Q.How is Sri Lanka's President/PM position different from India? Compare Supreme Court's role in President impeachment in both.
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →In India, the President is a largely ceremonial formal Head of State while the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers hold the real executive power (a parliamentary system); in Sri Lanka, the President is directly elected by the people and combines the roles of Head of State, Head of Government, and Commander-in-Chief in one office (a semi-presidential 'Executive Presidency'), with the Prime Minister in a distinctly lesser role. On impeachment, India's process (as covered in the earlier chapter on the President) is a purely parliamentary one requiring a special majority for violation of the Constitution, with no role given to the Supreme Court in this chapter's account; Sri Lanka's process explicitly allows the Supreme Court to be brought in to investigate allegations under one of its two removal pathways.
Position of President and Prime Minister — the difference: In India, the Constitution formally vests executive power in the President, but in reality the President exercises it only on the binding advice of the Council of Ministers headed by the Prime Minister (Article 74(1)). The President is not directly elected by the people at all — election is indirect, through elected MLAs and MPs. The real, working executive is the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers, who must have the support of the Lok Sabha majority; the President's role is mainly formal, with only a few areas of genuine discretion (reconsideration of advice, veto/pocket veto on Bills, and appointing a Prime Minister when there is no clear majority).
In Sri Lanka, since the 1978 constitutional amendment created the system of Executive Presidency, the President is directly elected by the people and holds vast, real powers under the constitution: the President chooses the Prime Minister from the party that has a majority in Parliament, and can also remove the Prime Minister or other ministers (even though ministers must themselves be members of Parliament). Beyond being the elected Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, the Sri Lankan President is also the Head of Government — a single office combining roles that in India are split between the President (formal head) and the Prime Minister (real head of government). This means the Sri Lankan President and Prime Minister may belong to the same party or to different, even opposed, parties — a situation that essentially cannot arise in India in the same way, because India's Prime Minister must always command a Lok Sabha majority to hold office at all.
Supreme Court's role in impeachment — the difference: For India, this chapter states that the President can be removed from office only by Parliament, following the impeachment procedure, which requires a special majority, and the only ground for impeachment is violation of the Constitution — no role for the Supreme Court is mentioned in this process as covered here. …
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