Responding to Democratic Decay in South Asia: The ‘Federalism Constraint’ on Regional Emergency Powers in India

Kritika Vohra
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Abstract

Abstract 2020 marked the 14th consecutive year of democratic decline in the world, and South Asia has been no exception to this global phenomenon. This paper focuses on one particularly egregious onslaught on democracy in India. In August 2019, the Indian government stripped the former state of Jammu and Kashmir of its special status under the Constitution of India, and reorganized its territory into two union territories. The government’s use of its regional emergency powers provided the legal basis for operationalizing these changes. Their use in this manner raises the question of the proper scope of these powers, independently of whether the proclamation of the regional emergency was constitutionally valid. What, if any, are the substantive limitations that constrain the center’s exercise of regional emergency powers? This paper offers a partial response to this question. It relies on the basic structure doctrine to theorize a substantive limitation on their exercise and situates this limitation in the wider legal and historical landscape on regional emergency powers. Articulating it as the ‘Federalism Constraint’, the paper argues that, even when a validly proclaimed regional emergency is in force in a state, the center cannot exercise its regional emergency powers to effect a permanent change to the detriment of the state, as doing so would damage federalism, a basic feature of the Constitution. On this basis, the paper argues that the recent changes to the status of the former state of Jammu and Kashmir are unconstitutional.
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对南亚民主衰退的回应:印度区域紧急权力的“联邦制约束”
2020年是全球民主衰退连续第14年,南亚也不例外。本文关注的是印度民主遭受的一次特别恶劣的冲击。2019年8月,印度政府取消了前查谟和克什米尔邦根据印度宪法的特殊地位,并将其领土重组为两个联邦领土。政府使用其区域紧急权力为实施这些变化提供了法律基础。以这种方式使用这些权力引起了这些权力的适当范围的问题,而不管宣布区域紧急状态是否在宪法上有效。如果有的话,是什么实质性限制限制了该中心行使区域紧急权力?本文对这个问题作了部分的回答。它依靠基本结构理论对这些权力的行使进行实质性限制,并将这种限制置于区域紧急权力的更广泛的法律和历史背景中。该论文将其表述为“联邦制约束”,认为即使在一个州有效宣布的地区紧急状态生效时,中央政府也不能行使其地区紧急状态权力来影响对该州不利的永久性改变,因为这样做会损害联邦制度,这是宪法的基本特征。在此基础上,本文认为,最近对前查谟和克什米尔邦地位的改变是违宪的。
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