LLM Group 1 Constitutional and Administrative Law Administrative Process Nature and Scope Apr 2025 - ATKT Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: the word "critically" is the instruction that matters. The answer must state the Indian position, illustrate it, and then evaluate it, saying what the Indian settlement gets right and what it does not. A good structure is: the theory in one paragraph; the Indian rule from Ram Jawaya Kapur; the examples of overlap organised by organ; the hard core that cannot be crossed; and then four critical propositions, each defended. The examples must be Indian, as the question requires.

The theory and the Indian rule

Montesquieu argued in 1748 that liberty is lost when the legislative, executive and judicial powers are held in the same hands, and that power should be a check to power. The doctrine asserts that no person should sit in two organs, that no organ should control another, and that no organ should exercise another's functions.

The legislature exercising judicial power. Under Articles 105 and 194 each House may punish for contempt and breach of privilege, sitting as judge in its own cause. The limit is that it may not decide a case: Indira Nehru Gandhi v. Raj Narain, 1975 Supp SCC 1 struck down Article 329A(4), which had declared the Prime Minister's election valid while her appeal was pending and barred every court from examining it.

The judiciary exercising legislative and executive power. Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan, (1997) 6 SCC 241 laid down binding guidelines on sexual harassment at the workplace that governed for sixteen years until Parliament legislated. Prakash Singh v. Union of India, (2006) 8 SCC 1 issued seven directions restructuring the police. Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association v. Union of India, (2016) 5 SCC 1 struck down the Ninety-ninth Amendment and the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act, 2014, keeping the appointment of judges with a collegium that appears nowhere in the constitutional text.

Each organ checking the others. Judicial review under Articles 13, 32 and 226; parliamentary control of finance through the Comptroller and Auditor General under Articles 148 to 151 and the Public Accounts Committee; and the executive's own instrument, the reference under Article 143, used in 2025 as described below.

The critical analysis

First proposition: the Indian settlement is coherent, because it protects the function that matters rather than the form. A parliamentary system cannot separate the executive from the legislature, and a modern State cannot legislate every detail. What can be protected is adjudication, and India has protected it more strongly than any of the systems it is usually compared with, by making judicial review unamendable. That is the correct choice, and the tribunal litigation shows it being enforced: from Union of India v. R. Gandhi, (2010) 11 SCC 1, through Rojer Mathew v. South Indian Bank Ltd., (2019) 6 SCC 1, to Madras Bar Association v. Union of India, decided 19 November 2025, which struck down the core provisions of the Tribunals Reforms Act, 2021 because Parliament had re-enacted provisions already held unconstitutional without curing the defects, and directed a National Tribunals Commission within four months.

Fourth proposition: the doctrine is now being applied against the judiciary as well, and that is a sign of health rather than of retreat. In State of Tamil Nadu v. Governor of Tamil Nadu, decided 8 April 2025, the Court prescribed timelines for the Governor and the President to act on Bills under Articles 200 and 201 and treated ten Bills as having received deemed assent under Article 142. On a reference under Article 143, a Constitution Bench advised on 20 November 2025 that no judicially prescribed timelines may be imposed, that deemed assent is alien to the Constitution because one constitutional authority cannot substitute itself for another, and that decisions under those Articles are not ordinarily justiciable, while a Governor may not sit on a Bill indefinitely. Whichever way the merits are read, a system in which the boundary can be tested in both directions in the same week, as it was in November 2025, is a system in which the doctrine is doing work.

A fifth proposition: the doctrine has no answer to the party

The classical doctrine assumes that the three organs have distinct institutional interests, so that each will resist encroachment by the others. In a parliamentary democracy with disciplined parties that assumption fails, and the Indian constitutional text has made it fail harder.

The consequence for the separation of powers is precise and is rarely stated. The legislative check on the executive, which is the first of Montesquieu's three propositions in a parliamentary system, operates through the ability of legislators to withhold support. The Tenth Schedule removes that ability for everything short of a confidence motion, and the anti-defection rules apply to ordinary legislation as much as to a vote of confidence. So the delegation clause passes with the Bill, the laying requirement is directory after Atlas Cycle Industries Ltd. v. State of Haryana, (1979) 2 SCC 196, and the scrutiny committees may only recommend, not because anyone designed a weak legislature but because a disciplined majority cannot vote against its own government's rules.

That is the strongest critical point available on this question, and it explains the shape of Indian constitutional litigation. In a system where two of the three organs are effectively fused by party discipline, every serious dispute about the limits of power ends up in the third, which is why the Indian doctrine has become, in practice, a doctrine about the scope of judicial review.