On 23 May 2026, senior advocate Khaja Moizuddin was shot dead outside his Hyderabad residence. Ten days later, the Telangana Advocates Protection Act, 2026 had cleared the legislature, received the Governor's assent, and come into force. The political achievement was real. The constitutional scrutiny was absent.

This article provides it. The Act rests on three structural fractures that have received no serious analytical attention not because they are obscure, but because the profession that would ordinarily supply such scrutiny is also the Act's primary beneficiary. The fractures are: repugnancy with the Advocates Act, 1961; impermissible modification of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 by state legislation; and the placement of a sitting Chief Justice in a permanent executive oversight role. Each is individually significant. Together, they render the Act constitutionally indefensible in its present form.

Repugnancy with the Advocates Act, 1961

The Telangana Advocates Act has been drafted under Entry 26 of the Concurrent List “legal, medical and other professions”. So does the Advocates Act, 1961, the all-embracing statute of Parliament of India which covers all aspects of the admission, rights, conduct and discipline of advocates in India.

The repugnancy test under Article 254, settled in M. Karunanidhi v. Union of India (AIR 1979 SC 898) does not demand clause by clause contradiction. If Parliament has passed a law to take up a whole field, then a state law on the same topic is repugnant, even if there's no direct conflict between them. The Advocates Act meets this requirement easily: its Preamble states that it is intended to “amend and consolidate the law relating to legal practitioners”; Section 30 gives the right to practise; Section 35 gives disciplinary powers to the State Bar Councils only; and Part VI of the Bar Council Rules covers the whole of professional conduct.

The Telangana Act establishes grievance redressal committees at the mandal, district, and state levels to receive and adjudicate complaints involving advocates. Yet these are not disputes that the Advocates Act leaves unregulated. Section 35 of the Advocates Act, 1961 entrusts the Disciplinary Committees of the State Bar Councils with examining complaints of professional misconduct the very ground now covered by the Telangana Act. The overlap is most evident in the paradigm case contemplated by the Act, an FIR lodged by an aggrieved litigant against an advocate. Such a dispute may simultaneously constitute a criminal matter and raise questions of professional conduct. The same facts may therefore come before two bodies the grievance committees under the Telangana Act and the Disciplinary Committee under the Advocates Act operating under separate statutory regimes. The result is concurrent jurisdiction over the same subject matter, a classic instance of repugnancy.

The “different spheres” argument that the Advocates Act applies to misconduct and the Telangana Act to violence is not sound. In Forum for Peoples Collective Efforts v. State of West Bengal (2021) 8 SCC 599, the Supreme Court refused to accept a similar defence where the state law adopted the same functional structure as the central law, but with “minor variations.” The grievance committees set up under the Telangana Act do just that.

Nor does the defect be cured by the assent of the Governor. Article 254(2) allows the President to assent to a repugnant state law only if the President is informed that the state law is intended to override central legislation. To the extent of the record, the Act was reserved for routine assent. A routine assent is not a curative assent.

State Law Cannot Amend the BNSS by Indirection

The Act's most widely celebrated provision conditions the arrest of any advocate on prior review by an officer not below the rank of Deputy Superintendent of Police, and prohibits arrest without a judicial order. This is presented as protection against false implication. In constitutional structure, it is a state law modifying the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (BNSS).

The BNSS is Parliament's most recent and comprehensive codification of criminal procedure, enacted under Entries 1 and 2 of the Concurrent List. Under the BNSS, cognizable offences may be investigated and arrests made by constables subject to defined internal safeguards. The Telangana Act inserts, for one occupational class, a rank-based gatekeeping requirement at the investigative stage a condition the BNSS does not authorise and which no state law may unilaterally impose.

