New Delhi: The Supreme Court today (April 8) said that Tamil Nadu governor R.N. Ravi’s withholding of assent over 10 Bills and reserving them for the president’s assent was illegal.LiveLaw reported that a bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and R. Mahadevan held that Ravi “did not act with bona fides” as the bills were sent to the President after he had had sat on them for a long time and only after the Supreme Court gave its judgement in the Punjab governor’s case, noting that governors cannot veto legislation in this manner.The judges observed that any subsequent steps taken on these laws by the President, too, do not survive.The apex court said that the 10 Bills will be considered to have got the governor’s nod when they were presented in the second round after they are passed again by the state assembly. The court, in this regard, exercised powers under Article 142 of the constitution.“We are in no way undermining the office of the government. All we say is that the governor must act with due deference to the settled conventions of parliamentary democracy, respecting the will of the people being expressed through the legislature as well as the elected government responsible to the people,” the SC bench said.The court said that the government is the constitutional head of the state and to that end has to accord primacy to the will and welfare of the people of the state.His oath, the court said, “not only makes his mandate anything but clear, rather also demands it of the Governor owing to the intimate and delicate nature of the functions that he performs and the potency of the ramifications that could ensue or be unleashed upon the state.”This is why, the court said, the governor “must be conscious to not create roadblocks or chokehold the state legislature in order to thwart and break the will of the people for political edge.”“The members of the state legislature, having been elected by the people of the state as an outcome of the democratic expression, are better attuned to ensure the well-being of the people of the state. Hence, any action contrary to the express choice of the people, in other words, the state legislature, would be a renege of the constitutional oath. Before we part with the matter, we find it apposite to observe that constitutional authorities occupying high office must be guided by the values of the Constitution,” the Supreme Court said.