In Numbers: Making Sense of the 130th Constitution Amendment Bill

The sweeping changes intended in the Indian system if the constitutional amendment were to go through would establish a Viceroy-like grip in the hands of governors, LGs and the President of India.

The Wire Analysis

The sweeping changes intended in the Indian system if the constitutional amendment were to go through would establish a Viceroy-like grip in the hands of governors, LGs and the President of India.

in numbers making sense of the 130th constitution amendment bill

Union Home Minister Amit Shah speaks in the Lok Sabha during the Monsoon session of Parliament. Photo: PTI

New Delhi: The Constitution (130th) Amendment Bill, presented in the Lok Sabha by Union home minister Amit Shah a day before parliament was adjourned, seeks to provide a ‘legal framework’ to automatically oust chief ministers, ministers and the prime minister, should they be detained in jail for 30 days in matters that attract a minimum sentence of five years.

In the case of chief ministers and state cabinet ministers, the governor/lieutenant governor of the state or Union Territory will act as the concerned authority, while in the case of the prime minister, it is the president of the country who will have the power to remove them.

The Bill has come under heavy fire from opposition leaders. The opposition has expressed apprehensions about these laws in the context of the past 11 years, which they describe as the single-minded pursuit of opposition leaders by central agencies at scale since 2014, when the Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) assumed office.

Sitting chief ministers and state cabinet ministers have faced long jail stays, often with no case at the end of the jail stint.

There has also been a trend of 'cases' mysteriously vanishing when opposition leaders switch sides and join the BJP or other parties who support the NDA.

How justified is the criticism of the opposition, and the BJP's own alliance partners, about how this would play out should the proposed legislation become law?

Here are some numbers that underlie the concerns about the Bill, serving as a kill-switch for state governments and leaders, that the ruling party does not like:

2/193 – Out of 193 cases registered by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) against opposition politicians between 2015-2025, only 2 were convicted, as per Modi government’s data.
That is, a conviction rate of 1%
12 opposition ministers were held in jail, most for more than 30 days, since 2014, as per The Indian Express. Most cases relate to Delhi and West Bengal and under the controversial Prevention of Money Laundering Act.
95% of ED cases since BJP came to power in 2014 were against opposition leaders, said a report by The Indian Express. They analysed that between 2014 and September 2022, 121 prominent leaders came under ED radar, 115 of them opposition leaders; “the list has grown since”.
23/25: (More than, but at least) 25 prominent political leaders from the opposition, who had been facing probes by central agencies in corruption cases, have switched to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since 2014, when Narendra Modi was first sworn in as Prime Minister of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government. Of these, 23 leaders have got a reprieve in the cases from the investigation agencies, a report by the Indian Express said.
2 top leaders from Maharashtra switched sides to the BJP and coincidentally, the cases against them went cold. This includes an ex-chief minister and an ex-Union minister. Both are now Rajya Sabha members.
90.66%: “The under trial population comprises 90.66% of the total jail population”, as per data on the Tihar jail website. Often, under trials in India end up serving prison sentences well in excess of the total sentence of the crimes they are being tried under. In normal course too, to get acquitted in India is a long drawn process.
Article 74(1) reads: “There shall be a Council of Ministers with the Prime Minister at the head to aid and advise the President who shall, in the exercise of his functions, act in accordance with such advice: Provided that the President may require the Council of Ministers to reconsider such advice, either generally or otherwise, and the President shall act in accordance with the advice tendered after such reconsideration.” Thus, the President of India sacking the prime minister inverts this basic tenet of a Parliamentary democracy.
2/3rds: The amendment needs approval from 2/3rds of the parliament to become law. The BJP does not even have a simple majority in the Lok Sabha. It would need all its allies and a significant chunk of the opposition to turn this proposal into law.

This article went live on August twenty-third, two thousand twenty five, at fifteen minutes past three in the afternoon.

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