The analogy to anti-arrest provisions for civil servants in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which courts have upheld, is less useful than the Act's defenders suggest. Those provisions protected government employees persons whose arrest directly implicates state functioning, engaging List II subjects and were carefully structured as conditions on cognizance (a judicial act) rather than arrest (an investigative act). The Telangana Act conditions arrest, not cognizance, and does so for advocates as a professional class rather than state functionaries. The constitutional foothold that sustained those provisions is absent here.

The occupied-field doctrine, as established in Deep Chand v. State of U.P. (AIR 1959 SC 648) and its progeny, is clear: where Parliament has comprehensively occupied the criminal procedure field, state modifications without Presidential assent for the specific override are void. The Act received the Governor's assent. That is constitutionally insufficient.

The Chief Justice Cannot Head an Executive Committee

The third is structural and the worst. The grievance redressal committee for the state is headed by the Chief Justice of the High Court of Telangana and has members from the Chief Secretary, Principal Secretary, and the government's representative in the district. The intent of the legislature is likely to make a statement of institutional seriousness. The constitutional impact is that the most senior judge of a High Court becomes a permanent member of an executive body.

The committee is not a court. It is an executive-administrative body that takes complaints against advocates, monitors police response and is part of the state's governance system. It is the Chief Justice's responsibility to keep in regular contact with the police and the Bar Council and the state government from which judicial independence must be safeguarded.

There are two aspects to the constitutional issue. The first is practical: If the Chief Justice is on a committee that hears complaints from advocates, she will inevitably find herself dealing with parties who are affected in a judicial role. The conflict is not just a clash of personalities, but a structural one that can't be solved. The second is institutional: a sitting Chief Justice presiding over an executive body set up to defend a particular class of professionals becomes, in effect, an institutional advocate for that class in the executive branch, which is not allowed by Article 50 or the separation of functions doctrine.

In Union of India v. Sankalchand Himatlal Sheth, 1977, 4 SCC 193 and in the Third Judges Case, (Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association v. Union of India, 1993, 4 SCC 441), it is reiterated that the independence of judges is not a personal right but a structural guarantee based on the constitutional architecture. The precedent of Shamsher Singh, which supported the delegation of non-judicial functions to sitting judges in law commissions and electoral boundary commissions is not relevant here. Those were limited encounters, with clear and limited mandates, and not permanent positions in the executive of the state.

The solution was available and simple to appoint a retired High Court judge as chairperson, as was done in the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019. This ensures the symbolic power of judicial oversight, but also safeguards the structural independence required by Article 50. This was not the course taken by the legislature.

The Equity Problem

One further question deserves acknowledgment. The Act implicitly asserts that advocates deserve specialised criminal protection that journalists, RTI applicants, human rights defenders, and trade union leaders whose professional functions are equally essential to the constitutional order do not. The Article 14 question follows directly: if the legislative object is protecting the justice delivery system, the classification is underinclusive to the point of arbitrariness. If the object is protecting advocates from violence in general, the statute provides nothing the BNSS and IPC do not already provide, and the Act's purpose becomes unclear. The Act as drafted extends its protections to all violence against advocates, including that arising from wholly private disputes. That is occupational privilege, and occupational privilege is not a constitutionally sufficient classification under Article 14.

The Telangana Advocates Protection Act, 2026 is a result of the true political will in response to the true violence. The murder of Khaja Moizuddin was a legislative case and the series of targeted attacks on advocates in Telangana preceding it reinforced the policy necessity. What that imperative did not justify was legislation that was drafted in ten days without being subjected to a constitutional review, that is repugnant to a comprehensive central statute, that changes the BNSS without the President's assent, and that puts a sitting Chief Justice in an executive position that he has no constitutional right to hold.

A constitutionally sound version of this statute would be based on List II (Public Order and Police) instead of Entry 26 of List III, would limit the protections to violence in the context of professional conduct, and would provide for the committee chairpership to be held by a retired judge. There are no difficult corrections to make here. They only ask that the legislature and the profession that called on the legislature to move forward take constitutional durability seriously as well.

Views are personal.