SUMAN K SHRIVASTAVA
Ranchi, December 24: The Constitution of India was never conceived as a distant charter, to be admired from afar and invoked only in moments of crisis. It was intended to inhabit everyday life—to descend, deliberately and decisively, into the ordinary spaces where citizens live, work, and govern themselves. Few constitutional moments embody this ambition more clearly than the Seventy-Fourth Constitutional Amendment, enacted in the early 1990s, which sought to relocate democracy from the corridors of power to the streets and wards of India’s cities.
That amendment bears the unmistakable imprint of Rajiv Gandhi, who believed that democracy weakened as it ascended hierarchies, and strengthened as it moved closer to the people. The 73rd and 74th Amendments were thus not merely legal reforms; they were acts of democratic faith—an insistence that self-government must begin where people actually live.
Three decades later, the Jharkhand High Court, still a relatively young constitutional court completing twenty-five years of its existence, found itself reminding the State of Jharkhand of a promise older than the State itself: that urban local bodies are institutions of self-government, not administrative outposts of the Secretariat.
The Silence of Elections
The story begins not with action, but with absence. Municipal elections in Jharkhand had been deferred, local bodies continued under administrators, and the constitutional guarantee of a fixed five-year tenure under Article 243U stood reduced to a formality observed in breach.
When the issue first reached the High Court, it came before a Single Bench presided over by Justice Ananda Sen. Justice Sen’s intervention was restrained yet firm. The court declined to treat the non-holding of elections as an administrative inconvenience and instead placed it squarely within the framework of constitutional duty. Elections, the court observed, are not contingent on convenience; they are mandated by the Constitution itself.
The matter subsequently engaged a Division Bench comprising Justice Sujit Narayan Prasad and Justice Arun Kumar Rai, with the judgment authored by Justice Prasad. It was here that the issue was situated within its full historical and constitutional context.
Justice Prasad traced the genealogy of Part IX-A of the Constitution, recalling how, before the 74th Amendment, urban local bodies had languished as fragile institutions—frequently superseded, routinely neglected, and persistently subordinated to State control. It was precisely this democratic erosion that Rajiv Gandhi’s government sought to arrest by constitutionalising municipalities and insulating them from executive whim.
To defer elections, the court held, was to revive the very mischief the amendment was designed to prevent.
The Second Breach: Autonomy Undermined from Within
If the first judgment addressed the failure to constitute municipal democracy, the second confronted a more subtle, but equally corrosive threat—the hollowing out of municipal autonomy through executive design.
In W.P.(C) No. 5345 of 2022 and connected matters, a Division Bench of Justice Sujit Narayan Prasad and Justice Arun Kumar Rai (on December 12 2025), again speaking through Justice Prasad, examined the functioning of the Ranchi Municipal Corporation. What appeared initially as a dispute over building plan sanctions revealed a deeper constitutional fault line.
Engineers deputed from State departments—lacking statutory qualifications and appointed outside the recruitment framework—were functioning as town planners and participating in the map sanctioning process. This occurred despite the existence of duly appointed Assistant Town Planners, recruited in accordance with the Jharkhand Municipal Act, 2011.
Justice Prasad refused to view the matter as a technical irregularity. Instead, he identified it as a direct intrusion into the internal affairs of an urban local body, thereby negating the autonomy guaranteed by the 74th Amendment.
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Invoking its extraordinary jurisdiction under Article 226, the Court passed a prohibitory order, restraining the two deputed town planners from discharging any function connected with town planning or the sanction of building maps in Ranchi. This was not framed as punishment, nor as contempt enforcement. Justice Prasad was careful to clarify that the Court was not asserting control over executive administration. It was instead preventing the nullification of the law by executive inaction.
The Law Must Be Followed—Or Not at All
Central to the judgment was a principle as old as administrative law itself: where the law prescribes a manner of doing something, it must be done in that manner or not at all. Citing a long line of Supreme Court authority, Justice Prasad held that executive improvisation—whether by flow charts, departmental arrangements, or deputations—cannot override statutory command.
The Jharkhand Municipal Act, 2011, he noted, was enacted explicitly to give effect to the constitutional vision articulated during Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure. Its preamble spoke of autonomy, decentralisation, and accountability. To allow the State to control municipal functions through deputed officers was to hollow out the Act from within, leaving behind a façade of self-government.
Maps sanctioned through an illegal process, the court warned, would not merely be irregular; they would be void. The consequences would ultimately fall upon ordinary citizens—homebuyers, borrowers, and residents—who would suffer for no fault of their own.
When Ministers “Come in the Way”
Perhaps the most telling moment in the proceedings arose when the Urban Development Department indicated that certain decisions were pending at the ministerial level. Justice Prasad’s response was unambiguous.
Once a statute has been enacted by the legislature and assented to by the Governor, no minister has the authority to obstruct its implementation. Rajiv Gandhi’s decentralisation project, the court observed in substance, was conceived precisely to move governance away from personalised discretion and into institutional frameworks.
In a constitutional democracy, individuals may guide policy, but they cannot suspend the law.
Justice Prasad’s Reading of the 74th Amendment
Across both judgments, Justice Sujit Narayan Prasad articulated a coherent constitutional philosophy. The 74th Amendment, he held, was not a cosmetic rearrangement of administrative powers. It was a structural recalibration of Indian democracy—intended to disperse authority, democratise planning, and anchor governance in elected local institutions.
Decentralisation, in this reading, is meaningful only when accompanied by real power, financial independence, and freedom from executive interference. Elections without authority are symbolic; authority without autonomy is illusory.
Justice Prasad’s judgments repeatedly returned to the idea that the Constitution does not trust democracy to benevolence. It secures democracy through rules, timelines, and institutional safeguards.
Judicial Review as Constitutional Necessity
The judgments also reaffirmed the role of constitutional courts. Judicial restraint, Justice Prasad observed, cannot descend into abdication. Where constitutional mandates are ignored—whether by delaying elections or undermining municipal autonomy—the court is not merely empowered to intervene; it is obliged to do so.
By restraining ineligible town planners and directing that statutorily appointed officers be allowed to function, the court did not substitute itself for the executive. It restored governance to the constitutional path laid down more than three decades earlier.
The Constitution Speaks Again
Read together, these decisions form a sustained judicial reminder. Democracy does not survive on good intentions; it survives on adherence to constitutional design. The vision articulated during Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure—of empowered municipalities and decentralised governance—cannot be honoured in rhetoric and violated in practice.
Through these judgments, the Jharkhand High Court ensured that the 74th Amendment remained a living promise rather than a historical footnote. It reminded the State that democracy must be allowed to function where it was constitutionally placed—in cities, wards, and municipal institutions accountable to the people.
In doing so, the court allowed the Constitution to do what it was always meant to do: to reach the citizen, not remain confined to power.
