Article 254 of the Constitution answers a question that Indian federalism cannot avoid: when Parliament and a State Legislature have both legislated on a subject they share, and the two laws cannot be obeyed together, which one gives way? The short answer is that the central law prevails and the state law is void to the extent of the conflict. The complete answer is more interesting, because the same article contains the one route by which a state law can defeat an earlier central law inside its own territory, and then, in a proviso that most accounts omit, reserves to Parliament the power to take that victory back whenever it chooses. A reader who knows only the short answer understands Indian federalism as a hierarchy. A reader who knows the whole article understands it as a negotiation conducted under a standing central veto.

The provision matters in practice because the Concurrent List is where the economically and socially significant legislation lives: education, labour, land acquisition, trade in essential commodities, insolvency, marriage, succession, and much of the criminal law. Every one of those fields has produced a dispute in which a state law and a central law pointed in different directions, and every such dispute is resolved, if it is resolved by doctrine at all, through Article 254. The article is therefore not a piece of constitutional plumbing to be memorised for examinations and forgotten. It is the operating rule of the shared legislative space, and the difference between its two clauses and its proviso is the difference between a State that may vary national law with national permission and a State that may not vary it at all.

Three ideas organise everything that follows. The first is the threshold: the provision is engaged only where both laws are, in pith and substance, laws on a matter in the Concurrent List, and a large share of supposed repugnancy disputes dissolve at that gate. The second is the test: where the gate is passed, courts look for a direct collision, for a parliamentary intention to occupy the whole field, or for two laws that occupy the same field and cannot stand together. The third is the assent route and its proviso: a state law that has been reserved for the President and has received the President’s assent prevails in that State notwithstanding its repugnancy to an earlier central law, but Parliament may legislate on the same matter at any time, including by amending or repealing the state law itself. The State, in the formula this article will defend, prevails only until the Union changes its mind.

The text of Article 254: two limbs and a proviso

The article sits in Part XI of the Constitution, in the chapter on legislative relations between the Union and the States, and it descends almost directly from Section 107 of the Government of India Act, 1935, which had run the same scheme for the federal and provincial legislatures of the colonial federation. Its first limb provides that if any provision of a law made by the Legislature of a State is repugnant to any provision of a law made by Parliament which Parliament is competent to enact, or to any provision of an existing law with respect to one of the matters enumerated in the Concurrent List, then, subject to the second limb, the law made by Parliament, whether passed before or after the law made by the State Legislature, or the existing law, shall prevail, and the law made by the Legislature of the State shall, to the extent of the repugnancy, be void.

Every phrase in that sentence carries weight. The comparison is provision against provision, not statute against statute in the abstract: a state Act is not condemned as a whole because one of its sections collides with a central Act, and the voidness that follows is expressly measured, extending only to the extent of the repugnancy and leaving the rest of the state law alive. The central comparator can be a law Parliament was competent to enact whether or not Parliament has yet exercised the competence over the whole subject, and it can equally be an existing law, the constitutional expression for law in force immediately before the Constitution commenced, so a pre-constitutional central enactment on a Concurrent subject displaces a post-constitutional state law by the same rule. The temporal words cut off a familiar argument: the central law prevails whether it was passed before or after the state law, so priority in time, which resolves many conflicts between statutes of the same legislature, resolves nothing here.

The second limb is the exception, and it is carefully fenced. Where a law made by the Legislature of a State with respect to one of the matters enumerated in the Concurrent List contains any provision repugnant to the provisions of an earlier law made by Parliament, or an existing law with respect to that matter, then the law so made by the State Legislature shall, if it has been reserved for the consideration of the President and has received his assent, prevail in that State. Four fences are visible on the face of the text. The state law must be on a Concurrent List matter. The central law it displaces must be the earlier law: clause (2) is a shield against the past, not against the future. The bill must have travelled the full route of reservation for the President’s consideration and actual assent, which in the machinery of Articles 200 and 201 means a Governor’s decision to reserve and a presidential decision to assent. And the prevalence is territorial and relative: the state law prevails in that State, and prevails over the earlier central law, whose operation everywhere else is untouched.

The asymmetry between the two limbs on the question of time deserves to be isolated, because it is the point on which lay accounts most often err. Clause (1) is indifferent to sequence: the central law prevails whether passed before or after the state law, so a State legislating into a Concurrent field legislates under a standing risk that a future central Act will displace its work, and a State whose law predates the central Act enjoys no grandfathering whatsoever. Clause (2) is not indifferent: it answers only the earlier central law, the law on the books when the State chose to depart from it and sought permission. The design is intelligible once seen whole. Assent is a decision taken on a known file: the Union examines the state bill against the central law as it stands, and consents to a specified departure from a specified regime. It cannot rationally consent in advance to departures from regimes that do not yet exist, and the text therefore confines its effect to the regime examined. Every consequence explored later in this article, the snapshot character of the victory in T. Barai, the failure of assent to answer the fresh code in Vijay Kumar Sharma, the inability of assent for one purpose to serve another in Malwinder Singh, is the unfolding of this single asymmetry: the exception is a transaction about the past, and the future belongs, always, to clause (1) and the proviso.

Then comes the proviso, on which the whole character of the exception turns: nothing in the second limb shall prevent Parliament from enacting at any time any law with respect to the same matter, including a law adding to, amending, varying or repealing the law so made by the State Legislature. The proviso does not merely preserve Parliament’s ordinary concurrent competence for the future. It names the assented state law itself as a permissible object of parliamentary legislation, so the very statute that prevailed by grace of assent may be amended or repealed by the legislature it prevailed against. Read as a whole, then, Article 254 does three things. It states a default rule of central supremacy on shared subjects. It creates a licensed exception through which a State may depart from an existing central law with the Union’s formal agreement. And it makes the licence revocable at will by ordinary legislation, without any special procedure, any state consent, or any compensation for the reliance the licensed law has generated.

Two textual details repay attention before the doctrine is reached. The first is the opening subordination: clause (1) operates subject to clause (2), which means the supremacy rule is stated by the text itself as a default, expressly yielding to the exception, and any interpretation that treats the assent route as an intrusion on the article’s scheme has the text against it. The second is the measure of voidness in clause (1): the state law is void to the extent of the repugnancy, a phrase that invites the provision-by-provision comparison the courts perform and forecloses the argument, occasionally still made, that a state Act in a Concurrent field stands or falls as a whole. A statute book under Article 254 is not cleared in fields; it is edited in lines.

That architecture explains why the provision repays slow reading. A constitution that wanted simple central supremacy could have stopped at the first limb, as many accounts of Indian federalism effectively do when they describe the Union as dominant. A constitution that wanted genuine state autonomy on shared subjects could have given the assented state law some protection against later central override, a cooling period, a special majority, anything. The text does neither. It gives the State a door and keeps the key on the Union’s side of it, and the sections that follow trace what that design has meant in the courts, in the assent process, and in the fields where states have actually used the door.

The lineage: Section 107 of the 1935 Act and the founding choice

The provision was not drafted for the Constitution; it was inherited, and the inheritance explains its shape. Section 107 of the Government of India Act, 1935, which governed conflicts between federal and provincial legislation in the colonial federation, provided that a provincial law repugnant to a federal law on a Concurrent subject was void to the extent of the repugnancy, that a provincial law which had been reserved for the consideration of the Governor-General and had received his assent prevailed in the province notwithstanding repugnancy to an earlier federal law, and that nothing in the section prevented the federal legislature from legislating on the same matter at any time, including by repealing the provincial law. Substitute Parliament for the federal legislature, the State for the province, and the President for the Governor-General, and Section 107 is Article 254 in all but numbering. The Constituent Assembly, which fought extended battles over the distribution of subjects between the Lists, over residuary power, over the emergency provisions and over almost every other federal question, took this mechanism over with comparatively little debate, because the mechanism was familiar and because it had, by 1949, a decade of working case law beneath it.

The inheritance had a second consequence, less often noticed: the doctrine arrived pre-built. When the Constitution commenced, courts did not have to invent the tests for repugnancy, because the Federal Court and the Privy Council had been applying Section 107 and its provincial analogues, and the concepts of direct conflict, occupied field and assent-cured prevalence were already the ordinary grammar of Indian legislative conflict. Zaverbhai, the first great proviso case, was decided in 1955 on facts arising under the 1935 Act itself, and the Court treated the constitutional provision and its predecessor as one continuous doctrine. The phrase existing law, which appears in both limbs of Article 254, is the bridge between the regimes: defined by the Constitution as law in force immediately before its commencement, it ensures that the central statutes of the earlier regime, the essential supplies legislation, the motor vehicles legislation, the food adulteration framework in its early form, stand in the central column of every repugnancy comparison until Parliament replaces them. A state law of 1960 could therefore be displaced by a central law of 1946, and was, whenever the two occupied the same ground.

The founding choice, seen with the lineage in view, was a choice for continuity of central supremacy within the shared field, softened by a licensing mechanism the provinces had already used. Whether that choice deserves the name of federalism’s betrayal or of federalism’s realism is the question the two readings at the end of this article contest. What cannot be contested is that the choice was deliberate in the limited sense that matters for interpretation: the Assembly retained a mechanism whose operation it knew, whose proviso it could have deleted with a stroke, and whose effects, including the Punjab and Bombay assent cases of the early republic, unfolded exactly as the text predicted.

The lineage also explains a small mystery of the case law: the ease with which the courts move between the 1935 Act’s authorities and the Constitution’s, citing federal and provincial decisions from the earlier regime as though nothing had changed in 1950. On most constitutional questions that ease would be suspect, because the Constitution repudiated parts of the colonial design. On repugnancy it is justified, for the design was retained in substance, and the judges who built the doctrine in the 1950s, several of whom had practised under the earlier Act, treated Section 107 and Article 254 as successive editions of one rule. The repugnancy doctrine is therefore among the oldest continuously operating doctrines in Indian public law, and its stability across a regime change that transformed the polity is itself evidence of how little the founding settlement, on this point, altered the distribution of power it inherited.

Before repugnancy: competence, Lists and pith and substance

Most disputes that arrive dressed as repugnancy disputes are decided before repugnancy is reached, because the doctrine has a gate, and the gate is competence. Article 246 distributes legislative power across the three Lists of the Seventh Schedule: Parliament alone on the Union List, the State Legislatures alone on the State List, subject to the Union entries, and both on the Concurrent List, where Article 254 waits for their collisions. Which List a subject sits on, and how the three Lists are to be read against each other, is a large subject in its own right, and the comparison of the Union, State and Concurrent Lists owns that ground; what matters here is the single proposition that Article 254 presupposes the answer. It is a rule for resolving conflicts inside the shared List. It is not a rule for policing the borders between Lists, and when a dispute is really about borders, other doctrines do the work.

