Your bills, dead or alive?

Brevity is the soul of wit, said Shakespeare.

- R. PRASANNAN

We, Indians, won't agree. We created the world's most verbose epic, and also the most verbose Constitution—395 Articles and eight Schedules in about 1,45,000 words. Yet, pundits say, the latter is silent on several things.

Governance becomes impossible when rulers confront silence in the statute. That's where the courts come in. Where the statute is silent, judges speak. They spoke last week, ending the silence of the statute on an issue that has been plaguing governments for three quarters of a century.

The issue was this. The Constitution says that a bill passed by the legislature shall become law only after the president, or the governor in the case of a state, gives his assent. If he returns the bill, and if the legislature passes it again and sends it to him, he is bound to give assent.

What if he sits on it doing nothing? The Constitution is silent; it doesn't give a deadline to the president or the governor to sign a bill on the dotted line, or to tear it up along any perforated line.