Governor's Delay: Congress Wrote the Rules, Gamed The System, And Now Cries Foul

In April 2024, the DMK government in Tamil Nadu accused Governor R.N. Ravi is holding up over a dozen bills, ranging from university appointments to the contentious anti-NEET legislation. The political reaction was deafening. “Murder of federalism!” cried the Congress and its allies. Newspaper columns, primetime debates, and Twitter threads flared up in outrage.

Then came the Supreme Court’s verdict in April 2025. In a landmark 415-page judgment, it ruled that Governors couldn’t simply sit on bills indefinitely. They must either give assent or return them within a reasonable time. It looked like a strong check against executive delay. But it raised a deeper question, can the judiciary set functional timelines for a Governor, a post intended to act independently within the executive framework?

Yet even that constitutional dilemma hides a far bigger irony: this isn’t new. Congress accusing the Centre of using Governors to stall state bills is like the arsonist suing the fire department.

Because for decades, Congress turned the Governor’s office into a tool of obstruction, stalling opposition-led reforms, blocking key legislation, and sitting on bills passed by elected state assemblies, most frequently in NDA ruled states. This article focuses exclusively on such instances from the UPA-1 and UPA-2 years.

This article retraces that forgotten legacy state by state, bill by bill to show how the Congress didn’t just play the game, they wrote the rulebook of using the Governor’s desk as a political purgatory.

At the center of the controversy is Article 200 of the Constitution. It grants the Governor several options upon receiving a bill passed by the state legislature: to assent to the bill, thereby making it law; to withhold assent, effectively vetoing it; to return the bill (if it is not a money bill) for reconsideration; or to reserve the bill for the President’s consideration if it conflicts with central laws or has broader national implications.

The issue was flagged long ago. The Sarkaria Commission (1988) warned against politicizing the Governor’s role. The Punchhi Commission (2010) even recommended a six-month limit on decisions. Yet, UPA governments chose not to act. Why fix the delay when it was serving your politics?

No case better captures this abuse than the Gujarat Control of Organised Crime Bill (GUJCOCA). First passed in 2004 under then CM Narendra Modi, the bill mirrored Maharashtra’s MCOCA aiming to crack down on terror and organised crime.

But while MCOCA was fine under a Congress led UPA government, GUJCOCA? Suddenly it was too harsh. The UPA-appointed Governors withheld assent, citing “concerns.” Between 2004 and 2015, the Gujarat Assembly passed the bill four times and each time, it hit the same wall: a stone-faced Governor and a disinterested President.

The message was unmistakable: what was acceptable in Congress-ruled Maharashtra was apparently fascist in BJP-ruled Gujarat. GUJCOCA finally got Presidential assent only after 2014, when the Modi government came to power.

Let’s not pretend GUJCOCA was an outlier. Here's a sample of the long queue of bills that mysteriously got stuck in Raj Bhavans under UPA:

Here, I'm just restricting myself to these examples because, well, we’d need an entire book to cover every single instance of this clever use of “executive discretion."

Fast forward to 2024, the tune has changed. Tamil Nadu’s Governor R.N. Ravi delays bills, and suddenly the same players start screaming “democracy in danger.”

Because if the courts had been this active during the UPA years, the legislative pipeline wouldn’t have looked like a waiting room.

Let’s Compare 10 Years of UPA & 10 Years of NDA:

This article does not aim to justify the misuse of gubernatorial powers, it seeks to expose the rank hypocrisy of those who perfected that misuse and now pretend to be its greatest victims.

History remembers patterns. And it’s clear: the Congress didn’t just write the playbook, they wore the whistle, changed the rules, and now complain when someone else plays the game.