The Centre, said the late N T Rama Rao, founder-leader of Andhra Pradesh’s Telugu Desam Party, is a “conceptual myth”. India, he reminded Indira, the republic’s most powerful prime minister, “is a Union of States”.
In so doing, NTR re-opened an old debate on the nature of Indian federalism. Students of political science, jurisprudence and public administration know that tomes have been written on the issue. Unresolved debates recur time and again whether the Indian Constitution has a “unitary” bias or a “federal” bias. The answer to this question has been a function not of legal interpretation, but of politics.
When Indira Gandhi sat on the podium at a meeting of the National Development Council in 1967 trying her best to get a consensus around a formula for the sharing of fiscal resources between the Centre and the states, and faced the likes of Anna Durai from Tamil Nadu, EMS Namboodiripad from Kerala, Kasu Brahmananda Reddy from Andhra Pradesh, V P Naik from Maharashtra, Mohanlal Sukhadia from Rajasthan and Kamalapati Tripathi from Uttar Pradesh, she knew the states had an upper hand. That is why she turned to the Gandhian economist, the then deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, a man respected by all, D R Gadgil, to secure a consensus formula. Thus was born the Gadgil formula. It was not an Indira formula. The same Indira Gandhi presided over the most centralised government of post-Independence history barely eight years later.
The political and administrative role and responsibilities of the central government may be defined by the Constitution in theory, but in practice, these are determined by the political realities of the day. With a multiplicity of political parties in power both at the Centre and in the states, there is a constant tug of war between these two levels of government. Given that there are both centrifugal and centripetal tendencies at play in Indian politics all the time, there is no defined equilibrium at which matters can be expected to settle.
However, it is important to remind oneself from time to time that there is such a thing as the Indian Constitution that defines the role and responsibilities of the central and state governments. There are 97 items in the “Union list”, including defence, atomic energy, foreign affairs, war and peace, citizenship, extradition, railways, shipping and navigation, airways, posts and telegraphs, telephones, wireless and broadcasting, currency, foreign trade, inter-state trade and commerce, banking, insurance, control of industries, regulation and development of mines, mineral and oil resources, elections, audit of government accounts, constitution and organisation of the Supreme Court, high courts and Union Public Service Commission, income tax, custom duties and export duties, duties of excise, corporation tax, taxes on capital value of assets, estate duty, and terminal taxes, where Parliament and the central government hold sway.
There are 66 items on which state legislatures and governments have the “exclusive” right to legislate and govern, and these include public order, police, administration of justice, prisons, local government, public health and sanitation, agriculture, animal husbandry, water supplies and irrigation, land rights, forests, fisheries, money-lending, state public services and state Public Service Commission, land revenue, taxes on agricultural income, taxes on lands and buildings, estate duty, taxes on electricity, taxes on vehicles, and taxes on luxuries.
There is then the “Concurrent list” of 47 items, including marriage and divorce, transfer of property other than agricultural land, education, contracts, bankruptcy and insolvency, trustees and trusts, civil procedure, contempt of court, adulteration of foodstuffs, drugs and poisons, economic and social planning, trade unions, labour welfare, electricity, newspapers, books and printing press, and stamp duties.
It appears from some of our recent public debates, be it on tackling the problem of naxalism and law and order, policy on utilisation of rural lands for non-agricultural purposes, right to education and school education, right to food and scope of the public distribution system and such like, that all policy and action must emanate only from New Delhi.
Maybe it has something to do with the centralisation of thinking in political parties and the concentration of the media in New Delhi, and the eagerness of Union ministers to appear on national television (both news and debates) that the government of the Union is willy-nilly brought to the centre of every debate, when the final word, in fact, lies with state governments.
Would the general secretary of the Congress party, Digvijay Singh, have accepted interference from a Union education minister like Murli Manohar Joshi in a subject matter like school education when he was chief minister of Madhya Pradesh? Never! Yet, the very same Mr Singh now wants Kapil Sibal to devote more attention to school education rather than higher education when the remit of the Union minister, clearly stated in the Constitution, includes higher and not school education. Kerala owes nothing to Delhi for its near hundred per cent literacy!
A combination of fiscal centralisation and the patronage of resource distribution, with the populism of centralised and “leader”-focused politics along with the emaciation of state- and district-level political and administrative leaderships, may have partly contributed to this. Equally, the pretensions of the Delhi Durbar and the ego-massaging it gets from a Delhi-based “national media”.
There are limits to what P Chidambaram can do to improve law and order across the country as Union home minister, just as there are limits to what Mr Sibal can do to school education, Sharad Pawar can do to the PDS or Jairam Ramesh can do for policy on land acquisition. Yet, the Delhi Darbar imagines it runs the country. Jai Ho!
