Why Allowing Devendra Fadnavis to Veto Other Ministers' Decisions is Against Representative Democracy

For the better part of the last decade, Indian politics has followed a familiar script. Centrally appointed Governors won’t sign bills, complicate the formation of elected state governments, sit on decisions indefinitely, or find other ways to slow-walk an elected government. Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Punjab, West Bengal, Delhi, and, most recently, Jammu and Kashmir are States and Union Territories that come to mind, having been at the centre of such political slugfests and, on occasion, court battles. But that familiar pattern now has a new twist in Maharashtra, where the issue is not a Governor obstructing the functioning of an elected government but a veto within the Cabinet itself under Maharashtra’s new Government Rules of Business, 2026. New Rules Give Maharashtra CM Fadnavis to Overrule Decisions by Any MinisterThe 2026 Rules replace the Maharashtra Government Rules of Business, 1975, which governed the allocation and conduct of administrative and ministerial business in the State from 1 July 1975. More importantly, Rule 13(5) now lets the Chief Minister (CM) intervene in any minister’s decision, as long as the intervention is recorded in writing and is deemed necessary in the public interest. Judicial matters are the only exception. In effect, this gives the Chief Minister a veto over the very ministers his party and allies sent to the Assembly. The new law also authorises the Chief Minister to call for documents from any department; both the minister in charge and the department secretary must comply. This gives the Chief Minister a practical way to monitor departmental functioning and exercise closer control over related administrative decisions. The rule’s constitutional significance lies in its explicit overriding of a 2023 ruling by the Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court, which addressed a similar issue involving Devendra Fadnavis’ predecessor, Eknath Shinde. In November 2022, Shinde, then Chief Minister, halted a recruitment process at the Chandrapur District Central Co-operative Bank, even though the matter fell under the Cooperation Minister’s portfolio under the 1975 Rules of Business. The High Court quashed the order, reasoning that the rules did not permit the Chief Minister to “intermeddle with the business of a department assigned to another minister.”TMC's Account Freeze Is the Latest Test of the ED's Sweeping PowersIn an attempt to show the constitutional risks of granting a Chief Minister a veto, I identify seven reasons why such power is constitutionally suspect. First, it violates the principle of collective responsibility, a cardinal principle of a parliamentary democracy like India. Article 164(2) makes the council of ministers collectively responsible to the legislative assembly as a whole; the Constitution does not confer on the Chief Minister a personal power to override or nullify the decisions of individual ministers at will. A Chief Minister’s unilateral veto would convert a constitutional principle of collective accountability into a hierarchical command, reducing ministerial responsibility from accountability to the legislature to subordination to one person. Even if one accepts the interpretation that the council of ministers is “collectively” responsible to the legislature, allowing the chief minister to overrule individual ministers at will would render that principle practically meaningless. Collective responsibility presupposes that ministerial decisions are made through a process of shared responsibility within the cabinet, rather than being reduced to a hierarchy in which the Chief Minister becomes the super minister. Second, the Chief Minister’s veto plainly opposes the principle of representative democracy. The clearest articulation of why this matters comes from the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in the Delhi services case.There, a five-judge bench led by then Chief Justice DY Chandrachud explained that representative democracy rests on a “triple chain of accountability”: officials are accountable to their ministers, ministers are accountable to the legislature, and the legislature is accountable to the electorate. Although the Delhi case involved the vertical allocation of power between the Lieutenant Governor and an elected government, its reasoning was not limited to that context. It affirmed that democratic governance depends on preserving the chain by which political responsibility flows upward, and electoral accountability flows downward. The Maharashtra rule severs that chain at the ministerial level.If the CM can unilaterally substitute his own judgment for a minister’s and merely record reasons, then the minister’s accountability to the legislature and the broader electorate risks breaching the “social contract.”Third, the Chief Minister’s veto must be read in the context of the Mahayuti coalition. Fadnavis is not governing alone. A rule that allows the CM to overrule any minister’s decision in a coalition government necessarily constrains Mahayuti partners, reducing the autonomy of ministers from allied parties and concentrating control in the Chief Minister’s office. Eknath Shinde and Sunetra Pawar, though deputy chief ministers, are ministers themselves; Rule 13(5) therefore creates a hierarchy that can override their decisions as well. Such a veto can therefore be read not only as a sign of coalition fissures, but also as an attempt by the CM to assert dominance over allies.The Fall and Rise of Devendra FadnavisFourth, the operating standard "public interest" is vague. The Chief Minister alone will decide what counts as public interest, with no criteria laid down to guide that determination. The absence of objective parameters makes the exercise of power arbitrary and therefore vulnerable to challenge on the ground of manifest arbitrariness under Article 14. Fifth, Indian constitutional law treats discretionary or overriding powers as powers that must be expressly conferred, not inferred as a general residual authority. By analogy, if the Governor had general discretion to act against cabinet advice, there would have been no need to separately carve out specific instances of discretion under the Constitution.For example, Article 200 allows the Governor to withhold assent and reserve a Bill for the President. This discretionary power has itself been contested, and the Supreme Court has placed important constitutional limits on the Governor’s handling of Bills in State of Punjab vs Principal Secretary to the Governor of Punjab (2024) and State of Tamil Nadu vs Governor of Tamil Nadu (2025). Sixth, this rule plainly overturns an established line of jurisprudence carved out by the Bombay High Court in 2023. Although a rule may be framed as a response to that ruling, it cannot, by mere reenactment, cure the underlying constitutional defect the court identified. As the court held: “The intervention of the Chief Minister is not authorised under the Business Rules and the Instructions issued thereunder. The Intervention of the Chief Minister is wholly unwarranted and without the authority of law. The Chief Minister has no independent power under the Business Rules and Instructions to interfere into the subject which was allocated to the In- charge Minister.” Seventh, the full Council of Ministers—including the Shiv Sena and National Congress Party ministers whose departmental authority is curtailed by Rule 13(5)—appears to have been required to advise the Governor on the adoption of the new rules. Yet it remains unclear if the entire cabinet was on board for enacting the rule. The Constitution requires the Governor to make such rules on the Cabinet's advice [Article 166(3)]; if that advice was never actually sought, Rule 13(5) fails on its own terms.The upshot is that the Chief Minister’s veto is the clearest example of the slow drift of Indian executive power toward the centre of every room it enters. The Union is taking authority from the States, and now, within the States themselves, the Chief Minister is snatching authority from the Cabinet. Representative democracy rests on the premise that power remains distributed among those accountable for exercising it—a minister answerable for a portfolio, a Cabinet answerable to the Assembly, and an Assembly answerable to voters.When that chain is broken, whether by an unelected Governor or an elected Chief Minister, the people’s power is diminished, and executive aggrandisement is normalised at the expense of constitutional accountability.(Burhan Majid teaches legal and constitutional theory at the School of Law, Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi. He tweets at @burhanmajid. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's. The Quint does not endorse or is responsible for them.)

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The Constitutional Issues With Devendra Fadnavis’ Veto Power Over Ministers

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