Guns, Gavels, and Governance: A Comparative Study of U.S. Posse Comitatus & Insurrection Acts and India’s Emergency – Martial Law Frameworks in Managing Domestic Unrest

The conflicted boundary between military authority and civil governance remains one of the most contested questions in constitutional democracies. This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the United States’ Posse Comitatus Act and related emergency powers, on the one hand, and India’s constitutional provisions for emergency rule and martial law on the other, in order to examine how each system negotiates the delicate line between safeguarding public order and preserving civil liberty. The inquiry is entrenched in light of two recent controversial and illustrative contemporary episodes: President Trump’s decision to federalise the California National Guard and deploy elements of the United States Marine Corps during the Los Angeles protests arising from immigration enforcement operations, 2025, and the erstwhile deployment of the Indian Army to Guwahati in December 2019 amidst the violent unrest surrounding the promulgation of the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens. By juxtaposing these events against their respective legal frameworks, the study aims to reveal striking parallels and divergences. In the American context, the invocation of the Insurrection Act as an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act underscores the enduring ambiguity over the permissible role of federal troops in civil law enforcement. In India, the reliance upon Articles 352–360 concerning emergencies, together with Article 34’s provision for martial law, and the long-standing doctrine of “Army in Aid to Civil Power,” demonstrate a similarly elastic interpretative space, where executive discretion can overshadow judicial and parliamentary oversight. The comparative exercise suggests that while the United States and India profess distinct constitutional traditions, they share a common vulnerability: the tendency to blur the civil–military divide under conditions of perceived crisis.