The border doctrine is pith and substance. A legislature’s enactment is characterised by its true nature and character, its object, scope and effect, and if in pith and substance it falls within an entry allotted to that legislature, it is valid even though it incidentally touches a subject allotted to the other. The Privy Council’s formulation in Prafulla Kumar Mukherjee v. Bank of Commerce, Khulna, decided in 1947 on the predecessor federation, remains the standard statement: subjects in the Lists are not to be read narrowly, overlaps are expected, and an incidental encroachment on the other legislature’s field does not invalidate a law that is in substance within its maker’s field. The Constitution Bench restated the consequence for repugnancy in M. Karunanidhi v. Union of India in 1979: where a state law, while substantially within the State List, entrenches upon a Union List entry, its constitutionality may be upheld through pith and substance if the entrenchment is purely incidental or inconsequential. In such a case Article 254 is never invoked at all, because the two laws are not both laws on a Concurrent matter, and the appearance of conflict is an artefact of reading the Acts at the level of their side effects.

The modern illustration most often cited is ITC Ltd. v. Agricultural Produce Market Committee, decided by a Constitution Bench in 2002. Bihar’s agricultural marketing legislation, a State List subject concerned with markets and fairs, was said to be repugnant to central legislation on industries and tobacco. The Court held that in pith and substance the two bodies of law occupied different fields: the state law regulated the marketing of agricultural produce, including tobacco as a notified commodity, while the central legislation addressed the development and control of the tobacco industry. Since the laws were not both referable to the same Concurrent entry, there was no repugnancy to resolve, and each operated in its own sphere. The case is a standing warning against the loose use of the word repugnancy to describe any situation in which a trader or a department finds two regulatory regimes inconvenient at once.

Where both laws do pass the gate, a second discipline applies before any test is run: repugnancy is not presumed. The Supreme Court said in Karunanidhi that the presumption is always in favour of the constitutionality of a statute and the onus lies on the person who assails it, and it laid down the conditions that must be satisfied before repugnancy can arise at all. There must be a clear and direct inconsistency between the central Act and the state Act. The inconsistency must be irreconcilable. And the inconsistency must be of such a nature as to bring the two Acts into direct collision, so that a situation is reached where it is impossible to obey one without disobeying the other. Courts therefore begin by trying to reconcile the two texts, reading each so that both can operate, and they reach for the voiding rule only when the reconciliation fails. Much of the case law that follows is best understood as courts performing that rescue operation with varying degrees of conviction.

Does Article 254 apply when the two laws sit in different Lists?

It does not. Article 254 resolves conflicts between two laws that are each, in pith and substance, referable to a matter in the Concurrent List. Where the laws sit in different Lists, any overlap is handled by pith and substance and the rule permitting incidental encroachment, not by repugnancy.

The threshold has a practical consequence that litigants ignore at their cost. A challenge framed under Article 254 invites the court first to characterise both statutes, and characterisation is where these cases are usually won and lost. If the state statute can be shown to be in substance a law on a State List subject, the central statute’s incidental pressure on it is constitutionally irrelevant. If the central statute can be shown to be in substance a law under a Union entry, as with the standards legislation discussed later in this article, the state law’s complaint is not that it has lost a repugnancy contest but that the field was never shared in the way it supposed. The doctrine of repugnancy, properly understood, is narrow: it governs the interior of the Concurrent List, and the long argument about Indian federalism is mostly conducted, deliberately or not, at its borders rather than in its interior.

The three tests by which courts find repugnancy

Once the gate is passed and reconciliation has failed, the courts ask whether the case falls within one of three situations, which the case law has repeated, with small variations of phrasing, for six decades. The canonical restatement is in Hoechst Pharmaceuticals Ltd. v. State of Bihar, decided in 1983, where the Supreme Court explained that repugnancy between a state law and a central law on a Concurrent subject may arise, first, where there is a direct conflict between the two; second, where Parliament intended to lay down an exhaustive code in respect of the subject matter, replacing the state law; and third, where the central law and the state law occupy the same field, even without an explicit provision-by-provision contradiction. Karunanidhi had organised the same material from the other end: two enactments contain repugnant provisions when they cannot stand together or operate in the same field; there is no repeal by implication unless the inconsistency appears on the face of the two statutes; where there is room for both statutes to operate in the same field without collision, no repugnancy results; and where the state statute, without being inconsistent, creates distinct and separate offences, both statutes continue to operate.

The direct conflict test is the easiest to state and the hardest to satisfy. It asks whether obedience to the state law necessarily involves disobedience to the central law: one commands what the other forbids, or one confers a right that the other takes away. Mere difference is not enough, and mere duplication is not enough. The classic negative demonstration is Tika Ramji v. State of Uttar Pradesh, decided in 1956, where the State’s sugarcane legislation, regulating the supply and purchase of cane for factories, was challenged against the central industries and essential commodities framework and its control orders. The Supreme Court found no repugnancy: the central regime had not fixed the field exclusively, the state law regulated a different aspect of the same industry, and the two could be obeyed together without strain. Tika Ramji remains the standard citation for the proposition that two laws may govern the same trade, the same commodity and even the same transaction, and yet not collide, because collision is a relation between provisions and not between atmospheres.

The second and third tests work together and do the heavier lifting. Where Parliament has evinced an intention to cover the whole field, the state law cannot stand even if no single provision contradicts a single central provision, because the vice is not contradiction but occupation. Deep Chand v. State of Uttar Pradesh, decided in 1959, is the foundational illustration. Uttar Pradesh had enacted its own transport legislation in 1955 authorising schemes for the nationalisation of road transport, at a time when the central Motor Vehicles Act, 1939 contained no corresponding scheme machinery. Parliament then amended the central Act in 1956, inserting a chapter that provided for state transport undertakings and framed the scheme-making power itself. The Supreme Court held that the state Act became inoperative to the extent of the inconsistency: Parliament had entered and occupied the field of transport nationalisation schemes, and the state machinery for the same purpose could not operate alongside the central one. The state law was not badly drafted or beyond the State’s competence in 1955. It died of a change in the central law’s ambition.

State of Orissa v. M. A. Tulloch and Company, decided in 1964, shows the occupation route at its most mechanical. Orissa’s mining areas development legislation levied charges to fund development in mining areas, under the State’s power over mines and minerals, a State List entry expressly made subject to Union control. Parliament’s mines and minerals legislation contained a declaration that it was expedient in the public interest that the Union should take regulation of mines and mineral development under its control, and Parliament then enacted a scheme of regulation for the field. The Court held that the declaration and the central scheme evinced the intention to occupy the field, and the state charging provisions could not survive in the occupied territory. Where Parliament uses a declaration of that kind, the search for its intention is short, and the State’s room is correspondingly small: the occupation is announced rather than inferred.

Hoechst itself is the counterweight, because on its facts the tests were run and repugnancy was not found. Bihar had levied a surcharge on the sale of medicines under its finance legislation and forbidden dealers to pass the surcharge on to purchasers, while a central price control order under the Essential Commodities Act, 1955 fixed the maximum prices at which drugs could be sold. The manufacturers said the two regimes collided: the order capped the price, the state law increased the burden within the price, and the field of drug pricing was occupied. The Court disagreed. The state law was in pith and substance a taxing law under the State’s taxation entry; the control order fixed a ceiling, not an invariable price; a manufacturer could obey both by absorbing the surcharge within the ceiling; and the occupied field argument failed because Parliament’s price control scheme had not assumed the field of taxation on sales. The judgment is the fullest single exposition of the tests precisely because it refuses to apply them loosely: each of the three routes was examined and each was found, on the texts, not to lead to repugnancy.

When does repugnancy begin, when a conflicting law is made or when it is brought into force?

Repugnancy arises when the law is made, not when it is commenced. In Mar Appraem Kuri the Supreme Court held that a central Act is a law made for Article 254 before its provisions are notified into force, so the Kerala Chitties Act, 1975 became void when the Chit Funds Act was enacted on 19 August 1982.

The timing rule matters more than it looks. A State planning legislation on a shared subject cannot take comfort from the fact that the displacing central Act lies uncommenced on the shelf: the displacement has already happened in law, and everything the State enacts into the occupied field is born void unless it travels the assent route of clause (2). The same reasoning disciplines the opposite temptation. Because repugnancy is tested at the making of the laws, courts compare the texts as enacted, and arguments built on how a central scheme is being administered, or on enforcement practice on the ground, do not manufacture a repugnancy that the texts do not contain.

The tests also have an internal order, which the decision table later in this article formalises. A court characterises the two laws first, because characterisation decides whether there is a shared field at all. It then attempts reconciliation, because repugnancy must be clear and direct before it is anything else. Only when reconciliation fails does it choose between the direct conflict description and the occupation description, which are frequently two accounts of the same collision: the occupation account explains why a provision that contradicts nothing in particular is still void, and the conflict account explains why a provision that contradicts something in particular would be void even in a field Parliament had not tried to fill. The assent question comes after both, because assent saves a law that is repugnant; it is not an argument that the law was never repugnant at all. That last distinction, simple as it sounds, decides real cases, including the Kerala chit funds case, where the State’s amendments of 2002 were struck at precisely this point: they were amendments to a law already displaced, enacted without the fresh assent that alone could have saved them.

A worked example: Karunanidhi and the public men legislation

The doctrine is best seen whole, once, on facts where every element is in play. Tamil Nadu enacted the Tamil Nadu Public Men (Criminal Misconduct) Act, 1973, creating offences of criminal misconduct by public men, a category reaching beyond the public servants of the central Prevention of Corruption Act, 1947, with its own machinery of investigation and trial. The challenge said the field of corruption offences was occupied by the central legislation, the Act of 1947 and the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 1952, and that the state Act was repugnant and void. The Constitution Bench in M. Karunanidhi v. Union of India, in a judgment delivered on 20 February 1979, rejected the challenge, and in doing so wrote the passage from which every later statement of the doctrine is copied.

The Court’s conditions have been quoted earlier in this article: a clear and direct inconsistency, irreconcilable, producing a direct collision in which obedience to one law means disobedience to the other. Applying them, the Court held first that the two regimes did not collide, because they were aimed at different subjects in the constitutional sense: the central Acts addressed public servants under the general criminal law, while the state Act addressed a defined class of public men and created offences distinct in their ingredients and their procedure. The proposition the Court drew is the one advocates cite most: where a state statute creates distinct and separate offences, without trenching on the central offences, there is no repugnancy merely because the two statutes inhabit the same broad territory of misconduct. The Court held second that there is no repeal by implication of a state law by a central law unless the inconsistency appears on the face of the two statutes themselves: repugnancy is a textual event, not an inference from the general spirit of the central scheme. And it held third that where both statutes can operate in the same field without coming into collision with each other, there is no repugnancy, a proposition that converts the court’s first duty into rescue: the texts are to be read together, each given its own work to do, before either is condemned.

