India, Jan. 19 -- From 1975 onwards-and more sharply between the early 1990s and 2014-the central democratic worry in India was judicial activism: courts intruding into policy-making and unsettling the separation of powers. Yet, for all its excesses, judicial activism played a corrective role. It restrained executive overreach and compensated for legislative inertia. That institutional equilibrium has now collapsed.

In its place has emerged a far more dangerous phenomenon: executive activism. This activism operates not through open defiance of the Constitution, but through investigative agencies, procedural pressure, and strategic litigation. Increasingly, it aligns with the political interests of the ruling party rather than neutral sta...