Blurred Standards of Review: The Silent Convergence of Wednesbury and Proportionality in Indian Administrative Law

Abstract

Indian administrative law formally maintains a bifurcated standard of review. Following Om Kumar v. Union of India, proportionality governs administrative action that restricts fundamental freedoms or is challenged as discriminatory under Article 14, while Wednesbury unreasonableness governs action challenged as arbitrary, including the quantum of disciplinary punishment. This article asks whether that bifurcation still describes what Indian courts actually do. Adopting a normative-doctrinal method combining statutory, case, conceptual and comparative approaches, it examines the leading Supreme Court authorities on judicial review of administrative discretion alongside recent constitutional proportionality jurisprudence. It advances four findings. First, the “shockingly disproportionate punishment” standard is not a species of irrationality review but a truncated proportionality inquiry: it compares means with ends, asks implicitly whether a lesser sanction would have sufficed, and weighs the severity of the burden against the gravity of the misconduct. Second, structured proportionality adopted in constitutional adjudication has spilled into the review of executive measures, further destabilising the bifurcation. Third, the resulting indeterminacy is a rule-of-law problem, because the intensity of review comes to depend on how a challenge is pleaded rather than on any reasoned assessment of the right affected or the competence of the decision-maker. Fourth, this pattern is not peculiar to India but recurs across postcolonial and Global South jurisdictions that have received proportionality without articulating the justification for the intensity of scrutiny they apply. The article argues not for abandoning either doctrine but for calibrated review, sustained by judicial duties of characterisation, structure and justification.