The judgment’s authority is reinforced by its method: Fazal Ali J., writing for the Constitution Bench, surveyed the whole line of earlier authority, Zaverbhai on assent and resumption, Tika Ramji on coexistence, Deep Chand on occupation, and Tulloch on the declared field, before extracting the conditions, so that the Karunanidhi propositions present themselves not as innovations but as the settled residue of thirty years of Section 107 and Article 254 litigation. Later benches have treated them accordingly. When Innoventive restated the law for the insolvency generation, it was the Karunanidhi conditions that it restated, and when Mar Appraem Kuri fixed the moment at which repugnancy bites, it built on the same foundation. A doctrine whose canonical statement has survived, unamended, from 1979 through the arrival of the great economic codes is either exceptionally well made or exceptionally convenient to both levels of government, and the argument of this article is that it is the former operating in the service of the latter: the tests are genuinely constraining on courts, and the constraints happen to leave the Union’s structural advantages, in the gate, in the occupation inference and in the proviso, exactly where the text put them.

Karunanidhi is equally instructive for what the State had done outside the courtroom. The Tamil Nadu Act had been framed against the central legislation with the repugnancy risk in view, and the case is argued in the books as the exemplar of careful state drafting: define the class distinctly, build offences with distinct ingredients, avoid commanding anything the central Acts forbid, and the state law survives without needing the assent route at all. The contrast with the cases the State loses, Deep Chand, Tulloch, Mar Appraem Kuri, is not a contrast of political fortune. It is a contrast of drafting distance from the central text. Courts applying the Karunanidhi conditions are, beneath the constitutional language, measuring that distance: the further the state law’s provisions stand from any central provision they might collide with, the more surely the reconciliation the Court prefers can be performed.

How courts avoid the finding: reconciliation, extent and severance

Three interpretive disciplines stand between a litigant’s allegation of repugnancy and a court’s finding of it, and together they explain why successful repugnancy challenges are rarer than the Concurrent List’s breadth would suggest.

The first is reconciliation itself, already described: the presumption favours the validity of the impugned statute, the burden lies on the challenger, and the court reads the two laws, where language permits, so that each operates in a distinct compartment. Reading down is the sharp end of the same discipline: a state provision capable of two constructions, one colliding with the central Act and one not, will ordinarily receive the construction that avoids the collision, because the court attributes to the State Legislature an intention to legislate within its competence and within the space the central law leaves. Challengers who frame their case as though repugnancy were a conclusion from the mere coexistence of two regulatory regimes have usually lost before the tests are reached.

The second discipline is extent. The voidness Article 254 inflicts is measured by the repugnancy: to the extent of the repugnancy the state law is void, and no further. A state Act of forty sections with two sections in collision loses two sections. The surviving sections continue to operate, including in cases where their operation feels anomalous next to the disapplied central regime, because the article performs a surgical comparison of provisions and not a judgment on the statute as a whole. Severability doctrine does the remaining work where the void provision is entangled with the valid ones: the question is whether what remains is workable and corresponds to a legislative scheme the State can be taken to have intended, and where it is, the remainder stands. Litigants who announce that a state Act has been struck down for repugnancy are therefore almost always overstating the result, and the overstatement matters practically, because the disapplied provisions are usually a small, identifiable set around which compliance can be reorganised.

The third discipline is the allocation of the argument. Repugnancy is raised, in practice, by whoever the state law inconveniences: the prosecuted trader, the employer resisting a state labour provision, the institution resisting a state regulatory condition, the creditor resisting a state moratorium. It is rarely raised by the Union itself, which has no need of the doctrine’s help, possessing the proviso and the power to legislate. The doctrine’s case law is accordingly built from private litigation about public power, and its outcomes track the quality of textual comparison in the individual case rather than any general judicial attitude to federalism. A court that saves a state law in one decade and voids a similar one in the next is usually not changing its mind about the federation. It is reading two different pairs of texts.

Repugnancy in the criminal law: overlapping offences and unequal punishments

The Concurrent List carries the criminal law and criminal procedure entries, and the criminal field has generated a distinctive family of repugnancy problems, because criminal statutes overlap by design: the same conduct may be an offence under a central code, under a state Act, and under a special local law simultaneously, and each regime may punish it differently. The doctrine’s answer, assembled across Karunanidhi and T. Barai, has three parts. First, duplication is not repugnancy: the central codes do not, merely by covering conduct, forbid a State to attach its own offences to the same conduct, provided the state offences are distinct in their ingredients, so that the prosecutor’s choice between regimes is a choice between different wrongs and not between two prices for the same wrong. Second, identity of offence with inequality of punishment is repugnancy in its most concrete form: where both laws punish the same offence and one prescribes imprisonment for life where the other prescribes three years, the citizen cannot conform his position to both, and the conflict is direct even though each law, read alone, is perfectly coherent. T. Barai was decided on exactly this geometry, after Parliament’s amendment brought the central punishment down against a state enhancement that assent had previously sustained. Third, the assent route has been the criminal field’s routine instrument: state amendments to the central criminal codes and state special criminal legislation departing from them have habitually been reserved and assented to, which is why the criminal law in India, formally codified nationally, is in substance a national code with state variations distributed unevenly across the map, in matters from procedure to the definition of local offences.

The criminal field also shows why the doctrine’s reconciliation discipline matters most where liberty is at stake. A court that found repugnancy loosely in this field would not merely reorganise a regulatory scheme; it would disable prosecutions, unsettle convictions recorded under the displaced provision, and raise the savings questions that Section 6 of the General Clauses Act, 1897 answers only partly, since it protects accrued liabilities under a repealed enactment but cannot recreate a prosecution the voidness has disabled from the start. The courts’ insistence on a clear and direct collision, on the face of the two statutes, is at its most defensible here: between a citizen’s exposure to two punishments for one act, which the doctrine prevents, and a State’s wish to punish its own defined wrongs in its own way, which the doctrine preserves, the line is drawn by the ingredients of the offences, and the line is workable precisely because it is textual.

The occupied field test and its discontents

The occupied field test deserves separate treatment because it is the test with the widest reach and the least determinate content, and because it is the route by which most state laws in shared fields actually fall. Direct conflicts are rare, for a simple reason: legislatures can read. A State that wants to legislate on a Concurrent subject can see the central Act, and the drafter’s ordinary skill is to write around it, choosing different instruments, different thresholds, different machinery, so that no provision commands what another forbids. What drafting cannot reliably avoid is the judgment, made after the fact by a court reading the central statute as a whole, that Parliament meant to govern the subject completely. That judgment is not found in any section. It is inferred from the scheme of the central Act: its comprehensiveness, its detail, its machinery, its non-obstante clauses, occasionally its preamble or a declaration of expediency, and from the court’s sense of whether a supplementary state law would disturb the uniformity the central scheme was built to secure.

The candid difficulty is that this inference can render a state law void without any actual conflict between anything the State enacted and anything Parliament enacted. The State is told, in effect, that the problem with its law is not what it says but where it stands: it stands in a field that has been taken. States experience that, understandably, as an expansion of central competence by construction, because a power to legislate on part of a subject becomes, through the occupation finding, an exclusion of the other legislature from the whole subject. The critics of the test, and they include state governments in litigation and commentators on the federal balance, point out that the intention being discovered is often a judicial construct: central statutes are long and detailed for many reasons, including administrative habit, and comprehensiveness of drafting is not the same thing as a purpose to exclude.

The defence of the test is functional, and it is not weak. Some subjects lose their point if they are regulated twice. A national insolvency code that must yield to twenty-eight state moratorium regimes is not a code. A price control scheme whose ceilings can be re-engineered by state surcharges and pass-through prohibitions will produce different real prices in different States, which may or may not be tolerable, but is at least a question the Constitution should answer rather than leave to drafting accidents. Article 254’s own text supplies the defence’s strongest premise: the default rule is central supremacy, and clause (2) exists precisely so that a State which wants room inside an occupied field can ask for it in advance, through reservation and assent, instead of taking it by drafting and defending it in court. On this view the occupied field test is not a trap but a signpost: it marks the fields in which the assent route is the proper way in.

The courts have built some restraint into the test, and the restraint deserves as much emphasis as the reach. The intention to occupy must be evinced, not merely available: Karunanidhi requires a clear and direct inconsistency, irreconcilable, before repugnancy arises, and the cases repeatedly say that courts must attempt reconciliation first and lean against a finding of repugnancy where two statutes can operate together. Tulloch turned on an express statutory declaration, the clearest possible evidence of intention. Deep Chand turned on Parliament inserting into the central Act the very machinery the state Act had created, a near-textual identity of subject. Where the evidence is thinner, courts have declined the finding, as Hoechst declined it for drug pricing: a ceiling price regime did not, without more, announce an intention to occupy the field of sales taxation. The honest summary is that the occupied field test is a judgment about legislative intention drawn from the scheme of a statute, that reasonable courts can and do reach opposite conclusions on similar schemes, and that everyone legislating in the Concurrent List, state and Union alike, works in its shadow. A State that legislates as if only direct conflict mattered will be surprised. A Union that legislates as if every detailed scheme automatically occupies its field will also be surprised, though less often and at less cost.

There is a drafting corollary, and it completes the section. Because occupation is inferred from scheme, the drafting of the central Act is the battlefield on which the test’s future applications are decided. A Parliament that wishes to leave room for state variation can say so, confining its scheme to stated aspects of the subject, and courts reading such a statute have material for the reconciliation they prefer. A Parliament that wishes exclusivity signals it through the indicia the cases reward: exhaustive coverage, uniform machinery, a non-obstante clause, a declaration where the constitutional scheme provides one. State drafters read the same signals in reverse, mapping the occupied territory from the central Act’s own architecture before choosing where to build. The occupied field test, often criticised as uncertain, is in this sense a communication system between legislatures conducted in the grammar of drafting, and its uncertainty falls most heavily on those who do not read the signals.

Repugnancy beyond statutes: rules, orders and notifications

The comparison Article 254 commands is between laws, and law in this setting is not confined to Acts of the two legislatures. Subordinate legislation made under a central Act, control orders, statutory rules and notifications issued under central statutory authority, enters the comparison on the central side, because it is law made under Parliament’s authority and within the competence Parliament has exercised. Hoechst turned on exactly this: the central comparator was not a section of an Act but the Drugs (Prices Control) Order, 1979, issued under Section 3 of the Essential Commodities Act, 1955, and the Court treated the Order’s price ceilings as the central law against which the Bihar taxing provisions were measured. The state side is symmetric: state rules and notifications under a state Act share the fate of the provisions they implement, and a state notification issued under a displaced provision falls with it.

