Pandas merge 1 column

By: PRABHAKAR TIMBLE 19 July 2019 3:06 PM GMT The anti-defection law as enunciated in the Tenth Schedule to the Constitution of India was to answer the menace of unethical political defections eating into vitals of democracy. Defections had reduced people's representatives to nomads wandering whenever and wherever they found lush green pastures to graze. Apart from destabilising duly elected governments, such switching of political loyalties had made a mockery of parliamentary democracy. Once elected and chosen by the voters, the people's representatives were at unrestricted liberty to dump their electorate. The 52nd amendment (1985) sought to regulate MLA trading and maintain a balance between the sanctity of the people's vote and the freedom of choice, expression and dissent of an individual. As legislators were quick to locate loopholes and engineered splits, the 91st amendment (2003) was brought in to tighten the loose bolts. This brought in the drizzle of … [Read more...] about Anti-Defection Law: A Tunnel Of Darkness?

By: PRABHAKAR TIMBLE 1 April 2019 7:09 AM GMT Borrowing words from the historic Freedom at Midnight ('Tryst with Destiny') speech of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to paint the midnight political drama in the Speaker's Chamber at the Goa Assembly Secretariat on March 27, would be parody. Nonetheless, when the whole India was asleep, at the midnight hour, Goa awakened to a new dawn of political darkness and illegitimate defections christened as merger at the unholy communion delivered by Deputy Speaker Michael Lobo, presently the Acting Speaker. Story in brief At the midnight hour of March 27, two out of the three MLAs namely Manohar Ajgaonkar and Deepak Prabhu Pauskar of the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP), a coalition partner in the recently formed Pramod Sawant led BJP government submit a letter to the Speaker in the presence of Chief Minister Pramod Sawant and State BJP President Vinay Tendulkar stating that the MGP legislature party is merged into the BJP. Based on a … [Read more...] about Goa Assembly: The Midnight Merger X-Rayed

By: Suhrith Parthasarathy 1 April 2019 4:48 PM GMT Over the course of the last five years, several laws of substantial and wide-reaching importance have been enacted without securing the Rajya Sabha's assent. These have included, among others, legislation such as the Aadhaar Act, the Specified Bank Notes (Cessation of Liabilities) Act, 2017, which provided imprimatur to the government's demonetisation programme, and the Finance Act of 2017, through which a raft of statutes was amended, and various different judicial tribunals were either newly created or merged and integrated together. The government achieved this circumvention of the Rajya Sabha's checks by having the Lok Sabha's speaker certify the draft of these legislation as money bills. As I pointed out previously here, generally under India's constitutional structure, for a bill to be enacted as law, it requires approval by both Houses of Parliament. The exception to this rule is contained in Article 110(1), which … [Read more...] about On Money Bills And Judicial Review

By: gautam bhatia 14 April 2019 6:24 AM GMT Justice Charles Evan Hughes' famous aphorism, that a dissent is an "appeal to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of a future day", has passed into legend. It was famously invoked by Justice H.R. Khanna, while concluding his dissent in the Habeas Corpus case. But sometimes, a dissent is not limited to a footnote in the judicial lore of a nation, waiting for the years to pass by until the "intelligence of a future day" dawns. Sometimes, like the swallow flying south, a dissent becomes part of the global migration of ideas. It finds fertile soil far from home, there to bloom into the full richness that it has been denied in its own native environment. Earlier this week, the Supreme Court of Jamaica struck down the Jamaican National Identification and Registration Act ["NIRA"]. The NIRA was a law that mandated the collection of biometric information from all Jamaican residents, and its storage in a centralised database. … [Read more...] about The Afterlife Of The Aadhaar Dissent: The Jamaican Supreme Court Judgment Quashing NCID

By: Dr. Aman Hingorani 8 Aug 2019 7:23 AM GMT The President has, on the recommendation of Parliament,issued the "Declaration under Article 370(3) of the Constitution" in exercise of his powers under Article 370(3) read with Article 370(1) of the Constitution to declare that all clauses of Article 370 would cease to be operative from 6 August 2019, except the clause to the effect that "(a)ll provisions of this Constitution, as amended from time to time, without any modifications or exceptions" shall apply to Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), notwithstanding anything contrary contained in the Constitution or the J&K constitution or "any law, document, judgement, ordinance, order, by-law, rule, regulation, notification, custom or usage having the force of law in the territory of India, or any other instrument, treaty or agreement as envisaged under Article 363 or otherwise". Such Presidential Order is the culmination of dramatic steps taken by New Delhi in issuing the Constitution … [Read more...] about Re-writing Article 370 : The Legal Test Ahead