The Modi Government’s reported move to introduce the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill in the coming Winter Session of Parliament, to bring Chandigarh under Article 240, is not a routine technical tweak. It is a rude political jolt for Punjab. For a border state that built Chandigarh after Partition in 1947 out of its own soil and resources, ceded it in the name of reorganisation in 1966, and has waited decades for the Centre to honour its word, this proposal will be read as nothing less than an attempt to wrench the city definitively out of Punjab’s administrative and political orbit.
Those broken assurances are not vague or oral. Indira Gandhi’s 1970 communication accepted the principle of transfer. The Rajiv–Longowal Accord of 1985 went further, solemnly promising that the Union Territory of Chandigarh would be handed over to Punjab by a Republic Day deadline – first 26 January 1986 and then, by some accounts, pushed to 1987. The deadline came and went; the promise never did.
For Delhi’s legal drafters, the present proposal may look like an elegant way to “streamline” Union Territory governance. For Punjab, it looks very much like a constitutional ambush. Placing Chandigarh under Article 240 is not about improving municipal water supply or building a smarter traffic grid. It is about who truly controls the city, whose voice counts in shaping its laws, and whether Punjab’s historic claim can be quietly buried under the soothing phrase “peace, progress and good government”. In reality, it is about vesting the President – read, the Union Cabinet – with powers to issue orders that are virtually laws, and that can in fact override even central legislation where there is any inconsistency between the two.
What Putting Chandigarh Under Article 240 Really Means
Article 240 empowers the President to make regulations for certain Union Territories – regulations that have the same force and effect as Acts of Parliament. In practice, it creates a parallel legislative channel, concentrated in the hands of the executive, with minimal democratic friction.
Today, Chandigarh is governed through a more layered mechanism. Parliament extends suitable Punjab laws to the Union Territory or enacts specific legislation for it. This is time-consuming and sometimes clumsy, but it does one crucial thing: it forces a measure of parliamentary debate. Punjab’s MPs can object, negotiate, demand amendments, or at least put their protest on record.
Once Chandigarh is written into Article 240, that modest but real leverage evaporates. Law for the city will largely come by presidential regulation, drafted in North Block, notified in the Gazette, and implemented by a bureaucracy that does not answer to Chandigarh’s residents or to Punjab’s legislature. Parliament will retain theoretical supremacy, but in day-to-day governance it will be the President’s regulations – in effect, the Union Cabinet’s will – that rule.
For Punjab, that means losing even the thin, indirect line of influence that currently runs through parliamentary procedures. What replaces it is a vice-like grip of the executive over every aspect of Chandigarh’s governance – from municipal structures and labour law to land use, policing architecture and service rules.
Delhi, J&K and the UT Spectrum – and Where Chandigarh Is Being Pushed
India’s Union Territories sit on a spectrum of autonomy. At the empowered end are Delhi and Puducherry, with elected legislative assemblies under Articles 239AA and 239A. Jammu & Kashmir, even after its 2019 reorganisation and the abrogation of the contentious Article 370, still has a legislature in principle. These territories may live under tighter central oversight than full-fledged states, with Lieutenant Governors vested with significant and often overriding powers, but citizens at least have the right to elect their own lawmakers and hold local governments to account.
At the other extreme are Union Territories that live almost entirely under Article 240. Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu are run through presidential regulations, with no elected assemblies and limited local say in law-making. Their administrators are formally answerable to the President, but in practice to the Union Home Ministry.
Chandigarh, so far, has been in a fraught middle zone. It has no Assembly and no Chief Minister, but its legal ecosystem has grown out of Punjab statutes extended through Parliament. Its day-to-day administration is run by an Administrator who, for four decades, has been the Governor of Punjab holding additional charge. That imperfect arrangement at least acknowledged the city’s organic connection with Punjab.
The proposed amendment would shove Chandigarh firmly down the spectrum, towards the least autonomous end. Instead of thinking seriously about a democratic framework for a city that serves as the capital of two states, the Centre seems intent on treating Chandigarh like a distant archipelago to be ruled by regulation rather than by representation.