The consequence is that repugnancy disputes in regulatory fields are often disputes about instruments nobody in either legislature voted on. A central control order can occupy ground against a state Act; a state rule can create the direct conflict that the parent state Act avoided. Practitioners who audit only the two Acts in a field are therefore auditing half the law in it. The same point disciplines the assent route: assent under clause (2) is assent to a bill, and it cures the repugnancy of the provisions enacted by that bill; it does not license every future state notification in the field, and a state instrument that travels beyond the assented Act’s provisions into fresh collision with the central law stands unprotected. The licensing logic is exact, and it follows the texts at every level of the hierarchy of norms.

Four questions, in order: whether a state law survives

The doctrine reduces, in practice, to four questions asked in a fixed order, and the order is not a courtesy: each question presupposes the answer to the one before it. A drafter in a state law department, an advocate advising on a challenge, and a student revising the subject are all running the same sequence, whether or not they write it down.

Question, in order	If the answer is yes	If the answer is no
1. Are both laws, in pith and substance, referable to the same matter in the Concurrent List?	Proceed to question 2; Article 254 is engaged.	Article 254 is not engaged; any overlap is resolved by pith and substance, and both laws stand.
2. Is there a direct conflict between the provisions, or has Parliament evinced an intention to occupy the whole field?	The state law is repugnant and void to the extent of the repugnancy, unless question 3 saves it.	There is no repugnancy; both laws operate together.
3. Was the state law reserved for the consideration of the President and assented to under Article 254(2)?	The state law prevails in that State over the earlier central law, to the extent of the inconsistency.	The state law remains void to the extent of the repugnancy found at question 2.
4. Has Parliament legislated on the same matter after the assent, whether by a fresh law or by amending or repealing the state law under the proviso?	The state law is displaced again, to the extent of the new repugnancy, from the making of the later central law.	The assented state law continues to prevail in that State.

The table also exposes why so many public arguments on this subject go wrong. Arguments about question 2, where lawyers are comfortable, are routinely offered as if they answered question 1, where the case will actually be decided. Arguments about question 3 are offered as if they answered question 4, as though assent were a permanent settlement rather than a position that holds only until Parliament speaks again. And arguments about fairness, federalism and the wisdom of the state law, which belong to the political debate, are offered as if they were answers to any of the four, which they are not. The four questions are the law. Everything else is advocacy about what the law should be, and the sections that follow keep the two apart.

The assent route: how clause (2) works in practice

The machinery of the exception is borrowed from the ordinary passage of state legislation, with one decisive addition. Under Article 200, when a bill has been passed by a State Legislature, the Governor may assent to it, withhold assent, return it for reconsideration if it is not a money bill, or reserve it for the consideration of the President. Reservation is mandatory in one case only, where the bill so derogates from the powers of the High Court as to endanger its constitutional position; in every other case, including the repugnancy case, reservation is a choice, made by the Governor, on ministerial advice or occasionally against the grain of it, and it is the choice on which the whole clause (2) route depends. Under Article 201, a reserved bill goes to the President, who may assent or withhold assent, or return it with a message asking the State Legislature to reconsider it in the light of stated considerations; the Legislature must reconsider within six months, and if the bill is passed again, with or without amendment, and presented again, the President is not bound to assent. Nothing in Article 201, as the Constitution Bench confirmed in its opinion on the Presidential Reference of 2025, permits a court to treat a bill as deemed assented to by the passage of time: the Court held that the concept of deemed assent is antithetical to the constitutional scheme, that timelines for the President’s decision cannot be prescribed by courts, and that the remedies for prolonged and unexplained delay are political and, at the limit, a limited judicial direction to decide within a reasonable time, never a direction as to the outcome.

A preliminary distinction, small in the text and large in litigation, separates reservation for clause (2) purposes from reservation generally. Bills reach the President by several roads: the mandatory road, where the bill derogates from the High Court’s position and the Governor is bound to reserve it; the discretionary road, where the Governor reserves a bill for reasons of national concern or constitutional doubt; and the clause (2) road, where reservation is the chosen instrument for curing an identified repugnancy. The roads converge on the same desk but they do not merge. Assent granted to a bill that travelled by a different road is assent to the bill, and it makes the bill law; it does not, without the repugnancy purpose in the file, perform clause (2)’s specific work of licensing the departure, which is the Malwinder Singh holding expressed in administrative terms. States have lost the benefit of assents they genuinely held because the paper trail showed the wrong purpose, and the loss is irrecoverable after enactment, since the cure must precede the operation of the law it protects. The reservation letter is therefore among the most consequential single documents in Indian legislative practice, and among the least read outside the secretariats that draft it.

Three features of the route are persistently under-described. The first is that assent under clause (2) is a cure applied in advance. It does not validate a state law that has already begun operating in conflict; the bill is reserved before it becomes law, and the assent it receives is what permits it to become law with the repugnancy inside it. A State that has enacted and commenced a conflicting provision without assent has no clause (2) defence at all, as Kerala discovered when its 2002 amendments to its chit funds legislation were held void: the amendments had never been reserved and assented to, and there was nothing to cure the defect after the event. The second feature is territorial: the assent’s effect is confined to the State whose bill was assented to. The same state law, word for word, enacted by a neighbouring State without assent, is void in that State while valid across the border, which is why the assent route produces patchworks, in land acquisition and labour regulation most visibly, that look odd until the mechanism is understood. The third feature is relational: the assent protects the state law against the earlier central law whose repugnancy was in contemplation. It is not a general charter of immunity against central legislation, past or future, and the cases on the proviso show how quickly that limit bites.

The Union’s consideration of a reserved bill follows an administrative pattern that the Sarkaria Commission described and later practice has kept. The bill is examined in the Union Home Ministry, which consults the ministry administering the central law from which departure is proposed and, where the file raises drafting or constitutional questions, the Law Ministry; clarifications and modifications are sought from the State in the course of the examination, and bills are on occasion effectively renegotiated in this correspondence, so that the bill finally assented to is not always the bill the Assembly passed in its original form. Telangana’s land acquisition bill passed through exactly this filter, emerging revised after the Law Ministry’s questions before its passage in April 2017 and its assent the following month. The filter’s existence is not a secret, but its operation is file-based and unpublished, and a State learns the Union’s objections in correspondence rather than from any public statement of criteria, which is one reason the assent stage is experienced by state governments as negotiation with a counterparty rather than adjudication by a tribunal.

Who advises the President when a state bill is reserved for assent?

The Union executive does. Under Article 74 the President acts on the aid and advice of the Union Council of Ministers, so a reserved bill is considered in substance by the Union government. The State must therefore obtain, in form from the President and in substance from the Union Council of Ministers, permission to depart from the Union’s own law.

That single fact explains most of the politics of the assent route. The decision on a reserved bill is not taken by a neutral arbiter standing above the two levels of government; it is taken by one of them, the one whose legislation is being departed from. Defenders of the arrangement reply that this is exactly what the provision contemplates: clause (2) is a mechanism of Union consent, and it would be strange to route consent anywhere else. Critics reply that consent routed through a political executive will be granted or withheld on political grounds, and that the files on which politically contested bills wait, sometimes for years, are the predictable product of the design rather than abuses of it. Both points are made with more care later in this article; here it is enough to register that the assent stage is executive government all the way down, and that any account of it as a judicial or quasi-judicial screening is a misdescription.

Is presidential assent a formality, or must the President be told why it is sought?

It is not an idle formality. In Malwinder Singh the Supreme Court held that the President has to be apprised of the reason why his assent is sought, and that where assent is sought for a specific purpose, its efficacy is limited to that purpose, so assent obtained for one purpose cannot cure a repugnancy it was never sought for.

The Malwinder Singh facts reward attention because they show how easily the point is missed in practice. Punjab’s village common lands legislation prevailed, as the Court held, over the central evacuee property legislation on its own terms; but the State had also advanced the assent argument, and the Court examined it and rejected it. The bill had been reserved and the President’s assent obtained in 1953, but the reservation had been made to secure the protection of the agrarian reform provisions of the Constitution, Articles 31 and 31A, not on the ground of repugnancy with the central Act. Chandrachud CJ held that the assent of the President under Article 254(2) is not a matter of idle formality: the President has at least to be apprised of the reason why his assent is sought, if the assent is to have the effect of curing repugnancy, and where assent is sought for a specific purpose its efficacy is limited to that purpose. O. Chinnappa Reddy J, concurring, put the same point as a limit on transformation: assent accorded for the express purpose of Article 31A is not capable of automatic transformation into assent for the purpose of Article 254(2). A State that needs the cure must ask for the cure, in terms, and a file that asks for something else gives it something else.

For those who keep the records of such transactions, the detail is unforgiving: the reservation letter, the statement of objects, and the ministry correspondence are the evidence on which a later court will decide what the assent was for, and a legal team assembling a bill’s history for litigation will often need to retrieve those records from scans, certified copies and old presentation files, a task made easier when the documents can be opened and read in the browser through an online PowerPoint viewer or a similar tool rather than chased through a registry. The substantive lesson is the one Malwinder Singh states: assent is purpose-specific, and the purpose is fixed at the moment of asking, not reconstructed afterwards to suit the litigation.

The Union government’s own handling of reserved bills reflects the same specificity. A bill reserved on repugnancy grounds is examined against the central law it proposes to depart from, and the examination is done by the Union ministries administering that law, which is why bills departing from a ministry’s flagship statute face a harder passage than bills departing from an ageing one. The practice generates a quiet body of precedent: state bills on land acquisition were processed in a batch in 2017 after the political decision to permit state variation had been taken, while education bills seeking exemption from national admission regimes have been returned or refused. The Constitution Bench’s 2025 opinion declined to convert any of this practice into enforceable timelines, holding that prolonged inaction may attract a limited direction to decide but that the decision itself, and its merits, are not justiciable. Anyone describing the assent stage, therefore, should describe it accurately: it is a real constitutional power, exercised by the Union executive, on files, without a statutory clock, and with reasons that are communicated as a matter of practice and commission recommendation rather than of enforceable duty. This account states that general position; it is not advice on any particular bill, and a live repugnancy question always turns on the two texts in force and the recorded purpose of any assent, which have to be examined in the individual case.

The proviso in action: assent is a permission Parliament can withdraw

The proviso to clause (2) is short, and its consequences are large. It provides that nothing in clause (2) shall prevent Parliament from enacting at any time any law with respect to the same matter, including a law adding to, amending, varying or repealing the law so made by the State Legislature. The words at any time abolish any doctrine of protected reliance: the assented state law enjoys no grace period, no entrenched status, no claim that Parliament, having consented through the President, is estopped from resuming the field. And the inclusion of repeal of the state law itself, as an express parliamentary object, removes any argument that Parliament may legislate around the state law but must leave the state law standing. Parliament may go through it, over it, or straight at it.

