14.6 Doctrine of Political Questions

The doctrine: some questions are assigned by the Constitution to the political organs and are not justiciable — the court refuses to decide them, not because it lacks power over the subject in the abstract, but because the Constitution commits the decision to another branch's discretion, or the matter lacks judicially discoverable and manageable standards. The restraint-doctrine: the political-questions doctrine is the judiciary's own recognition of the separation of powers (Unit 5). The recognised families: the conduct of foreign policy and diplomatic recognition; war-and- peace judgments committed to the political branches; the internal proceedings of Parliament (Article 103(2): no court questions the regularity of parliamentary proceedings — the express textual political-question clause); the summoning-and-prorogation calculus;questions of political expediency and policy priority; the work-allocation of ministries (Article 82: non-justiciable). The Nepali caution (the trick half of the doctrine): the doctrine is narrow — the Court has repeatedly held that merely because a question has political consequences does not make it a political question: disputes over dissolution, the confidence machinery, impeachment procedure and emergency declarations are constitutional questions with political weather around them, and the Court has reviewed them all (the 2020–21 dissolution rulings as the modern demonstration). The exam formulation: political in subject ≠ political in question; the test is constitutional commit and manageability, not the topic's heat.