How Chandigarh’s Administration Has Kept One Foot in Punjab
To understand why Punjabis see this as an existential issue, it is worth recalling how Chandigarh has been administered since the 1980s. Until 1984, the Union Territory had a Chief Commissioner – a senior civil servant reporting directly to Delhi. On 1 June 1984, on the eve of Operation Blue Star, that system was dismantled. The Governor of Punjab was given additional charge as Administrator of Chandigarh; the Chief Commissioner was redesignated as Adviser to the Administrator.
The official explanation at the time was administrative convenience and security coordination during a period of grave turmoil. In reality, it created a unique hybrid: constitutionally, Chandigarh remained a Union Territory; politically and symbolically, its reins were lodged in the Raj Bhawan at Chandigarh, not merely in the North Block file system. The Governor’s dual role became a daily reminder that Chandigarh was, and is, Punjab’s capital first, even if it serves Haryana and the Union as well.
Every time Delhi has tried to sever that umbilical cord, Punjab has exploded. In 2016, when the Centre briefly floated the idea of appointing a separate full-time Administrator – a retired IAS officer and BJP politician – the move had to be withdrawn almost overnight. Across the spectrum, from the Akalis to the Congress to a then-nascent AAP, Punjab spoke with one voice: decoupling Chandigarh’s Administrator from the Punjab Governor would be read as diluting Punjab’s claim.
The January 2025 decision to redesignate the Adviser to the Administrator as “Chief Secretary, Chandigarh” triggered a similar storm. What looked to Delhi like a mere re-labelling of a post was seen in Punjab as an attempt to normalise a UT bureaucracy detached from Punjab’s service traditions and the historic 60:40 sharing of posts between Punjab and Haryana.
Seen against this backdrop, the plan to drag Chandigarh under Article 240 is not a one-off. It is the most ambitious, if not audacious, step in a long, deliberate project: to chip away, rule by rule and notification by notification, at every institutional reminder that Chandigarh is rooted in Punjab — and now to cap it with the brahmastra of a constitutional amendment.
From Parliamentary Resolutions to Presidential Decrees
So far, the legal backbone of Chandigarh has been built through Parliament. When the city needed a municipal framework, Parliament extended the Punjab Municipal Corporation Act to Chandigarh, with local modifications. When new regulatory needs arose, bills were debated, clauses were contested, and Punjab’s parties could at least attempt to defend their state’s interests on the floor of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha.
Under an Article 240 regime, that architecture is replaced by presidential decrees. Regulations for Chandigarh’s “peace, progress and good government” will be drafted within the executive, notified by the President, and applied with the same force as Acts of Parliament – except without the noise and inconvenience of democratic deliberation.
For the Centre, this is efficient. For Punjab, it is disenfranchising. The state’s MPs may still fulminate in Parliament, but the real action will have shifted to the opaque space of inter-ministerial consultations and Cabinet notes. Punjabi voices – whether from ruling or opposition benches – will no longer stand between a draft regulation in North Block and its becoming binding law in Chandigarh.
The difference is not merely procedural. When laws are made through Parliament, the Centre must calculate political costs across the federation. When regulations are made under Article 240, those costs are lower and more easily ignored. For a state that already feels besieged by central overreach – from farm laws to university governance – that shift matters.
Punjab’s Claim Is Law, Not Mere Sentiment
Punjab’s insistence that Chandigarh is its capital is not just emotional rhetoric. It is grounded in history, statute and a series of solemn political assurances that now risk being mocked by the 131st Amendment.
Chandigarh was conceived as the new capital of East Punjab after Partition ripped Lahore away. Land was acquired from Punjabi villages; the city’s design and institutions took shape as expressions of a wounded but resilient Punjabi identity. When Haryana was carved out in 1966, Chandigarh was declared a Union Territory and made the shared capital of both states, with an implicit understanding: it would eventually be transferred to Punjab once Haryana created its own capital.
