The executive office without a limit

On March 22, 2026, Narendra Modi completed 8,931 days as head of an elected government in India, combining over thirteen years as Chief Minister of Gujarat (from October 7, 2001 to May 21, 2014) with three consecutive terms as Prime Minister. The milestone surpassed the record of Pawan Kumar Chamling, who served as Chief Minister of Sikkim for 8,930 days. Neither the congratulations from within the ruling dispensation nor the alarm from its critics engages the constitutional question the milestone makes unavoidable: why does India’s Constitution impose no limit on how long a single individual may hold the office that wields actual executive power?

India is unusual among large democracies in this respect. The United States adopted the Twenty-Second Amendment in 1951, responding to Franklin Roosevelt’s four consecutive terms. South Korea, Brazil, Colombia, and Indonesia all impose presidential term limits. Among parliamentary democracies, the question is considered less urgent because the Prime Minister serves at the confidence of the legislature. But this theoretical availability of removal is precisely the assumption that requires scrutiny in the Indian context.

Constituent Assembly’s rationale

The Constituent Assembly’s reasoning was articulated most influentially by B.R. Ambedkar in his speech of November 4, 1948 introducing the Draft Constitution. Ambedkar drew a distinction between “the daily assessment of responsibility,” available through questions, no-confidence motions, and adjournment motions, and the “periodic assessment” offered by fixed-term elections. The daily assessment, he argued, was far more effective. No term limit was needed because the legislature’s confidence served as a rolling check. The logic reflected Westminster practice, where no Prime minister has been constrained by a term limit, but the ruling party’s caucus can remove its own leader, as Conservative MPs removed Margaret Thatcher in 1990.

What the Tenth Schedule broke

The Fifty-Second Amendment (1985) inserted the Tenth Schedule, providing for the disqualification of any legislator who votes against the party whip. The Supreme Court in Kihoto Hollohan vs. Zachillhu (1992) upheld its constitutionality as a measure to protect the integrity of the electoral mandate. But the Tenth Schedule fundamentally altered the relationship between legislature and executive that Ambedkar had relied upon. Under the anti-defection regime, a ruling-party member who votes against the government on a confidence motion faces disqualification. The no-confidence motion, the very instrument meant to substitute for term limits, becomes a dead letter whenever the ruling party has a working majority.

Nor does the British safety valve operate in India. Indian political parties have no institutionalised mechanism for leadership challenges. The anti-defection law locks legislators into party loyalty; the absence of intra-party democracy locks the party into loyalty to its leader. The check that was meant to substitute for term limits has been doubly disabled.

The comparative evidence

Tom Ginsburg, James Melton, and Zachary Elkins, in their study of executive term-limit evasion, showed that leaders in multiple regions have sought to extend their tenure through constitutional amendment, replacement, or judicial interpretation. Ginsburg and Aziz Huq further argued that democratic decline more often proceeds through incremental institutional decay than through sudden authoritarian rupture. India has not needed to abolish a term limit because it never had one. The question is whether the absence of a formal constraint, combined with the neutralisation of parliamentary accountability, produces the same structural risks that term limits elsewhere are designed to prevent.

The presidential irony

India has developed a convention against a third presidential term, though the presidency is largely ceremonial. No President has served more than two terms. The expectation satisfies the three-part test for constitutional conventions laid down by Ivor Jennings in The Law and the Constitution (1959): precedents exist, the actors believed themselves bound by a rule, and the rule has a reason. The office that holds no real executive power is constrained by convention. The office that holds virtually all executive power is constrained only by the electorate’s periodic verdict, with the anti-defection law largely disabling other accountability mechanisms.

The critic’s objection, and its limits

The strongest counter-argument is that voters have endorsed Mr. Modi’s tenure three consecutive times, and that a term limit would override their expressed preference. The objection is serious; a term limit is, in a real sense, anti-democratic. But it rests on the premise that Ambedkar relied upon: that periodic elections, combined with parliamentary accountability, suffice to discipline executive power. If that accountability has been structurally impaired by the Tenth Schedule, elections must carry a heavier burden. And elections, however free, are a weak constraint on the compounding advantages of prolonged incumbency: control over appointments to regulatory bodies, the Election Commission, and the higher judiciary; the capacity to shape the information environment; and the ability to calibrate policy for electoral benefit across multiple cycles.

What might be done

The more natural reform is to restore the mechanism the framers relied upon. Exempt votes on confidence motions from the Tenth Schedule’s disqualification provision, so that legislators can remove a government without forfeiting their seats. A more ambitious possibility is a constitutional amendment limiting consecutive terms as Prime Minister or Chief Minister, while permitting a return after a gap. The State-level dimension is equally pressing, given the extended tenures of leaders such as Jyoti Basu, Naveen Patnaik, and Pinarayi Vijayan.

The 8,931-day milestone forces attention to whether India’s parliamentary system retains the self-correcting capacity the framers relied upon. The evidence suggests it does not. And the presidential convention against indefinite tenure applies only to the office that does not need it. That gap deserves scrutiny regardless of who occupies the office.

(V. Venkatesan is a journalist and legal researcher)

Published – April 05, 2026 11:20 pm IST