​Misplaced urgency: On the Madras High Court interim order

By staying the operation of Tamil Nadu’s multiple amended Acts — to the extent that they empower the government to appoint Vice-Chancellors (V-Cs) of 18 State universities — the Madras High Court has effectively halted the momentum that followed last month’s landmark Supreme Court verdict, which granted deemed assent to 10 Bills on which the Tamil Nadu Governor had inordinately delayed action. The interim order, delivered by Justices G.R. Swaminathan and V. Lakshminarayanan, effectively restores to the Governor-Chancellor, the powers of appointing V-Cs, which those very Bills had sought to divest. The result is a continuing stalemate: nearly a dozen universities remain headless, with appointments frozen until further judicial intervention. The Vacation Bench, acting on a petition by a lawyer, held that interim relief was justified because the impugned Acts “fall foul of the law” laid down by the Supreme Court in prior rulings on V-C appointments. These include Professor (Dr.) Sreejith P.S. vs Dr. Rajasree M.S. (APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University) and Gambhirdan K. Gadhvi vs The State Of Gujarat (Sardar Patel University). In both cases, the appointment of V-Cs was quashed for violating Regulation 7.3 of the University Grants Commission (UGC) Regulations, 2018, which govern the composition of search committees and procedures for V-C appointments. The High Court rejected the State’s argument that it had adopted the UGC Regulations in 2021 with a caveat excluding Regulation 7.3. The judges held that stripping the Chancellor of appointment powers was plainly unconstitutional — “… is so glaring and obvious that we cannot shut our eyes,” they wrote.

What is equally glaring, however, is the misplaced urgency with which the Bench moved to deprive the amended Acts of legal effect. The High Court overlooked the Higher Education Department counsel’s submission that the State had mentioned before the Supreme Court seeking urgent listing of a petition to transfer the instant case to itself; and that the Supreme Court had indicated that the High Court may be apprised of this fact. Judicial propriety would suggest that a lower court must exercise restraint in such cases. Moreover, the interim order was passed without affording the State adequate time to file its counter affidavit. In any case, while the current impasse on V-C appointments in Tamil Nadu persists, given the conflicting case precedents — Kalyani Mathivanan and Jagdish Prasad Sharma among them — the Supreme Court, should it hear the case, must settle, once and for all, the critical question: can UGC Regulations issued by a subordinate authority override State legislation enacted under constitutional authority?