The first great demonstration came early, and under the predecessor provision. In Zaverbhai Amaidas v. State of Bombay, decided in 1955 on Section 107 of the Government of India Act, 1935, Bombay had amended the central essential supplies legislation as it applied in the State, enhancing the penalties for offences, and the amending Act had received the Governor-General’s assent, the clause (2) analogue of the time, so the enhanced penalties prevailed in Bombay. Parliament then amended its own Act in 1950 and itself enhanced the penalties, occupying the same ground with different figures. The Supreme Court held that the Bombay amendments were displaced: once Parliament legislated on the same matter, the assented state law, to the extent of the new inconsistency, ceased to operate. The sequence is the proviso’s biography: state departure, central assent, central resumption, state law void, all without any constitutional amendment and without anyone acting beyond the text.

T. Barai v. Henry Ah Hoe, decided on 7 December 1982, is the modern authority and the most complete judicial description of the mechanism. West Bengal had amended the central Prevention of Food Adulteration Act, 1954 as it applied in the State, raising the punishment for specified adulteration offences to imprisonment for life, and the amendment Act of 1973 had been reserved and had received the President’s assent, coming into force in April 1974. Parliament then amended the central Act in 1976, moving in the opposite direction: it reduced the corresponding punishment to a maximum of three years and introduced summary trial for such offences. The accused, prosecuted in West Bengal, argued that the milder central regime governed; the State argued that its assented law prevailed. The Supreme Court held for the accused. The Court’s reasoning repays quotation in paraphrase because it maps the whole article: assent under clause (2) makes the state Act prevail in that State, and to the extent of the inconsistency, but the predominance of the state law may be taken away if Parliament legislates under the proviso, and Parliament had done so, by amending the central Act on the same matter; the West Bengal amendment accordingly stood impliedly repealed, and the prosecution had to proceed under the central Act as amended. A State’s victory under clause (2), the case establishes, is a snapshot, not a settlement: it records who prevailed against the central law as it stood on the day of assent, and it says nothing about the day after.

Vijay Kumar Sharma v. State of Karnataka, decided in 1990, closes the remaining gap in the logic. Karnataka’s contract carriages legislation, which provided for the acquisition of contract carriages and had received the President’s assent, was overtaken by Parliament’s Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, a fresh central enactment on the same field. The Court held that the state Act was rendered void to the extent of its repugnancy with the later central Act: assent under clause (2) answers the earlier law, and it is no answer at all to a later one. Between Zaverbhai, T. Barai and Vijay Kumar Sharma, every temporal sequence has been run. A central law after assent displaces the state law whether the central move is an amendment of the same Act, a recalibration of penalties within it, or a fresh code for the field. The pattern is so consistent that practitioners state it as a rule of thumb: never advise a client that an assented state law is safe; advise only that it is in force, with its validity expiring, in practical terms, whenever Parliament next legislates on the matter with a different intention.

Why would a constitution design an exception so thoroughly defeasible? The answer that fits the text is that the exception was never designed as autonomy. It was designed as administration: a safety valve through which local departures from a national scheme could be authorised where the Union saw no harm in them, while the Union retained unimpaired ownership of the scheme. The 1935 Act, from which the provision descends, was an imperial instrument in which provincial autonomy existed within a framework of central reservation powers, and the Constituent Assembly, which debated many federal questions with great care, carried the mechanism across with remarkably little alteration. The proviso is the fingerprint of that origin. It tells the reader that the framers’ concern was not to balance two sovereignties on the shared subjects, but to provide an orderly way for the senior partner to say yes, case by case, without ever saying yes in principle.

One phrase in the proviso is stronger than anything the case law has yet needed, and it should not pass unnoticed: Parliament may enact a law adding to, amending, varying or repealing the law so made by the State Legislature. The ordinary case, illustrated by T. Barai, is indirect displacement, where Parliament amends its own Act and the state law falls by repugnancy. The proviso’s words authorise the direct operation as well: a parliamentary enactment whose object is the state statute itself, amending its text on the State’s own statute book. In practice Parliament has almost always preferred the indirect route, which reaches the same result with better optics, and the direct power stands in the text largely unused. Its presence remains diagnostic. A federation in which the senior legislature may directly amend the junior’s statutes, within the shared field and after the junior has obtained every permission the constitution requires, has located the final legislative authority in one place, and Article 254 is the provision that records the location. The proviso is rarely quoted in full in the textbooks. It should be quoted first.

The lifecycle of an assented law: amendment, extension and the limits of the cure

An assented state law has a lifecycle, and each stage of it tests the limits of the cure in a different way. The first limit is specificity, already established by Malwinder Singh: the assent cures the repugnancy it was sought for, on the file as presented, and a state law whose drafters described their bill to the President as an agrarian reform measure cannot later present its assent as a repugnancy cure for a different central Act. The second limit is provision-specificity, established by the Kerala chit funds litigation: the cure attaches to the provisions enacted by the assented bill, and when the State later amends the assented law in ways that create or enlarge a repugnancy, the amendments are fresh provisions requiring their own cure. Kerala’s State Finance Act amendments of 2002 failed precisely here: the parent Act’s fate had already been sealed by the central Chit Funds Act, and the amending provisions, never reserved and assented to, were void, notwithstanding that they amended a statute of the State in a Concurrent field and notwithstanding that assent for the scheme of the amendments would very likely have been a straightforward file had it been sought. The rule is unforgiving but it is not arbitrary: the Union’s consent is consent to identified provisions departing in identified ways, and a State that extends the departure extends it beyond the consent.

The third limit is territorial and personal in operation. The assented law prevails in that State, which means its protection runs with the State’s territory and not with the persons or transactions it governs once they cross the border: a labour threshold lawfully applicable in Rajasthan has no force in the same employer’s establishment across the state line, and a land acquisition commenced under an assented state regime must be completed under it as well, since the central Act it displaces continues to govern every other acquisition in the country. Businesses operating across states experience the clause, therefore, not as a doctrine but as a compliance matrix, in which the applicable version of what appears to be one national statute changes at each border according to which States have sought and received assent for which departures. The fourth limit is the proviso itself, the subject of the preceding section: the whole licensed position is defeasible at Parliament’s pleasure, so the lifecycle of every assented law includes, as a standing possibility, its termination by the legislature it was licensed against. Prudent state drafting acknowledges the lifecycle in the text of the assented law itself, with savings and transition provisions written against the day the central law moves, because the day is not within the State’s control and its arrival, as T. Barai shows, can retrospectively change the legal character of pending proceedings.

The assent route in the field: land, labour, markets and the bills that never emerged

Doctrine aside, the assent route has a working life, and its recent history is written in three fields. Land acquisition came first in volume. The central land acquisition statute of 2013 was enacted on the Concurrent List entry for acquisition and requisitioning of property, and its consent, compensation and rehabilitation provisions were, from the beginning, the provisions several States most wished to soften. When the Union’s own effort to amend the central Act failed in Parliament, the field moved to the state capitals: States enacted their own amendments to the central Act as it applied within their territories, departing from its consent and compensation architecture, and sent those amendments up the clause (2) route. The state amendments to the land acquisition framework and the parallel departures in state marketing legislation for agricultural produce are the standing examples of the assent route used as federal flexibility in its classic form, a State varying a national scheme with national permission.

Telangana’s is the best documented of these files. The State’s amendment bill of 2016 was passed in December of that year; the Union Law Ministry raised questions on the draft; a revised bill was passed on 30 April 2017 and reserved by the Governor the same day; the President assented on 12 May 2017, and the Act was published as Telangana Act No. 21 of 2017. Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand and Tamil Nadu also amended the 2013 Act by the state route in the same period, creating the patchwork described earlier: the central Act’s protections varied state by state, not because the Constitution distributes acquisition law unevenly, but because clause (2) had been used, state by state, to license the variation. Critics of the 2013 Act’s dilution make a point the doctrinal account should not conceal: the assent route here achieved, without a central amendment that Parliament had declined to pass, much of what the failed central amendments had proposed. Defenders reply that this is the clause working as intended, with each variation publicly enacted, publicly assented to, and confined to the State that asked for it.

Labour law supplied the second field. In 2014 Rajasthan amended a cluster of central labour statutes as they applied in the State, raising the threshold of workmen above which the industrial disputes legislation’s permission regime for layoff, retrenchment and closure applied, from one hundred to three hundred, increasing the applicability thresholds under the factories and contract labour legislation, and raising the membership threshold for trade union registration. The amending Acts were reserved and received the President’s assent, and the higher thresholds took effect in Rajasthan while the central figures continued everywhere else. The episode is cited by reformers as proof that clause (2) can move faster than central amendment, and by trade unions as proof that a protection enacted by Parliament for the whole country can be dismantled for one State’s workers by an executive decision in which those workers’ representatives have no part. Both citations are accurate. The clause decides who may authorise variation; it takes no position on whether the variation is wise.

The third field is the one where the route failed, and the failures are as instructive as the successes. In October 2020 the Punjab Legislative Assembly, responding to the three central farm laws of that year, passed four bills: amendments that sought to neutralise the central Acts within Punjab, and an amendment to the civil procedure legislation protecting farm land from attachment. The Governor did not assent to the bills, and they travelled to the President, from whom no assent followed. The bills never became law, and when Parliament repealed the central farm laws in 2021 the episode closed without the Punjab amendments ever operating. Tamil Nadu’s experience with medical admissions runs on parallel lines: the State’s 2021 bill to exempt its students from the national eligibility test for medical admissions, education being a Concurrent subject on which the central regime prevails, required the President’s assent to survive its repugnancy with the central law, and the assent was withheld, the refusal being communicated to the State in March 2025, after which the State carried the matter to the Supreme Court. In both episodes the formal position and the political position coincide: the Union executive, asked to license a departure from its own contested legislation, declined or did not answer, and the States’ legislative majorities were, in law, beside the point.

These episodes also expose the clause’s quietest feature: it has no default. A reserved bill that the President neither assents to nor returns simply waits, and until the 2025 litigation there was not even agreement about whether a court could look at the waiting. The Constitution Bench’s opinion in the Presidential Reference has settled the outer frame: no judicially prescribed timelines, no deemed assent, decisions on the merits of a bill not justiciable, but prolonged, unexplained and indefinite inaction open to a limited direction requiring a decision within a reasonable time. The Sarkaria Commission had recommended expedition and communication of reasons when assent is withheld, and the Punchhi Commission recommended that decisions on state bills be taken within a maximum of six months. Those recommendations stand as the reform position; the constitutional position, after the Reference, is that they are recommendations still. A State planning a clause (2) strategy must therefore price in the possibility of the file simply not moving, which is a strange thing to have to price into a constitutional mechanism, and is one of the considerations weighed in the two readings offered below.