That understanding was later reinforced twice over. Indira Gandhi’s 1970 communication explicitly committed the Union to transferring Chandigarh to Punjab as part of a broader package. The Rajiv–Longowal Accord of 1985 tried to put a date stamp on that promise by fixing a Republic Day deadline for the handover, only for the commitment to be postponed and then quietly shelved after Sant Longowal’s assassination.
The administrative 60:40 formula for sharing Chandigarh’s posts between Punjab and Haryana was not an act of charity. It reflected population ratios and the legal architecture of the Punjab Reorganisation Act. Over the decades, Punjabis have watched with growing anger as that ratio has been eroded in practice – not by open debate, but by a quiet influx of officers from the AGMUT cadre into key positions. Service rules, recruitment norms and deputation patterns have steadily chipped away at Punjab’s institutional footprint in its own capital.
Seen in that light, placing Chandigarh under Article 240 is not a neutral technocratic choice. It is a deliberate attempt to formalise what has so far been done by stealth: to downgrade Punjab from a stakeholder with a special claim to an outsider whose views can be taken note of and then brushed aside.
Haryana’s Calculus – and Its Own Risks
Haryana has historically opposed any exclusive transfer of Chandigarh to Punjab and has been vocal about retaining the city as a joint capital. In political terms, it is tempting for Haryana’s leadership to see the Article 240 move as a quiet victory: a Chandigarh fully in the Centre’s hands cannot be given away to Punjab without reopening the entire legal settlement.
But Haryana too should look carefully at what is being proposed. A Chandigarh governed directly through presidential regulations will not be a “neutral” arbiter between the two states. It will be, first and last, an instrument of central policy. The 40 per cent share of posts that Haryana secured in 1966 is no safer than Punjab’s 60 per cent when the decisive cadre becomes AGMUT, answerable not to either state but to the Union.
Nor is it in Haryana’s long-term interest to legitimise a model in which the Centre can, by a stroke of the constitutional pen, convert a shared capital into a laboratory of unaccountable executive power. Once such a precedent is set in Chandigarh, the argument for similar moves in other sensitive territories – including those that affect Haryana’s own security and agrarian economy – will become easier to make.
On this question, Punjab and Haryana actually share a deeper interest: that their common capital remains embedded in a federal, parliamentary framework rather than turned into an executive fiefdom.
Playing with Fire in a Border-Sensitive, Poll-Bound State
The timing of the proposed amendment adds another layer of anxiety. Punjab heads into Assembly elections in early 2027. The political climate is already tense, shaped by the scars of the farm law agitation, persistent economic distress in rural areas, and simmering anxieties about Sikh identity and security narratives that too easily brand dissenting Punjabis as “anti-national”.
In such an atmosphere, any move that looks like an assault on Punjab’s rights over Chandigarh will be read through a long and painful memory. That memory stretches from the trauma of 1984 and the decade of militancy that followed, to repeated instances where the Centre has appeared tone-deaf to Sikh and Punjabi sensibilities – whether over religious jathas, diaspora politics, or the handling of peaceful protests.
The recent Panjab University episode is a warning that Delhi seems not to be heeding. An attempt to dissolve a 59-year-old elected Senate and Syndicate and replace them with a centrally scripted structure was rolled back only after students, faculty and political parties across Punjab united in protest. For many Punjabis, that saga confirmed a pattern: when local democratic institutions stand in the way of central designs, they are treated as dispensable.
To follow that misadventure with a constitutional amendment tightening Delhi’s grip over Chandigarh would be to pour fuel on a fire that has only just been contained. It risks converting a campus-centred agitation into a much broader mobilisation around Punjabi dignity and federal fairness. For a border state, that is not just bad politics; it is bad security strategy.
Reform, or Just Another Step in Centralisation?
The Centre will undoubtedly present the 131st Amendment as a reform measure. The talking points are easy to anticipate: Chandigarh’s importance as a Union Territory hosting key national institutions; the need for coherent regulations; the avoidance of legal ambiguities about whether a Punjab law automatically suits a rapidly changing, urban, UT context.
