Reimagining Indian Federalism
As India’s new dominant party system coalesced after 2014, the country entered a phase of centralisation. India has always had federalism with a strong centre, but from the late 1980s to the mid-2010s, political and economic regionalism and national coalition governments encompassing national and regional parties produced an appearance of deepening federalisation. Since 2014, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) became the first party in over 25 years to win an outright parliamentary majority, the twin pillars of political centralisation under a dominant party system and economic concentration, have once again drawn attention to the contested nature of India’s federal contract.
In this blog, I look at why core ideas and values associated with federalism—which is recognised by the Supreme Court as part of the basic structure of India’s constitution—have been unsettled over the last decade and the alternative visions that are surfacing.
In recent months, opposition parties have been protesting in the national capital against the erosion of federalism and complaining of fiscal discrimination against non-BJP ruled states. Chief Ministers from states including Karnataka, Kerala, Punjab and Delhi have joined protests at Jantar Mantar—the astrological observatory more typically the site for demonstrations by members of civil society than elected politicians.
Addressing the media during one of these protests, Chief Minister of the southern state of Kerala, Pinarayi Vijayan, said: “We have had to resort to such an unprecedented struggle as it is essential for Kerala’s survival and advancement. This agitation is intended to safeguard the Constitutional rights of all States, not merely Kerala’s.” Echoing complaints of other southern states, he noted that the share of centrally collected taxes received by Kerala has been falling despite the state’s contributions to central taxes.
Opposition-ruled states across the country, from Punjab to West Bengal to Tamil Nadu, have also complained about the politicisation of the office of Governor, the centrally appointed nominee of the President in whom executive power is vested. While the Governor is constitutionally bound to act on the advice of the elected Chief Minister and their cabinet, they must provide assent to bills passed by state legislatures. They also play a crucial role in testing a government’s strength in the legislature after an election or where there is a question over its majority. In a number of states, Governors and non-BJP Chief Ministers have been at loggerheads over questions ranging from delays in providing legislative assent to intervention in the day-to-day operation of governments.
Federalism as Glue for National Opposition Alliance
Regional parties were weak proponents for strengthening the institutions of federalism when they took part in coalition governments in the 1990s and 2000s. Most were focused on defending the interests of their state or party more than a general defence of federalism. Furthermore, regional parties have been inconsistent defenders of federal principles in recent years. Most regional parties, for instance, supported the 2019 annulment of the autonomous constitutional status of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim majority state, and its bifurcation into two centrally administered Union Territories. This was a decision taken by the national parliament while the elected assembly in Jammu and Kashmir was in suspended animation.
But, in the face of a dominant national party with centralising proclivities, members of the unwieldy INDIA opposition bloc have found common cause in championing federalism and the defence of states’ rights. Key players in the pan-India opposition from the DMK in Tamil Nadu to Trinamool Congress in West Bengal to the Left Front in Kerala have presented federalism as a critical value that is under threat.
The recent protests have taken shape ahead of India’s Lok Sabha elections and presented a platform for opposition parties to take a united stance. They also point to the pending tensions that may be unleashed when India revisits the ”delimitation” of its parliamentary constituencies after the election (an exercise that is due to occur by 2026). In February, the Tamil Nadu legislative assembly passed a resolution opposing the anticipated delimitation exercise.
The seemingly technocratic exercise of delimitation has the potential to open up a fundamental set of debates about the character and sustainability of the current model of Indian federalism. If delimitation is carried out based on updated population figures (to date, these have been frozen since the 1971 census), it is expected to see the reallocation of parliamentary seats from southern states whose population has grown less rapidly over the last fifty years to more populous northern states.
The richer southern states, which may see their share of parliamentary seats reduced, have, over the last decade, become a principal bastion of non-BJP opposition parties. They also contribute disproportionately on a population basis to central taxes. Set against the backdrop of far-reaching political centralisation, delimitation has the potential to throw central elements of India’s federal bargain, notably its redistributive model of fiscal federalism, into open partisan conflict.
Anticipating this, the Prime Minister has warned the opposition about crafting “new narratives to break the nation,” which serve to create a north-south divide. Avoiding the term federalism, the Prime Minister instead referred to the imperative of national integrity:
“The way language is being spoken these days to break the country, these new narratives are being made for political gains…This nation is not just a piece of land for us. It is like the human body, if there is pain somewhere, the hand doesn’t say that the thorn is in the foot and it doesn’t concern me…if there is pain anywhere in this country, pain should be felt by everyone…If any part of the country is left without development, then the country cannot become developed. Therefore we should look at the country as one and not separate parts.”
The physiological metaphor of the country as a human body echoes longer traditions of thinking about India’s sacred geography and an organic Hindu social order in Hindu nationalist thought, in which each part is linked integrally to the life of the whole.