The Governor’s choice, the return route and the reform file

Every clause (2) journey begins in the Raj Bhavan, and the Governor’s decision at the threshold deserves more attention than it usually receives, because it is the one point in the process where a State’s own constitutional functionary can stop the route before the Union is even asked. Under Article 200 the Governor’s options on a passed bill are to assent, to withhold assent, to return the bill with a message if it is not a money bill, or to reserve it for the President. Reservation on repugnancy grounds is not automatic, and it is not the State Legislature’s decision: a legislature that passes a bill departing from a central Act cannot itself reserve the bill, and a Governor who assents to such a bill without reservation produces a law that is operative on its face and void in its repugnant provisions, a defect no subsequent discovery of the problem can cure retrospectively. State law departments that manage the route professionally therefore treat the reservation as part of the bill’s design from the first draft: the statement of objects identifies the central provisions departed from, the repugnancy is acknowledged rather than concealed, and the Governor’s secretariat is briefed on the clause (2) purpose, because Malwinder Singh teaches that the recorded purpose of the reservation is the measure of the assent that follows it.

The return route under Article 201 is the assent process’s least examined branch, and its history contains the Gujarat anti-terrorism legislation, which travelled the full circuit more than once. First passed in 2003, the bill was reserved, and the President returned it; passed again by the Assembly, it was withheld; passed afresh in 2015, it was again sent up, and the President’s assent came in 2019, some sixteen years after the bill’s first passage, by which time the national anti-terror framework around it had been rebuilt twice. The episode is the cleanest demonstration in the record that Article 201’s return is not a dialogue with a timetable attached, and that a State’s legislative will on a Concurrent subject touching Union sensitivities can be deferred, by successive constitutional functionaries acting within their formal powers, for longer than the political life of the majority that expressed it. Nothing in the 2025 Reference opinion disturbs that position; the opinion holds the merits of assent decisions non-justiciable and rejects deemed assent, leaving the limited remedy of a direction to decide within a reasonable time where inaction is prolonged and unexplained.

The reform file on this machinery is old, consistent and unimplemented. The Sarkaria Commission, reporting in 1988 on Centre-State relations, recommended that bills reserved for the President be dealt with expeditiously and that, where assent was withheld, the reasons be communicated to the State, treating the assent stage as a federal courtesy that required explanation rather than silence. The Punchhi Commission, reporting in 2010, recommended a maximum period of six months for a decision on a bill, and that a bill repassed after reconsideration should oblige assent. Successive state governments have endorsed these recommendations in inter-state forums, and no constitutional amendment has enacted them. The 2025 opinion has added a judicial layer to the same file by closing the door the Tamil Nadu litigation had opened: courts will not supply the timelines the commissions proposed and the amendment process has not. Anyone assessing the assent route as it stands, therefore, assesses a mechanism whose reform has been recommended by two commissions, declined by the amending power, and refused by the Court, which is itself a fact about the mechanism’s place in the constitutional order: it persists because the level of government it favours has never needed to change it.

Void or merely inoperative: Article 251 and the space between

Article 254(1) says the repugnant state law is void to the extent of the repugnancy. The neighbouring Article 251 uses different words for a neighbouring problem, and the difference is deliberate. Where Parliament legislates under Article 249, on a State List matter in the national interest after a Rajya Sabha resolution, or under Article 250, on any matter during an emergency, and a state law conflicts, Article 251 provides that the parliamentary law prevails and the state law shall, to the extent of the repugnancy, but so long only as the law made by Parliament continues to have effect, be inoperative. Not void: inoperative, and expressly for the duration. When the central law’s temporary life ends, the state law revives and operates again, without re-enactment, because it was never extinguished; it was eclipsed.

The machinery behind Article 251 explains why the gentler word was chosen. Article 249 empowers Parliament to legislate on a State List matter when the Rajya Sabha resolves, by a majority of not less than two-thirds of the members present and voting, that it is necessary or expedient in the national interest that Parliament should do so; the resolution lasts for the period it specifies, not exceeding one year, renewable in further one-year periods. Article 250 empowers Parliament to legislate on any matter, including the State List, while a Proclamation of Emergency is in operation. In both cases the central intrusion into the State’s exclusive field is constitutionally temporary by design: a law Parliament would not have been competent to make but for the resolution or the Proclamation ceases to have effect, to the extent of the incompetency, six months after the resolution or Proclamation ceases to operate. Article 251’s inoperative formula matches that design. The state law conflicts with a central law whose own life is metered, and it would be absurd for the state law to be extinguished by an intruder scheduled to leave: it is therefore suspended, not killed, and on the intruder’s departure it operates again in full, including over the interval’s unfinished business, subject to anything done under the central law while it operated.

The contrast throws Article 254’s harsher vocabulary into relief. A central law on a Concurrent subject is not metered; it stands until Parliament repeals it, which may be never. The framers could still have chosen the inoperative formula for the Concurrent field as well, treating every central occupation as an eclipse of the state law for the occupation’s duration. They chose void, and then softened the choice in practice through the eclipse reasoning the courts developed for repealed central laws, which is why the law on repeal and revival has the improvised quality the Kerala discussion exposed. The textual lesson is one this article has pressed throughout: in Part XI, the words are the settlement, and the gentler settlement was given to the temporary central power and the harsher one to the permanent, an allocation that only makes sense on the premise that permanence, not intrusion, is what the Concurrent List arrangements were built to protect.

What is the difference between a law that is void and a law that is only inoperative?

A void law is not law at all: it cannot be enforced, and nothing done under it has legal support. An inoperative law remains valid law on the statute book but cannot be given effect while the overriding law operates; when that law ceases, the inoperative law revives of its own force, because its defect was subordination, not invalidity.

The position under Article 254 is less tidy than the word void suggests, and the cases show the untidiness. Where a state law is displaced by an occupying central law, and the central law is later repealed, the orthodox analysis treats the state law as eclipsed rather than annihilated: the repugnancy that silenced it has been removed, and the better view, consistent with the reasoning in Mar Appraem Kuri about the effect of repeal on accrued rights and with the eclipse reasoning applied to pre-constitutional laws, is that the state provision can operate again once the field is vacated, always subject to what the repealing central law itself provides about savings. The Kerala case also shows the harder edge: where the state law stood impliedly repealed because the central Act covered the entire field, transactions under the state Act before the central Act was made were preserved through Section 6 of the General Clauses Act, 1897, which saves the previous operation of a repealed enactment and the rights and liabilities accrued under it. The practical difference between the routes is therefore smaller than the words imply, but the conceptual difference is real, and it matters at the moment of repeal: an inoperative law needs no one’s permission to wake; a void law needs a doctrine, eclipse, or a saving provision, to stir at all.

There is a further asymmetry worth registering. Article 251’s inoperative formula applies where the central law is itself exceptional and temporary in design, an emergency or national interest incursion into the State List. Article 254’s void formula applies in the ordinary shared field, where the central law may stand for generations. The framers’ vocabulary thus reserves the gentler consequence for the extraordinary case and the harsher one for the routine case, which is the reverse of the intuition most readers bring to the text, and one more indication that on the Concurrent List the senior partner’s position was meant to be comfortable.

Education, standards and the Concurrent List

No field has tested the boundary between the shared List and the Union’s standards power as thoroughly as education, and the education cases teach a lesson the pure repugnancy cases cannot: some state laws lose not because they collide with a central Concurrent List law, but because the subject, properly characterised, contains a Union core that the state law trenches on. Education sits in Entry 25 of the Concurrent List, expressly subject to Entries 63 to 66 of the Union List, of which Entry 66, coordination and determination of standards in institutions for higher education or research and scientific and technical institutions, does the decisive work. The federal history of education’s place on the Concurrent List traces how the subject came to be shared; the question here is what sharing means when the Union legislates for standards.

State of Tamil Nadu v. Adhiyaman Educational and Research Institute, decided in 1995, is the standard authority. Tamil Nadu’s private colleges legislation and the Madras University Act regulated, among other things, the establishment and standards of technical institutions in the State, and the All India Council for Technical Education Act, 1987, enacted by Parliament, laid down norms and standards for technical education nationally. The Supreme Court held that the central Act is relatable to Entry 66 of the Union List and Entry 25 of the Concurrent List, and that the state enactments, relatable to Entry 25, are void and inoperative by virtue of Article 254 to the extent they occupy the field occupied by the central Act. The State had not obtained the President’s assent under clause (2), so there was no saving argument, and the Court stated the practical rule in terms that have governed admissions litigation since: standards laid down by a State cannot be higher than those laid down by the central Act in the occupied area, because a State may not, by prescribing additional conditions in the name of standards, re-enter a field the central legislation has taken.

Two features of Adhiyaman deserve emphasis for the federalism argument. First, the state laws were not hostile to standards; if anything, they were more demanding, and they fell anyway, which shows that Article 254 is not a rule against bad state laws but a rule about who occupies a field, indifferent to the direction of the deviation. Second, the route not taken is conspicuous: clause (2) assent was available in principle as the mechanism by which Tamil Nadu’s stricter regime could have been licensed, and its absence from the story illustrates how rarely the assent route is integrated into state legislative planning in regulatory fields, as distinct from the land and labour fields where state law departments plan for it as a matter of course. The standards jurisprudence also explains the NEET conflict’s legal skeleton: once medical admissions standards are characterised as a central subject under the Union entries and the central medical legislation, a state exemption is not a policy difference to be negotiated but a repugnant provision to be cured by assent or not at all, which is why the Tamil Nadu bill’s fate was always going to be decided in the assent process rather than in the Assembly.

The standards line of authority runs wider than the Adhiyaman facts. In the postgraduate medical admissions cases the Court applied the same Entry 66 logic to hold that standard-setting by the Union includes the eligibility and selection standards for admission to the highest courses, and that a State may not use its concurrent education power to lower or to supplement the governing central standards in the occupied area, because either manoeuvre alters the standard nationally set and reproduces, at the level of admissions, the fragmentation the standards entry exists to prevent. The States’ genuine grievances in these cases, regional language, rural service, the staffing of state health systems, are real, and the doctrine gives them no weight, which is why the education field has produced the Union’s most persistent state resentment and why the admissions bill route, reservation and an appeal to the assent discretion, has become the States’ chosen instrument there. The assent refusal in the Tamil Nadu medical admissions matter is thus not an aberration from the education doctrine but its completion: the doctrine assigns the field to the Union, and the assent process then decides, politically, whether an exception will be licensed. Where both assignments run the same way, as they did there, the State has no third forum, and the federalism argument moves, as such arguments must, out of the courtroom and into the politics of amendment, where it has so far made no progress.

