The Government Complied With the Supreme Court's Order - By Passing a Law That Cancels It

There Is a Legal Test for When Parliament Can Undo a Court Judgment

• And This Act Has to Pass It In 1969, in Prithvi Cotton Mills v. Broach Borough Municipality, the Supreme Court laid down what is now called the "removal of basis" doctrine: a legislature can validly nullify the effect of a court judgment, but only by curing the actual legal defect the court identified - not by simply re-legislating the opposite outcome. If Parliament just restates what the court struck down, using a different label, that is not validation, it is an unconstitutional override of judicial power. The CAPFs (General Administration) Act, 2026 is about to be tested against exactly this doctrine, because the Supreme Court's May 2025 judgment did not find a legal defect that Parliament has now cured - it made a substantive finding that CAPF cadre officers deserved progressively reduced IPS deputation and the new Act legislates the opposite conclusion.

Where the Government's Position Gets Complicated The Home

Ministry's affidavit describes full procedural compliance: cadre review proposals submitted, forwarded to DoPT and the Department of Expenditure and headed eventually to the Cadre Review Committee under the Cabinet Secretary.

All of that is real institutional process. But it runs on a separate track from the CAPFs Act, which statutorily entrenches the very deputation levels the 2025 judgment said should shrink. Justice Bhuyan's observation about a "strong lobby" that keeps cadre officers "completely stifled" is really a judicial recognition that procedural compliance and substantive compliance have been deliberately decoupled - the government can point to cadre reviews in progress while a parallel statute guarantees the underlying numbers won't actually change.

Why November 18 Matters More Than September 22

The contempt hearing on September 22 can only address whether the government followed the 2025 judgment's procedural directions. The real constitutional question - whether Parliament can use ordinary legislation to legislatively overrule a judicially recognised classification (CAPF officers as Organised Group A Services) without curing any actual defect in that classification - will only be tested when the five writ petitions against the 2026 Act are heard on November 18.

That is the proceeding that will determine whether "removal of basis" has actually occurred or whether this is a legislative override of judicial review dressed up as ordinary cadre-management law.

Why This Case Will Be Watched Well Beyond the CAPFs If the CAPFs

Act survives judicial scrutiny, it hands every future government a working template: when a court judgment threatens an executive's institutional arrangement, legislate the arrangement into statute rather than contesting the judgment on its merits. That template would matter far beyond paramilitary cadre management - it would reshape how much genuine finality any Supreme Court judgment against executive practice actually carries.