Judicial Activism Versus Judicial Restraint in Maintaining India’s Federal Balance

Jai Subhash Thakur
Research Scholar

HRIT University, Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh 201206

Dr. Priyadarshni

Associate Professor

HRIT University, Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh 201206

Abstract

The Supreme Court of India is the designated umpire of a polity that its own framers declined to call a federation. Between 2020 and 2025 the Court decided a dense cluster of disputes on the constitutional status of co-operative societies, the Goods and Services Tax Council, mineral taxation, control over services in Delhi, the investigative jurisdiction of the Central Bureau of Investigation, State borrowing and the assent powers of Governors which together constitute the most consequential phase of federal adjudication since S.R. Bommai. This paper argues that the familiar binary of “activism” and “restraint” is too blunt to describe that jurisprudence. What the record actually discloses is a divergence between interpretive posture and remedial posture: the Court has been consistently and increasingly activist in construing legislative entries and constitutional offices in favour of the States, while oscillating sharply over what it may do once a violation is established. That oscillation is most visible in the treatment of Article 200, where the “deemed assent” device fashioned in State of Tamil Nadu v. Governor of Tamil Nadu was disapproved within seven months by a Constitution Bench answering the Presidential Reference of 2025. The paper concludes that durable protection of the federal balance lies in doctrinal clarity and institutional reform rather than in remedial improvisation under Article 142.

Keywords: Indian federalism; judicial activism; judicial restraint; Article 200; Article 131; fiscal federalism; Article 142.