The modern restatement: repugnancy and the insolvency code

The doctrine’s most consequential modern application is also its clearest teaching text. In Innoventive Industries Ltd. v. ICICI Bank, the first substantial appeal decided under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016, the Supreme Court confronted a Maharashtra statute, the Maharashtra Relief Undertakings (Special Provisions) Act, 1958, under which the State had notified an industrial company as a relief undertaking, with the statutory consequence that its liabilities and obligations stood suspended. The company’s financial creditor had meanwhile invoked the Code, and the question was whether the state moratorium could stand against the Code’s insolvency process. The structure and working of the insolvency code is treated in its own guide; the repugnancy holding is what matters here. The Court held that the Code, relatable to the Concurrent List entry on bankruptcy and insolvency, is a complete and exhaustive code on the subject, that its non-obstante clause gives its scheme overriding force, and that the Maharashtra Act, to the extent of its inconsistency with the Code, was rendered inoperative by virtue of Article 254(1). The state moratorium, granted by the State in exercise of its own view of industrial policy, could not hold back a process the national code had set running.

Innoventive matters for three reasons beyond its facts. First, it restated the repugnancy principles in the Karunanidhi line for a commercial generation of lawyers, confirming that the mid-century doctrine governs twenty-first century economic legislation without modification. Second, it showed the occupied field analysis operating at full strength: the Code’s completeness was the ground of decision, and the state Act fell although the two statutes had different immediate objects, industrial relief on one side and creditor remedy on the other, because in operation they claimed the same ground, the fate of the same company’s obligations. Third, it demonstrated the asymmetry of the modern Concurrent List in economic matters. The significant codes in commerce, insolvency, competition’s state analogues, food safety, land and labour are national, and Article 254, applied through the occupation test, keeps them national against state deviations that no one has licensed. The clause (2) door exists in these fields too, but it is telling that the modern commercial cases are almost all clause (1) cases: states do not, in practice, seek assent to depart from the commercial codes, and the Union would rarely grant it if they did. The exception flourishes where the Union is indifferent, in land ceilings of local detail and labour thresholds; it withers where the Union cares, which is to say the exception’s real content is the Union’s indifference, formally recorded.

The Innoventive pattern has repeated wherever a national economic code meets a state protective statute, and its logic extends beyond insolvency. The Code’s own validity was upheld in Swiss Ribbons v. Union of India in 2019, and the repugnancy holding has been the template for resolving the Code’s collisions with state regimes since: wherever a state law offers a debtor or a state authority a route that delays, dilutes or duplicates the Code’s process, the comparison is run under Article 254, the Code’s completeness is emphasised, and the state provision yields. The deeper point for federalism is about where economic lawmaking energy flows. A State that wishes to protect its industries, its borrowers or its public sector undertakings must work within the interstices of the national codes, in the spaces the occupation finding has not reached, because the codes’ drafters have learned to draft for occupation: completeness recitals, non-obstante clauses and exhaustive machinery are standard central drafting practice precisely because Innoventive and its predecessors reward them. The doctrine, in this way, shapes the texts it will later be asked to judge, and state drafting has adapted in mirror image, with state law departments in the licence-seeking fields preparing the repugnancy analysis and the reservation file as part of the bill itself rather than as a response to a challenge.

The political economy of the route: why it is used so unevenly

The pattern of successful use, land and labour at one end and the commercial codes at the other, invites a structural explanation, and the explanation determines how the provision should be judged. The assent route works where three conditions coincide. The departure must be one the Union can concede without damaging a scheme it cares about: a compensation formula in one State, a threshold in another, local detail in a national framework. The State must be willing to invest in the file, accepting revision in the Home Ministry’s correspondence and possible delay, which favours departures with a committed state government behind them and a long enough horizon to wait. And the departure must not be a public repudiation of a contested Union policy, because the assent decision is taken by the Union executive and a bill whose purpose is to negate the Union’s own flagship measure asks the executive to license its own defeat. The Punjab and Tamil Nadu files failed on the third condition, not on any legal defect: their drafting was competent, their competence was not in doubt, and their repugnancy was exactly the kind clause (2) exists to cure. They failed because the cure is discretionary and the discretion was exercised, by action or by inaction, against them.

This unevenness has a consequence for the federation that neither reading of the clause should understate. Because assent is obtainable for the departures the Union does not mind and unobtainable for the departures it does, the clause sorts state legislation by Union preference rather than by constitutional merit, and over time it teaches States where not to legislate. The teaching effect is invisible in the case law, since it operates in bills never introduced and files never opened, but it is the clause’s largest real-world effect: the Concurrent List in practice is smaller than the Concurrent List in the Seventh Schedule, and the difference between the two is the measure of anticipated refusal. A constitutional designer weighing the provision should therefore count not only the assents granted and refused, which are the visible record, but the self-censorship the anticipation produces, which is not recorded anywhere and can be inferred only from the fields, education standards and admissions among them, where state legislative energy visibly stops at the boundary the assent process polices.

Two readings of the assent route

The provision supports two complete and incompatible readings, and this article’s framework requires both to be stated at full strength before a verdict is given.

The first reading is the accommodationist one, and its strongest advocates are the commissions and the state governments that have used the clause successfully. On this reading, Article 254 is one of the more honest pieces of federal engineering in the Constitution. The Concurrent List creates shared space knowing that national uniformity will sometimes be wrong for local conditions: a land acquisition regime designed for the whole country will fit a small, densely settled State and a large, tribal land State differently; labour thresholds that suit one industrial structure will misfit another. Clause (2) allows that misfit to be corrected openly, by the State’s elected legislature, with the Union’s considered consent, and confined to the State that asked. The Sarkaria Commission treated the reservation and assent machinery in this spirit, as a working part of the federal design that needed expedition and better communication rather than replacement. The proviso, on this reading, is not a betrayal but a discipline: because Parliament can always resume the field, the Union can afford to say yes, knowing that a variation which proves harmful nationally can be corrected by ordinary legislation. The revocability is what makes the permission grantable. A door the Union could never close would be a door the Union would never open.

The second reading is the centralist one, stated at full strength by the States that have waited on files and by critics of the assent process. On this reading, clause (2) is a permission slip, and a federation in which one level of government needs the other’s permission to legislate within its own constitutional field is a federation in name only. The permission is granted by the political executive of the very government whose law is being departed from. It may be withheld without reasons that any court will examine, left undecided without any enforceable clock, and granted selectively, so that States aligned with the Union’s politics obtain their variations and States in opposition wait. The proviso then completes the picture: even the granted permission creates no rights, and a State that has built a regime on an assented law, as landowners, employers and universities build on regimes, can have the ground removed by an ordinary central amendment at any time. Punjab’s farm bills and Tamil Nadu’s admissions bill are the exhibits for this reading: in each, a State’s considered legislative answer to a contested national policy was stopped not by a court, not by Parliament, but by the assent process, which is to say by the Union executive. On this reading the Constituent Assembly’s retention of the 1935 mechanism was the retention of an imperial control device, and its subsequent history has been faithful to its origin.

The verdict this article defends sits closer to the second reading on the design, and closer to the first on the practice, and the reasons are textual before they are political. On the design, the centralist reading is simply the more accurate description of the words. Assent confers a revocable permission, not an entrenched exception; the proviso converts a federal safeguard into a permission Parliament can withdraw by ordinary legislation, and no amount of goodwill in the administration of the clause changes what the clause is. A reader who finishes Article 254 believing that clause (2) balances clause (1) has misread the proviso, and the proviso’s omission from almost every textbook summary of the provision is the single largest distortion in the standard account of Indian legislative federalism. On the practice, however, the accommodationist reading records something real: the clause has been used, repeatedly and successfully, for exactly the local variations its defenders describe, in land and labour, and the States that used it were not supplicants in any humiliating sense but governments executing a considered strategy through a known procedure. The honest synthesis is that Article 254 builds a federalism of licences: real room for state variation, genuinely used, held on terms that reserve the final word, at every point and without exception, to the Union. Whether that is a defect or a design depends on what one thinks the Indian Union is. The text has already answered for itself.

What Article 254 finally decides

Stripped to its working content, the article decides four things. It decides that on shared subjects the central law is the default and the state law the exception, and that the exception must be justified, provision by provision, against the tests of direct conflict and occupation. It decides that the tests are textual and structural, not political: courts ask what the two laws say and what field they occupy, and a state law’s popularity, wisdom or electoral mandate is irrelevant to the inquiry. It decides that the one legitimate escape from a finding of repugnancy is prepared in advance, through reservation and presidential assent sought for the stated purpose of curing the repugnancy. And it decides that the escape is held on licence, revocable by Parliament at any time, by a law that may amend or even repeal the state law itself. The reader who holds those four propositions together holds the whole doctrine: the rest is application, and the application, as the land, labour, education and insolvency fields show, is where Indian federalism is actually lived.

One final discipline follows for anyone reading a fresh dispute in this field. The public presentation of such disputes is reliably misleading in three ways. The State presents its law as an exercise of its constitutional right to legislate, which it is, and omits that the right on a shared subject is a right to legislate subject to displacement. The Union presents displacement as the automatic consequence of its law, which it is not, since the tests must be run and the assent route stands open until it is refused. And both sides present the assent process, when it is in play, as a legal formality awaiting completion, which it never is: it is a political decision by the Union executive, reviewable at the margins for indefinite inaction and otherwise final. A reader who discounts all three presentations and asks the four questions of the decision table, in order, will reach the legal answer unaided, and will also see, which the presentations are designed to obscure, exactly where the law ends and the politics resumes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How does repugnancy under Article 254 operate?

Article 254 operates in three stages. First, both laws must be referable to a matter in the Concurrent List, judged by pith and substance; if they are not, the article is not engaged. Second, the court tests the two laws for a direct conflict, or for a parliamentary intention to occupy the whole field, and if either is found the state law is void to the extent of the repugnancy. Third, if the state law was reserved for the President and assented to, it prevails in that State over the earlier central law, subject always to Parliament’s power under the proviso to legislate on the same matter again.

Q: When does a central law override a state law?

A central law overrides a state law when both are, in pith and substance, laws on the same Concurrent List matter and their provisions collide: either because obeying the state law means disobeying the central law, or because Parliament has evinced an intention to occupy the whole field, leaving no room for the state law to operate. The override is never automatic from coexistence alone. Courts first attempt to reconcile the two texts, the burden of proving repugnancy lies on the challenger, and the state law falls only to the extent of the inconsistency found, section by section, not as a whole.