Hindu Nationalism and Unitary Imaginaries of India
Prime Minister Narendra Modi came into office in 2014 calling on India’s states to work together as a “Team India” to promote a spirit of “cooperative federalism.” Modi continues to talk of the need for cooperative federalism, pointing, for instance, to the Union government’s decision to spread out meetings for India’s recent G20 presidency across cities. After 2014, and especially following the 2019 election, however the Prime Minister has also used a discourse of “one nationism” to combine a more unitary conception of Indian identity with a policy agenda that has sought to increase national coordination in realms that range from tax, electricity supply, ration cards to the streamlining of elections to national, state and even potentially local bodies so that they are held simultaneously.
Moving beyond the “one nation” policy agenda, the ascendancy of a civilisational conception of India as a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu state) overshadows the rhetoric of cooperative federalism in the imaginary of the ruling party. This conception has been further institutionalised with the inauguration of the Ram Mandir (temple) in Ayodhya in January 2024. On the last working day of the current parliament, Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla moved a resolution on behalf of the House on the Ram Mandir’s inauguration, in which he said the temple symbolises the sentiment of “Ek Bharat, Shresht Bharat” (one India, ultimate India).
The upholding of the abrogation of Article 370 (the constitutional provision which had provided for a measure of autonomy to Jammu and Kashmir) by the Supreme Court in late 2023 has provided further legitimacy to a view of federalism that prioritises national integration over the recognition and respect of different modes of belonging within a common political union.
Calls to decolonise constitutional thinking in India are also leading to a wider reimagining of the nature of the Indian state and society, with implications for ideas of federalism. In his 2021 book India that is Bharat, J Sai Deepak takes aim at what he describes as a “Western-normative” hegemony that shapes thinking about India. He seeks to recover the idea of Bharat as a living civilisational “reality” shaped by an “Indic consciousness”. While this is not a book about federalism, its civilisational view of India is relevant for understanding how ideas of India as a civilisational state may inform ideas of federalism.
In defining Bharat as a civilisation, Sai Deepak relies on the early twentieth-century writer Radha Kumud Mookerji. Mookerji, like other nationalist writers, argued that the cultural unity of precolonial India or Bharat was found in a form of “federal civilisation” with multiple sub-identities that had been culturally bound for millennia. Groups with “non-Indic worldviews” could live alongside Bharat’s indigenous civilisation as long as they do not “seek to deny or sever the bonds that tie this land to its culture and its adherents.”
Sai Deepak takes from Mookerji’s writings the idea that lawmaking should be decentralised and “federalised” to become a more organic process in which law serves to codify the “collective experience of society” rather than being imposed top-down. While India that is Bharat does not itself spell this out, the vision of an organic and decentralised conception of an ”Indic society” as the basis for law-making at one level appears to sit uncomfortably with the political centralisation that has been seen over the last decade. However, at another level, it is consistent with a vision of federalism in which the states take a back seat as spaces of linguistic and cultural difference, instead viewed as sub-components of an overarching national and predominantly Hindu identity.
The Dynamic Entanglements of Region and Nation
The debate about whether India is best seen as a civilisational state, or what political scientists Alfred Stepan, Juan Linz and Yogendra Yadav described as a “state-nation” in which multiple overlapping identities coexist within a single state, is not new. Writing in the late 1980s, Ravinder Kumar observed that the tension between a pan-Indian identity drawing on a civilisational identity, on one hand, and regional cultural and linguistic solidarity, on the other, was an unresolved tension of India’s nationalist movement.
The pushes and pulls of regionalisation and centralisation have made themselves felt across India’s history. The centralised model of federalism adopted in India’s constitution has not prevented the deepening of regional identities. The coexistence of a centralised federal system with regionalisation was evident with the reorganisation of states along linguistic lines in the 1950s, followed by the rise of regional parties and the fact that for a third of India’s post-Independence electoral history, no national party has been able to secure a majority in the national parliament. But the consolidation of a Hindu nationalist imaginary over the last decade under a nationally dominant BJP has the potential to destabilise the compromises that sustain Indian federalism.
Opposition parties in southern states are currently careful to strike a balance between regional assertions and emphasising their support for national unity. The prominent Tamil Nadu politician (and former Finance Minister) P Thiaga Rajan, for instance, wrote recently of the shared concern that redistribution from richer to poorer regions continued to be essential for reducing (growing) regional inequality. This redistribution was, he argued, in the interests of national unity, even if transfers were not currently achieving the desired results:
“It is rooted in the Dravidian ideology of social justice that we must reduce disparity and move towards equity. And we wholeheartedly believe it is in the interest of the unity of the nation that nobody should be left behind. This is why when Tamil Nadu receives only 29 paise for every rupee it contributes to the Union, and Uttar Pradesh gets Rs.2.73 for every rupee it contributes—we do not complain or begrudge it; we only lament that such largesse has not resulted in faster growth or equitable progress.”
Over the next five years, the debates about fiscal redistribution and representation in parliament are likely to deepen. The clash between opposition parties and the BJP today speaks to tensions and ideas that go to the heart of competing socio-political and political-economic imaginations of India. How these tensions are resolved will be consequential for the future of federalism as both a constitutional value and set of institutions in India.