India’s constitutional design is parliamentary. Citizens elect representatives who constitute Parliament, which, in turn, selects the political executive from among its members. Accountability, in theory, therefore rests with Parliament. In practice, political parties drastically transform this design. It is the majority party or coalition, not Parliament, that forms and sustains the government. Only the ruling party can, then, meaningfully hold that government to account. Political parties in Britain have shown some capacity to check their executive in recent years but their Indian counterparts remain overwhelmingly leader-centric, leaving little internal capacity to enforce accountability.
The design fails further at the level of individual ministers. Parliamentary systems, India’s included, operate on the principle of collective cabinet responsibility. A no-confidence motion can be moved only against the government as a whole, never against an individual minister. Because most ruling party MPs owe their political survival to the prime minister, voting to unseat the ministry is self-defeating regardless of the party’s actual confidence in any given minister. The power to induct or remove ministers thus rests with the prime minister alone — not with the party, and certainly not with Parliament.
This is not a problem unique to India. Several democracies have tried to correct it by reintroducing citizens into the governance process between elections. At present, popular participation in Indian governance is confined to periodic elections. Once elections conclude, citizens are expected to route grievances through constitutional institutions, including their representatives or courts.
A right to recall could change this by letting citizens revisit — mid-term — a decision they were entitled to make at the ballot box. If people elect a representative and reconsider that choice after five years, there is no principled reason they cannot exercise the same judgment within the term itself. Nor would the idea be wholly alien to Indian constitutional practice: several states already permit recall of local body heads under panchayati raj and municipal legislations. What is missing is an equivalent instrument at the level of national and state legislatures.
Two objections merit attention. The first is that a right to recall destabilises government; second, an elected government needs time to deliver its agenda before facing the electorate again. There can be three responses to the first objection. First, no government is vested with unlimited power merely by virtue of an election; each remains bound by constitutional limits and is accountable to institutions such as the CAG and the courts. Second, electoral mandates are necessarily general. Voters endorse a broad manifesto, not specific policies, often under the sway of short-term sentiments. Disagreement with a particular policy, which is discovered only when the government acts on it, deserves some means of registering popular consent before the next election. Third, the instability concern is manageable by design. Several jurisdictions permit recall only once per term, only after the halfway mark of the
term is reached, and only on a petition signed by 15–20% of the relevant electorate. These design choices reflect a deliberate calibration between two legitimate concerns — governmental stability and continuous accountability — rather than a wholesale surrender of one to the other.
The second objection is that recall targets constituency representatives, not the ministers whose conduct often triggers public anger. The answer lies in the structural point made above. Ministers are ultimately answerable to their parties, not to Parliament or to the public directly. Recall petitions could give the party a reason to register public sentiment well before the government itself is placed at risk.
Governments are more powerful than the citizens they govern. What keeps them responsive is the credible threat of losing power. Elections supply that threat only periodically. A right to recall could be a constitutional channel through which people can express dissent.
Anmol Jain is an Honorary Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School