Q: Can a state law prevail over an earlier central law?

Yes, through the single route Article 254(2) provides. If a state law on a Concurrent List matter is repugnant to an earlier law made by Parliament or to an existing law, the state law prevails within that State if the bill was reserved for the consideration of the President and received the President’s assent. The prevalence is confined to that State and to the repugnancy contemplated when assent was sought. Outside that route, no: a state law cannot prevail over a central law merely because it is later in time, more local in knowledge, or enacted by a larger majority in the state Assembly.

Q: What is the effect of presidential assent under Article 254?

Presidential assent under clause (2) cures the repugnancy of the state law against the earlier central law, so the state law prevails in that State to the extent of the inconsistency, as the Supreme Court confirmed in T. Barai v. Henry Ah Hoe. The assent is purpose-specific: in Malwinder Singh the Court held that the President must be apprised of the reason assent is sought, and assent given for one constitutional purpose does not cure repugnancy. The effect is also provisional, because the proviso lets Parliament legislate on the same matter at any time, including by amending or repealing the assented state law itself.

Q: How do courts test for repugnancy?

Courts apply the conditions restated by the Constitution Bench in M. Karunanidhi v. Union of India and organised in Hoechst Pharmaceuticals v. State of Bihar. There must be a clear and direct inconsistency between the two Acts, irreconcilable, such that it is impossible to obey one without disobeying the other; alternatively, Parliament must have intended to lay down an exhaustive code occupying the field; or the two laws must occupy the same field so that they cannot stand together. Before any test is run, the court characterises both laws by pith and substance and attempts reconciliation, since repugnancy is not presumed and the burden lies on the challenger.

Q: What is the occupied field doctrine?

The occupied field doctrine holds that a state law may be displaced even without contradicting any particular central provision, if Parliament has evinced an intention to cover the whole field of a Concurrent subject with its own law. The intention is inferred from the scheme of the central Act: its completeness, its machinery, any declaration of expediency, and provisions such as non-obstante clauses. Deep Chand v. State of Uttar Pradesh and State of Orissa v. M. A. Tulloch are the classic applications. The doctrine is the widest of the repugnancy tests and the most criticised, because it can void a state law for standing in a field rather than for anything the state law says.

Q: Can Parliament override a state law that received assent?

Yes, at any time, and by ordinary legislation. The proviso to Article 254(2) expressly preserves Parliament’s power to enact any law on the same matter, including a law adding to, amending, varying or repealing the state law itself. In Zaverbhai v. State of Bombay the assented state enhancement of penalties fell when Parliament amended its own Act; in T. Barai the West Bengal amendment, assented to in 1973, stood impliedly repealed when Parliament recalibrated the central punishments in 1976; and in Vijay Kumar Sharma a fresh central code displaced an assented state Act. Assent records a position against the central law of the day, not a settlement for the future.

Q: Which recent state laws relied on presidential assent?

The clearest cluster is land acquisition: after 2013 several States amended the central land acquisition Act as it applied in their territories and obtained assent, Telangana’s amendment being assented to on 12 May 2017 and published as Telangana Act No. 21 of 2017, with Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand and Tamil Nadu also using the state route. Rajasthan’s 2014 amendments to the central labour statutes, raising the industrial disputes threshold from one hundred to three hundred workmen and altering the factories, contract labour and union registration thresholds, also took effect through assent. State amendments to the central criminal codes form a further long-standing class of assented departures.

Q: What is the difference between Article 254(1) and Article 254(2)?

Clause (1) states the default rule: where a state law is repugnant to a law Parliament is competent to enact, or to an existing law on a Concurrent matter, the central law prevails, whether passed before or after, and the state law is void to the extent of the repugnancy. Clause (2) states the licensed exception: a state law repugnant to an earlier central law prevails in that State if it was reserved for the President and assented to. The differences are asymmetry of time, clause (1) looking both ways and clause (2) only backwards, and the proviso, which subordinates the exception to Parliament’s future legislation.

Q: Which subjects in the Concurrent List produce the most repugnancy disputes?

The disputes cluster where both levels of government legislate actively on the same subject: education, where state standards and admissions laws meet central standards legislation; land acquisition and agricultural marketing, where state amendments depart from central frameworks; labour welfare, where state thresholds differ from central ones; motor transport, the field of Deep Chand and Vijay Kumar Sharma; and criminal law and procedure, where state offences and punishments overlap the central codes. Insolvency joined the list with the Code of 2016 in Innoventive. The pattern follows legislative energy: a Concurrent subject litigates in proportion to how much both sides use it.

Q: What role does the Governor play in getting a state law presidential assent under Article 254(2)?

The Governor is the gatekeeper of the route. Under Article 200, a bill passed by the State Legislature is presented to the Governor, who may assent, withhold assent, return it for reconsideration, or reserve it for the consideration of the President. Only reservation opens the clause (2) route: a Governor who assents to a repugnant bill without reserving it produces a law void in its repugnant provisions, incurable afterwards. Reservation for repugnancy is discretionary, unlike the mandatory reservation of bills endangering the High Court’s position, and the recorded purpose of the reservation governs what the eventual assent can cure, as Malwinder Singh establishes.

Q: Is there a time limit for the President to decide on a state bill reserved for consideration?

The Constitution prescribes none. Article 201 fixes a six-month period for the State Legislature to reconsider a returned bill, but no period for the President to assent, withhold or return. Two commissions recommended one, the Punchhi Commission proposing a maximum of six months, without amendment following. In its 2025 opinion on the Presidential Reference, the Constitution Bench held that courts cannot prescribe timelines for the President under Article 201 and that deemed assent is impermissible, while allowing that prolonged, unexplained and indefinite inaction may attract a limited direction to decide within a reasonable time. The merits of the decision remain non-justiciable.

Q: What did the Supreme Court decide in M. Karunanidhi v. Union of India?

The Constitution Bench, in its judgment of 20 February 1979, upheld the Tamil Nadu Public Men (Criminal Misconduct) Act, 1973 against the charge of repugnancy with the central Prevention of Corruption Act, 1947 and the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 1952, and restated the doctrine. Before repugnancy can arise there must be a clear and direct inconsistency between the Acts, the inconsistency must be irreconcilable, and the Acts must be brought into direct collision so that obeying one means disobeying the other. The Court added that there is no repeal by implication unless the inconsistency appears on the face of the two statutes, and that a state statute creating distinct and separate offences raises no repugnancy.

Q: Why did the Kerala Chitties Act fail in the Mar Appraem Kuri case?

Because Parliament occupied the whole field and Kerala never obtained the cure. The Supreme Court held in State of Kerala v. Mar Appraem Kuri Company, in 2012, that the central Chit Funds Act, 1982, covering the entire field of chits under the Concurrent List, displaced the Kerala Chitties Act, 1975, which became void under Article 254(1) when the central Act was made on 19 August 1982, even though the central Act had not been brought into force in Kerala. Kerala’s amending Act of 2002 was also void, because the State had failed to obtain presidential assent under Article 254(2) for the amendments.

Q: Can the President send a reserved state bill back for reconsideration?

Yes. Under Article 201, when a bill is reserved, the President may direct the Governor to return it to the State Legislature with a message requesting reconsideration of the bill as a whole or of specified provisions, and the Legislature must reconsider it within six months. The decisive feature is what follows: if the bill is passed again, with or without amendment, and presented again to the President, the President is not bound to assent to it. The return is therefore a request, not a veto with an override attached, and Gujarat’s anti-terrorism legislation, returned and withheld at different stages before its eventual assent in 2019, shows how long the circuit can run.

Q: What happens to a state law when Parliament repeals the central law it conflicted with?

The orthodox position is that the state law revives. A state law displaced under Article 254 is treated as eclipsed rather than annihilated: once Parliament repeals the occupying central law, the repugnancy that silenced the state law is removed and the state provision can operate again, unless the repealing law provides otherwise. Transactions completed while the central law operated are governed by savings principles, including Section 6 of the General Clauses Act, 1897, which preserves the previous operation of an enactment and rights and liabilities accrued under it, the analysis the Supreme Court applied in the Mar Appraem Kuri litigation to dealings under the Kerala Act before displacement.

Q: Does a state law need fresh presidential assent every time it is amended after an earlier assent?

Yes, wherever the amendment itself creates or enlarges a repugnancy. Assent under clause (2) attaches to the provisions of the bill that was reserved and to the departure that was placed before the President; it is not a standing licence for the statute as amended from time to time. Kerala’s amendments of 2002 to its chit funds legislation failed on exactly this ground in Mar Appraem Kuri: the amending provisions had never been reserved or assented to, and they were void against the occupying central Act. Amendments that do not touch the repugnancy need no cure, but a State extending a licensed departure must license the extension.

Q: What did the Supreme Court hold in Innoventive Industries about the insolvency code and state law?

The Court held that the Maharashtra Relief Undertakings (Special Provisions) Act, 1958 could not stand against the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016. In the first substantial appeal under the Code, the State had notified the debtor company as a relief undertaking, suspending its liabilities, while a financial creditor invoked the Code. The Court held the Code, relatable to the Concurrent List entry on bankruptcy and insolvency, to be a complete and exhaustive code, pointed to its non-obstante clause, and concluded that the Maharashtra Act was rendered inoperative to the extent of its inconsistency by virtue of Article 254(1). The judgment restated the Karunanidhi repugnancy principles for economic legislation.

Q: What did the Sarkaria and Punchhi Commissions recommend about state bills sent for presidential assent?

Both commissions treated delay and silence at the assent stage as federal defects requiring correction. The Sarkaria Commission, reporting in 1988, recommended that bills reserved for the President be dealt with expeditiously and that, where assent was withheld, the reasons be communicated to the State concerned. The Punchhi Commission, reporting in 2010, recommended a maximum period of six months for the decision on a bill, and that a Governor decide on bills within a similar discipline, with a repassed bill obliging assent. None of these recommendations has been enacted by constitutional amendment, and the Constitution Bench’s 2025 opinion declined to supply timelines judicially, so they remain the standing reform position rather than the law.

Q: Why did Punjab’s farm law amendment bills of 2020 never become law?

Because the assent route was their only path and it was never completed. In October 2020 the Punjab Assembly passed four bills, three amending the central farm Acts of that year in their application to Punjab and one amending the civil procedure law to protect farm land from attachment. The amendments were repugnant to the central laws they sought to neutralise, so they could operate only through reservation and presidential assent under the clause (2) route. The Governor did not assent to the bills, they travelled to the President, and no presidential assent followed. Parliament’s repeal of the central farm laws in 2021 closed the episode with the bills still unassented and never in force.