The Rule Said Two Years. A Gazette Notification Said Five. Only One of Them Was Legal.

A Rule-Making Body Cannot Use Its Own Rules to Keep Itself in Office BCI Rule

12(2), Chapter I, Part II fixes the Chairperson and Vice-Chairperson's tenure at two years - a limit the Bar Council of India itself wrote and adopted under its statutory rule-making power. In April 2025, a gazette notification purported to extend that same tenure to five years, running until April 16, 2030.

The Supreme Court's intervention this week rests on a distinction that sounds technical but is actually the entire case: a body with delegated rule-making power can validly amend its own rules through proper procedure, but it cannot use that power to grant its own sitting office-bearers a longer term than the rule they are simultaneously bound by - because the people voting to extend the tenure are the exact people who benefit from the extension.

Why "Pro Tem" Is the Court's Real Instrument Here

By declaring Manan Kumar Mishra only a "pro tem" chairperson, "co-terminus with the elections," the Court did something more precise than simply criticising the five-year extension - it restored the two-year rule's practical effect without needing to formally strike down the gazette notification in this hearing.

Mishra continues functioning administratively, but stripped of any claim to a fixed five-year mandate and now bound to consult the Attorney-General and Solicitor-General - permanent ex-officio BCI members - before any policy decision.

That is the Court using institutional design, not just a declaration, to correct a self-dealing rule change.

Where the Pearl First Trust Fits the Same Pattern The BCI Pearl First

Trust, formed in 2020 with sitting office-bearers named as "permanent managing trustees," raises the identical structural problem in a different form: individuals holding elected, term-limited office converting institutional assets into a vehicle where their control outlasts their electoral mandate entirely. Senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan's question in Court - "Can elected members become permanent trustees beyond their capacity?"

• is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the exact same self-perpetuation logic as the tenure extension, applied to institutional assets rather than institutional office.

What This Means for Statutory Self-Regulation Generally

Statutory professional bodies like the BCI occupy an unusual constitutional position - they regulate their own profession with minimal external oversight, which is precisely why the mechanism the Supreme Court used here (mandatory AG/SG consultation, time-bound elections) matters beyond this one case. It establishes that when a self-regulatory body's own governance rules can be - and were - bent by the very people the rules were meant to limit, external ex-officio oversight becomes the necessary check that internal rule-making alone cannot provide.