Introduction

Every government has three organs — the legislature that makes laws, the executive that implements and enforces them, and the judiciary that interprets them. This chapter is about the second of these: the executive. The Constitution keeps the three organs working in coordination with one another while also maintaining a balance among them, so that no single organ becomes all-powerful. In a parliamentary system such as India's, the executive and the legislature are interdependent — each keeps a check on the other. This chapter discusses the composition, structure, and function of the executive organ of government, and the changes recent political practice has brought to it. By the end of the chapter you should be able to tell a parliamentary executive apart from a presidential one, explain the constitutional position of the President of India, describe how the Council of Ministers is formed and how the Prime Minister leads it, and understand why a professional, permanent civil service is essential to running a modern state.