On 20 August 2025, the Government placed before the Lok Sabha the Constitution (One Hundred and Thirtieth) Amendment Bill. Its operative idea is stark: if the Prime Minister, a Chief Minister, or any Union/State minister remains in custody for thirty consecutive days for an offence carrying a potential sentence of five years or more, they are automatically removed from office on the thirty-first day. There is no requirement of conviction, no judicial finding that a case is even fit to be tried. The proposal has gone to a Joint Parliamentary Committee, but its logic is already clear: it converts pre-trial custody into a constitutional disqualifier.
In public debate, my batchmate from the 1984 IAS cohort, Pritam Singh, has voiced very legitimate concerns about what a plain reading reveals. He argues that the Bill collapses the vital distance between accusation and adjudication. Thirty days’ custody is frequently a function of special statutes, investigative remand and docket pressures; it is not a surrogate for guilt. Displacing elected leaders on that basis disenfranchises voters and, for Chief Ministers, risks nullifying an entire State’s mandate. Because central agencies often drive such custodial phases, the device will be ripe for political weaponisation, eroding federal balance. Existing safeguards that tie disqualification to conviction are jettisoned; the promise of “reappointment” after release is illusory because reinstatement is political, not automatic. In short, what is sold as probity is in truth a regime of rule-by-remand, with chilling effects on opposition politics and representative government.
2) Why Now? Numbers, Ratification — and the Politics
Constitutional amendments are not casual exercises in publicity; they demand a special majority. Each House must pass the Bill by a majority of its total membership and by a two-thirds majority of those present and voting. Where the amendment touches the architecture of State executive government, ratification by at least half the States becomes necessary. Presidential assent follows. The arithmetic is unforgiving, the federal dimension even more so.
Against that backdrop, timing matters. If the ruling coalition cannot guarantee the votes in the Rajya Sabha or the breadth of ratification in the States, the immediate utility of tabling the Bill is not legal but political. This week has also seen the opposition’s “Vote Adhikar” mobilisation in Bihar, led by the Leader of the Opposition, Rahul Gandhi, claim significant media oxygen and popular attention. In that context, the Bill looks like a stage prop designed to seize the agenda, dominate headlines and hang a political threat over “uncomfortable” opposition Chief Ministers — regardless of whether the numbers ultimately exist to carry the amendment home. The immediate effect, then, is atmospherics: a sword of Damocles brandished in the public square, rather than a serious, worked-through constitutional reform.
3) Custody Is Not Conviction — The PMLA Trapdoor
The most alarming feature of the proposal is how neatly it dovetails with the architecture of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), which already tilts the field against liberty in the pre-trial phase.
First, PMLA permits arrest at the investigation stage, even before a prosecution complaint is filed. The remand cycle begins long before a court has applied its judicial mind to take cognizance. In other words, the State may lawfully keep an accused in custody for weeks without any judicial finding on the sufficiency of the material, let alone guilt.
Second, bail under Section 45 of PMLA is not routine. The so-called “twin conditions” require the court to be satisfied that there are reasonable grounds to believe the accused is not guilty and is unlikely to commit an offence while on bail. That formulation, in practice, reverses the posture of criminal process: instead of the State justifying continued incarceration, the accused must persuade the court of non-guilt at a threshold stage, with limited access to the prosecution’s material.
Third, Section 24 introduces a reverse onus about “proceeds of crime”. Once the prosecution establishes basic foundational facts—that a scheduled offence exists, the property is traceable to it, and the accused is linked to laundering—the court shall presume (for a person charged under Section 3) that the property is involved in money-laundering unless the accused rebuts it. Read with Section 45’s twin bail conditions, this presumption materially raises the bail threshold. The Supreme Court in Vijay Madanlal Choudhary (2022) upheld the validity of Section 24 and Section 45 (with parts of the ruling now under limited review). In practice, this statutory architecture contributes to prolonged pre-trial incarceration in PMLA matters even before cognizance, not because guilt has been adjudicated, but because the law front-loads restraint at the bail stage.
Karan Bir Singh Sidhu, IAS (Retd.), former Special Chief Secretary, Punjab, writes on the intersection of constitutional probity, due process, and democratic supremacy.
