Parliamentary Sovereignty in India and its Limitations

Every Lok Sabha election result gets called a mandate, and every mandate gets treated as if the winning party can now do anything it likes. This topic is the reality check: exactly how much can the Indian Parliament actually do, and what stops it well short of Dicey's classical picture?

In two minutes

The Indian Parliament is supreme in law-making within its own sphere, but it is not sovereign in the classical Diceyan sense — it operates under a written Constitution, subject to judicial review, federal division of powers, fundamental rights, and the basic structure doctrine, each of which limits it in a distinct way.

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