Twenty Years After Prakash Singh, Police Reform Has Become a Centre-versus-State Fight Inside the Supreme Court

The State List Gives the Pen; the Judgment Tries to Take It Back The Seventh

Schedule puts "public order" and "police" in the State List, as Entries 1 and 2. In plain terms, only a State legislature can make laws about how its police force is organised and led. The 2006 Prakash Singh judgment did something the text never anticipated.

It laid down binding rules on how a State must choose its police chief: a transparent process, a minimum two-year tenure and only officers with at least six months of service left. Every DGP dispute since then sits in the gap between those two facts.

The Constitution gives the States the pen; the judgment tells them what they may write.

The rule as written, the rule as practised The text says a State may legislate on its police.

Article 141 says the law declared by the Supreme Court binds all courts and Article 144 requires every authority to act in aid of the Court. Read together, these mean a State may write its own police law, but it may not write one that contradicts a binding judgment.

In practice, States have repeatedly tested that boundary. They frame their own appointment rules and argue that they are exercising legislative competence, not defying the Court. Jharkhand's Selection and Appointment of Director General and Inspector General of Police, Jharkhand (Head of the Police Force) Regulation, 2025 is the latest such instrument.

The Centre says it breaches Prakash Singh, citing the appointment of incumbent DGP Tadasha Mishra. The legal test is settled in principle. A legislature can remove the basis of a judgment by changing the underlying law.

It cannot simply declare that a judgment will not apply. Whether a State police rule changes the basis or merely sidesteps the outcome is the question the Court must answer, State by State.

The new shape of the fight What makes this hearing different is who is fighting whom.

For two decades, the story was the Court versus reluctant States. Now it is the Centre versus a State, fought through the Court. Jharkhand turned the challenge into a charge of selective enforcement. It pointed to West Bengal, where a DGP appointed by the Election Commission in March 2026 was due to retire the next month and then had his tenure extended by six months.

It also pointed to Bihar's allegedly worse law. The Solicitor General answered by proposing that the Court issue notice to every State. The Bench took that path. It asked amicus curiae Raju Ramachandran, with the UPSC's help, to scrutinise DGP laws and appointments nationwide.

One State's dispute has become a federal compliance audit.

Why this matters for the exam Prakash Singh was meant to insulate police leadership from politics.

Twenty years on, the appointment of a police chief has itself become a political contest between governments. The lesson for GS2 is precise. Federalism allocates who writes police law; judicial review decides what that law may contain. When the Centre selectively invokes a judgment against one State, the only credible answer is the one the Court has now chosen: apply the same test to everyone.