Indian constitutional courts’ murky jurisprudence in conducting judicial review, two doctrines antithetical to each other emerge — judicial deference, where the Court defers to the legislature on matters beyond its purported expertise, and manifest arbitrariness, where the Court outrightly declares legislative acts as unconstitutional to the principle of equality. The theoretical periphery of where the two doctrines apply or not has recently warranted an awkward answer. Their inherently vague nature is potent to confuse jurisprudence over when judicial review should be exercised or refrained from. In this paper, the authors contend that the application of these doctrines by Indian constitutional courts hasdefied consistency, where the diametrically opposite tests are being applied in similar factual matrices. This is demonstrated through the arising dichotomy among recent yet prominent case laws of the Supreme Court. This makes it imperative to harmonise the application of both doctrines to culminate in a consistent approach to conducting judicial review. The paper intends to resolve this conundrum byproposing a consistent theory of judicial review which would resolve the application of both doctrines. It builds on Dixon’s Responsive Judicial Review alongside other concomitant models to conclude that the present literature originates from a Global North constitutionalist perspective, requiring courts to conduct the exercise as a response to protecting democracy. However, given the nature of complexities faced by Global South constitutional democracies like India, resolving them requires the courts to not just be democratically responsive but also respond by protecting larger constitutional commitments as a whole. This can only occur by reimagining the contours of judicial review through the application of remedies. Thus, while judicial deference should be retained, it should give way to ensuring enforcement of constitutional values. This can be done by applying weak strong remedies in Indian constitutional matters, such that the balance between the two doctrines is maintained. One such remedy the paper proposes is a Suspended Finding of Unconstitutionality, which entails temporarily suspending the Court’sfinding of unconstitutionality of a legislative act until the legislature remedies such unconstitutionalitywithin a stipulated period.
