A Prime Minister or a Chief Minister in a country where there is a multi-party system cannot afford to crack the whip every time a Minister makes a statement which may either be in bad taste or disparaging, the Supreme Court said in a Constitution Bench judgment on Tuesday.
“The Prime Minister or the Chief Minister does not have disciplinary control over the members of the Council of Ministers,” Justice V. Ramasubramanian, who authored the main judgment endorsed by three other judges on the Constitution Bench, said.
Justice Ramasubramanian said a “strong Prime Minister or Chief Minister will be able to drop any Minister out of the Cabinet”, but “in a country like ours where there is a multiparty system and where coalition governments are often formed, it is not possible at all times for a Prime Minister/Chief Minister to take the whip, whenever a statement is made by someone in the Council of Ministers”.
“Governments which survive on wafer-thin majority (of which we have seen quite a bit), sometimes have individual Ministers who are strong enough to decide the very survival of such governments. This problem is not unique to our country,” Justice Ramasubramanian observed.
The four judges said their observations did not mean that any public official, including a Minister, could get away after making irresponsible statements, even bordering on hate speech. They were only discussing whether the government could be held vicariously liable under the principle of “collective responsibility” for the disparaging statements of a Minister.
Answering the question in the negative, Justice Ramasubramanian said collective responsibility was that of the Council of Ministers. “In other words, the flow of stream in collective responsibility is from the Council of Ministers to the individual Ministers. The flow is not in the reverse, namely, from the individual Ministers to the Council of Ministers,” he said.