Place the Bill’s thirty-day trigger into this landscape and the danger is obvious. The constitutional guillotine would fall precisely during a phase where no court has tested the accusation, no cognizance has been taken, and the defence has had little opportunity to contest the State’s narrative. That is not probity; it is pre-trial punishment by another name. It also creates a perverse incentive structure: arrest early, oppose bail vigorously, and let the calendar do the rest. If that clock can topple a Chief Minister or minister without judicial application of mind, we will have rewritten accountability as a function of custodial logistics rather than constitutional principle.
4) The Constitutional Safety Valve Already Exists — Article 356 and Judicial Scrutiny
If the real fear is that a State’s governance cannot be carried on in accordance with the Constitution because its political executive is compromised, the Constitution already provides a powerful instrument: Article 356. That provision does not merely allow dismissal and dissolution; it empowers the Union to assume functions and issue directions to restore constitutional governance. It sits under strict judicial review, as it should. The possibility of review is its virtue, not a vice. It ensures that extraordinary interventions are justified by extraordinary facts, tested for mala fides, proportionality and necessity.
The proposed amendment is an end-run around precisely that judicial discipline. It imposes an automatic, non-deliberative consequence based on a custody clock, at the very moment when courts have not even taken cognizance, much less weighed evidence. If a State truly reaches the point where constitutional governance is impossible, the Centre has a path that is both decisive and justiciable. What it does not need — and should not want — is a shortcut that allows a ministerial decapitation in the shadows of remand proceedings.
5) Offences Must Be Punished, But Through Due Process
It is nobody’s case that offences, including corruption and illegal gratification by those holding high constitutional posts, should go unpunished. On the contrary, probity in public life demands that such cases be dealt with firmly. But the remedy is not a draconian constitutional amendment that conflates custody with conviction. The real answer lies in speeding up the due process of law and ensuring faster, time-bound trials. The Supreme Court has already directed that special benches be set up in High Courts to deal with criminal cases involving MPs and MLAs. Yet, these cases continue to languish in procedural delays and adjournments. This logjam must be broken if accountability is to be real. At the same time, reforms must avoid the opposite pitfall, where “justice hurried becomes justice buried.” Striking the balance between timely justice and fair process is the path to protecting both integrity in office and democratic supremacy.
6) Optics Over Reform — The Sword of Damocles and the Way Forward
Strip away the rhetoric and a simple picture emerges. We already possess a constitutional and statutory tool-kit to police integrity in high office. The Representation of the People Act ties disqualification to conviction; legislatures can demand resignations or censure non-compliance; governors, within constitutional bounds, have options; and Article 356 stands as the last-resort mechanism for constitutional breakdowns, subject to court supervision. None of this is painless, and none of it delivers the instant gratification of a countdown to automatic removal. But a democracy should find removal difficult, deliberative and examinable — not the by-product of pre-trial scheduling.
As politics, the Bill succeeds in one thing: it commands headlines and chills the calculus of opposition leaders who know that thirty days’ custody is easily crossed under PMLA’s unforgiving bail architecture. That is the “sword of Damocles” utility — a permanent threat in search of a pretext. As law, however, it fails the basic tests of natural justice, federal balance and constitutional design. It reduces accountability to a stopwatch, invites partisan misuse and weakens the sovereignty of voters by allowing accusation plus custody to nullify their verdict.
A better path, if integrity in high office is genuinely the aim, would be to design standards tied either to conviction or to a robust, judicially supervised prima facie finding after an adversarial hearing. Courts can act swiftly when evidence demands urgency, and they can repel vindictive prosecutions. That is the equilibrium a constitutional republic should cherish.
7) The Verdict
The verdict is straightforward. Custody is not conviction. Pre-trial remand — especially in PMLA matters — cannot be the constitutional trigger for toppling elected executives. If governance truly collapses, Article 356 already provides a strong, court-tested remedy. What India urgently needs is not an amendment that reduces constitutional accountability to a custody clock, but a justice system that moves with speed and fairness. The Supreme Court has already directed that special benches in High Courts should prioritise trials of MPs and MLAs. Yet, as noted hereinbefore, those cases remain mired in adjournments and delay. Breaking that logjam is the path to restoring probity in public life without sacrificing due process. The 130th Amendment Bill, by contrast, substitutes the discipline of judicial application of mind with the easy spectacle of a countdown. It looks less like reform and more like choreography. Parliament should treat it accordingly.
Author credentials:
Karan Bir Singh Sidhu, IAS (Retd.), former Special Chief Secretary, Punjab, writes on the intersection of constitutional probity, due process, and democratic supremacy.