But this argument ducks the central question: why must efficiency come at the cost of representation and federal balance? If Chandigarh genuinely needs a modernised governance framework, there are other options. Parliament could debate a bespoke Chandigarh Act that transparently defines the roles of Punjab, Haryana and the Union. The city could be given, at minimum, a directly elected council with real legislative powers, rather than a municipal body whose autonomy is increasingly whittled away.
Instead, the Centre has chosen the route that maximises its own control while minimising consultation. In the wider pattern of recent years – the downgrading and reorganisation of Jammu & Kashmir, the push to homogenise service rules across UTs, the willingness to govern sensitive territories by notification rather than negotiation – this move fits uncomfortably well. It may tidy up administrative charts in the North Block conference room, but it does so by pushing the envelope of centralisation ever further.
For Punjab, that is precisely the problem. The state is not objecting to better governance in Chandigarh; it is objecting to being written out of the script – once again, and in defiance of written commitments from 1970 and the Rajiv–Longowal Accord of 1985.
What Punjab Needs to Do – Beyond Rhetoric
If the Centre insists on proceeding with the amendment, Punjab cannot afford fractured, performative resistance. The state’s political class will need to treat Chandigarh not as a party-wise talking point but as a shared red line. That means the ruling Aam Aadmi Party, the Congress and the Shiromani Akali Dal must, for once, resist the temptation to weaponise the issue merely for electoral soundbites and instead construct a united constitutional response.
First, Punjab’s MPs should insist that any amendment placing Chandigarh under Article 240 be referred to a parliamentary standing or select committee, where the state’s legal and historical case – including the 1970 assurance and the Rajiv–Longowal Accord – can be placed on record in detail.
Second, an all-party delegation from Punjab ought to meet the President and the Prime Minister, armed not just with emotions but with the documentary history: the promises on Chandigarh, the asset-sharing principles of the Reorganisation Act, the pattern of encroachments on the 60:40 formula, and the recent PU controversy.
Third, the state government should be prepared to challenge the amendment, if passed, on basic-structure grounds. A case can be made that stripping a state of its historic and functional capital without its consent, while simultaneously reducing parliamentary scrutiny, damages the federal character of the Constitution. Whether the Supreme Court ultimately agrees is another matter, but the argument should be forcefully made.
Finally, Punjab’s civil society, student bodies and professional associations must frame the debate in constitutional, not sectarian, terms. This is not just a Sikh grievance or a Punjabi pride issue. It is a test case of how India treats its border states, honours solemn political commitments, and balances central authority with regional autonomy.
Conclusion: Chandigarh Is Not a Territory to Be Slipped into Article 240
For Delhi’s legal technicians, Chandigarh may look like one more territorial unit to be slotted neatly into Article 240 alongside far-flung islands and small coastal enclaves. For Punjabis, it is something entirely different: the living symbol of a promise made and not kept, the visible reminder of a state that has repeatedly sacrificed for the Union and repeatedly been short-changed in return.
The proposed 131st Amendment is, therefore, about much more than Union Territory governance. It is about whether the Centre chooses confrontation over consultation, executive convenience over parliamentary scrutiny, and central dominance over genuine federal partnership.
If the government persists, it will almost certainly win the numbers game in Parliament. But it will lose something more valuable: the trust of a proud border state that has, for all its internal turbulence, remained firmly within India’s constitutional mainstream. In a region where trust is a strategic asset, that is a reckless gamble.
Chandigarh’s future should not be decided by sliding its name quietly into a clause of Article 240. It should be resolved through an honourable political settlement that respects Punjab’s historic claim, recognises Haryana’s practical concerns, and keeps faith with the federal idea. Anything less will be seen in Punjab not as reform, but as yet another chapter in a long story of betrayal — stretching from 1966, through the 1970 Indira Gandhi assurance, to the 1985 Rajiv–Longowal Accord, and now, potentially, to the 131st Amendment itself.