Weaponising the Law: Is India Becoming a Police State?
Humayun Aziz Sandeela
The Indian Parliament’s recent tabling of three controversial bills—the Constitution (One Hundred and Thirtieth Amendment) Bill, 2025, the Government of Union Territories (Amendment) Bill, 2025, and the Jammu & Kashmir Reorganisation (Amendment) Bill, 2025—marks a deeply unsettling shift in the nation’s democratic architecture. Ostensibly framed as instruments of integrity and probity in public life, these measures threaten to hollow out the very principles that sustain constitutional democracy, reducing the presumption of innocence to a hollow phrase.
At the heart of this legislative move lies the provision to automatically remove the Prime Minister, Chief Ministers, or ministers from office if detained for 30 consecutive days on charges punishable by five years or more, regardless of conviction. This unprecedented stipulation—enshrined in the 130th Amendment Bill and mirrored in its two companion bills for Union Territories and Jammu & Kashmir—effectively conflates arrest with guilt, weaponising preventive detention as a political tool rather than a judicial outcome.
On the surface, such provisions may appear to be bold safeguards against corruption, a striking blow against the malaise of criminalisation in politics. However, scratch beneath the veneer and a different picture emerges—one of legislative overreach and political expediency. As Congress MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra warned in Parliament, these laws could “remove a Chief Minister without trial or conviction”—a proposition that not only affronts due process but also undermines the constitutional fabric upon which Indian democracy is built.
The principle of “innocent until proven guilty” is not merely a procedural nicety; it is the bedrock of every democratic judiciary. By subverting this axiom, the bills tilt the scales of justice dramatically in favour of arbitrary executive power. As MA Baby observed in The Indian Express, such provisions “invert justice” and run contrary to the spirit of Section 8 of the Representation of the People Act as well as the due process guarantees enshrined in the Constitution. In essence, these measures create a chilling precedent where incarceration—not conviction—becomes the determinant of political legitimacy.
1. Constitution (130th Amendment) Bill, 2025
2. Government of Union Territories (Amendment) Bill, 2025
3. Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation (Amendment) Bill, 2025Is the ‘triple threat’ for cleansing or witch-hunting? @bhupendrachaube exposes the double standards pic.twitter.com/EgpaOqJGu7
— The Squirrels (@thesquirrelsin) August 21, 2025
The implications are not confined to jurisprudence alone; they strike at the heart of India’s federal structure. By enabling the removal of elected leaders through extended detention, the Centre accrues unprecedented leverage over state administrations. Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has categorically denounced the legislation as part of a “neo-fascist strategy to destabilise non-BJP states,” warning that it emboldens governors—often aligned with the ruling party at the Centre—to act as instruments of political subversion.
The accompanying amendments for Union Territories and Jammu & Kashmir amplify these concerns. By replicating the same punitive provisions, they further consolidate central authority in territories where democratic representation is already diluted. Critics argue this signals a broader pattern of constitutional engineering—one that chips away at the autonomy of states and reconfigures India into a hyper-centralised polity under majoritarian dominance.
Compounding the threat is the potential for misuse of investigative agencies, a trend that recent history renders all too plausible. The arrests of Delhi’s Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Jharkhand’s former Chief Minister Hemant Soren underscore how central agencies like the Enforcement Directorate and CBI have been deployed in politically charged contexts. In its report published on 22 March 2024, The Indian Express clearly pointed out 95% of Enforcement Directorate cases since BJP came to power in 2014 were against opposition leaders. It showed that between 2014 and September 2022, 121 prominent leaders came under ED radar, 115 of them opposition leaders; the list has grown since
As AIMIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi trenchantly remarked, these bills risk turning India into “a police state, where unelected agencies act as judges.” The legislative imprimatur now proposed would transform such executive overreach from aberration into norm.
India’s democratic resilience has long rested on a delicate balance between its institutional pillars—the legislature, the judiciary, and a free press. These new provisions, however, disrupt that equilibrium, skewing power disproportionately towards the executive. Lok Sabha’s former Secretary-General P.D. Thankappan Acharya described the bills as “badly conceived and drafted,” asserting they are “primarily designed to target opposition leaders rather than cleanse politics.”
The consequences of such a trajectory are grave. If democratic governance is reduced to instantaneous retribution on mere allegations—bereft of trial, conviction, or appeal—it ceases to be democracy in any substantive sense. International indices have already downgraded India to the ranks of “electoral autocracy.” These amendments, by institutionalising political vendetta and eroding federalism, accelerate that decline with alarming speed.
What remains, then, is a façade—a staged democracy where constitutional safeguards are sacrificed at the altar of partisan expediency. A system where political rivals are purged without judicial verdict, where state autonomy is contingent on central favour, and where majoritarian dominance masquerades as governance. In this climate, the line between democracy and dictatorship is not just blurred; it is perilously close to being erased.
India now faces a defining question: will it uphold the inviolability of due process and federal balance, or acquiesce to a future where power, unchecked and unaccountable, reigns supreme under the guise of constitutional reform?
