remains in office only while commanding a majority in the Assembly. Dismissing a Chief Minister without allowing the Assembly to test confidence would replace accountable cabinet government with arbitrary rule. The safeguard matters because citizens elect MLAs, and the majority in the Assembly, not the Governor, should decide who governs.
Proposal 2 violates judicial review. Articles 13, 32 and 226 allow courts to strike down laws that violate fundamental rights. Judicial review is treated as part of the basic structure. Without it, a law could take away equality or speech and the citizen would have no effective remedy, so rights would become paper promises.
Proposal 3 violates the amendment procedure and the basic structure doctrine. Article 368 requires a special majority in Parliament, and ratification by half the states for federal provisions. A simple majority is the procedure for ordinary laws, not constitutional amendments. The higher threshold protects federalism and prevents a temporary majority from rewriting the rules of the game.
2. Could a real constitutional amendment under Article 368 do any of these three things? Explain using the idea of the basic structure.
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An amendment under Article 368 can change many provisions, including the details of how the Governor and Chief Minister interact, but it cannot destroy the basic structure. In Kesavananda Bharati the Supreme Court held that judicial review, federalism, secularism, free and fair elections and the rule of law are part of that basic structure, and in Minerva Mills it reaffirmed that ordinary amending power cannot convert the Constitution into a document without limits. So proposal 2 would be struck down because it removes judicial review entirely. Proposal 3 would fail because it bypasses Article 368 itself and would let a simple majority destroy the safeguards. Proposal 1 is more complicated: Parliament could alter the form of the executive, but an amendment that makes the Governor personally arbitrary and removes the Assembly's confidence power would attack representative democracy and accountable government. The reasoning is not that the Constitution can never change; it is that change must preserve the core design that makes citizens equal participants rather than subjects.
3. If such a law were actually passed, which court and which constitutional provision would a citizen use to challenge it, and what would she have to show?
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The citizen could move the High Court under Article 226, or the Supreme Court under Article 32 if a fundamental right is violated. Article 32 itself is a fundamental right and is called the right to constitutional remedies. She could also rely on Article 13, which says that laws inconsistent with fundamental rights are void.
She would have to show three things: first, that the law is within the legislative competence of the body that passed it; second, that it violates a specific right such as equality under Article 14, speech under Article 19 or life and personal liberty under Article 21; and third, that the procedure used was unconstitutional, for example that a constitutional amendment was passed by a simple majority instead of the Article 368 special majority.
The court would then examine whether the restriction is reasonable and whether it destroys the basic structure. A mere policy disagreement is not enough; the petitioner must connect the defect to a constitutional rule. This is why the mock debate should focus on legal reasoning, not on whether the students like the proposed amendments.