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Constitutional Roots of Judicial Populism in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2025

Anuj Bhuwania Open the ORCID record for Anuj Bhuwania [Opens in a new window]
Anuj Bhuwania*
Affiliation:
Professor at the School of Law, Shiv Nadar University, Chennai
*
Emails: anujbhuwania@gmail.com and anujbhuwania@snuchennai.edu.in
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Abstract

The rise of judicial populism in various national jurisdictions is usually explained through the vicissitudes of power conflicts between the judiciary and other governmental organs. In this article, I try to locate the origins of India’s well-known judicial populism in the peculiarities of Indian constitutional design itself. I argue that the heavily statist nature of India’s transformative constitutionalism, specifically its “Directive Principles of State Policy,” has made the practice of classical judicial review increasingly untenable and provided the grammar for its judicial populism. Directive Principles add another layer of complexity to the “counter-majoritarian difficulty” in India, forcing the constitutional courts to traverse increasingly unconventional territory to legitimise their role. It helps explain why the famously powerful Indian judiciary has failed to act as an institutional check to the crisis of constitutionalism well underway in India. The article provides a stark example of the normative challenges faced by a constitutional court in a transformative constitution.

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Law & Social Inquiry , First View , pp. 1 - 27
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Bar Foundation

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References

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